Over 85,000 hectares of potentially endangered forests in two major Malaysian states are advertised for sale on online marketplaces, a rapid response report by climate watchdog Rimbawatch revealed Friday.
Rimbawatch has identified nine land listings of over 85,000 ha of forested land in the Eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak in Malaysia, on online marketplace Mudah.my and Facebook.
The watchdog conducted a geospatial analysis into the remaining forest cover within such lands and found that a total of 54,629 ha of these lands can be classified as “undisturbed forest” and a further 30,476 ha as “degraded forest”, meaning a total of 85,105 ha of forests could be under threat if these sales were to be successful, Rimbawatch said.
“For context, 85,105 ha is 12,000 ha larger than the size of Singapore and three and a half times the size of Kuala Lumpur,” the report said.
Out of the nine land listings, six were found to be in Sarawak.
The land listing of about 54,400 ha in Silat, Sarawak was found to be in close proximity to villages, and overlapped with an area excised from the Gerenai Forest Management Unit (FMU) for conversion to palm oil plantations which was located within Indigenous traditional territories, it said.
“In 2021, a letter sent by the Gerenai Community Rights Action Committee (GCRAC) to the Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC) stated that the Gerenai FMU was established without free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), and that no social impact assessment or environmental impact assessment reports were publicly available,” the watchdog claimed.
It also revealed that some of the listings had official maps attached and other listings included land titles, official letters, and project proposals attached to them.
While the commodity or sector-specific threats were unknown and unspecified in the listings, some of them mentioned the suitability of the land for agriculture.
The watchdog has urged the state governments to investigate the findings, especially given the presence of government-sanctioned maps attached to some of the listings.
It also recommended that the government ensures these land parcels are not sold to private enterprises while also making sure that the protection of biodiversity and human rights is prioritised in development planning.
Any future plans to trade such lands must be dropped in order to maintain Malaysia’s forest cover at the maximum possible extent, it said.
Meanwhile, real estate websites, including Facebook Marketplace, should see to it that deforestation is not facilitated by such websites, Rimbawatch added.
By Nikita Pandey – nikita@carbon-pulse.com
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