Malaysia News

In Asian society, where young people are expected to be submissive to elders, a vocal youth movement demanding climate justice from their governments is rising.

This article was co-published with The Gecko Project.  When a string of palm oil companies arrived in the village of Anggai, in a heavily forested corner of Indonesia’s easternmost Papua…

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s environment minister risks undermining the country’s credibility if she continues denying, in the face of overwhelming data, that haze from Indonesian forest fires is affecting neighboring Malaysia…

Hotspots signaling fires in Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra have increased nearly sevenfold over a four-day period in September, according to official reports. The national disaster management agency on Sept. 2…

This is the sixth article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four and Part Five. KOTA BELUD, Malaysia — Road building is…

This is the fifth article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. KOTA KINABALU, Malaysia — In March 2019, the…

This is the fourth article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” Read Part One, Part Two and Part Three. BATU PUTEH, Malaysia — They call it the…

KUALA KOH, Malaysia — On a daytime flight into Kuala Lumpur airport, it’s hard not to feel a certain sense of despair. The land, at times adorned by jungle-clad mountains,…

This is the third article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” Read Part One and Part Two. KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — When Baru Bian was a boy,…

This is the second article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” Read Part One. TELOK SERABANG, Malaysia — At the westernmost tip of Borneo sits a dense…

This is the first article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” MIRI, Malaysia — Tucked under the sweep of green that blankets parts of Malaysian Borneo is…

JAKARTA — The governments of Indonesia and Malaysia have agreed to carry out in vitro fertilization of Sumatran rhinos, heralding a breakthrough in a decades-long effort to breed the nearly…

Three years after forest fires in Indonesia sent huge volumes of smoke billowing into Malaysia and Singapore, the Southeast Asian neighbors are dealing with a repeat of the “embarrassing” transboundary…

In April 2018, a month before Malaysian voters elected Mahathir Mohamad to the prime minister’s office, Ng Zhu Hann couldn’t have been more open and enthusiastic about Forest City, the…

China’s mammoth spending on transportation, energy and residential infrastructure was a potent issue in Malaysia’s raucous 2018 election that saw Najib Razak replaced as prime minister by his former mentor…

On May 27, Monday morning, I woke to the news that Tam, the last male Sumatran rhino in Malaysia and the last known male Bornean rhino, had perished. As clichéd…

Tam, the last known male Sumatran rhino in Malaysia, died May 27 after months of declining health. "It is with heavy hearts that we share the tragic news that Tam,…

The last male Sumatran rhino in Malaysia may be on the verge of dying, leaving a lone female as the last of the species there, authorities reported. The rhino known…

It might seem harmless enough at first. The big eyes and the rambunctious, bounding play of the tiny cats and monkeys on your social media feed draw you in, and…

Traffic is a decades-old problem in Penang, a common complaint shared across class, race and political lines in this Malaysian state. When it’s brought up, Siti Fadhilah, a 31-year-old selling…

If you flew over the island of Borneo in 1950, you would see nearly unbroken, untouched forest from one end to the other. Of course, there would be villages and…

A prototype system to identify rare species in real time using thermal-imaging cameras mounted on unmanned aircraft, or drones, passed its latest test when it successfully identified orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus)…

The past few years there has been a dedicated lobbying/promotional campaign among local amateur naturalists, professional conservationists, and international researchers to bring back Malay tapirs, Tapirus indicus, to Borneo. A…

There’s a new record for the tallest tree in the tropics, and the scientists who found it say it could add to our understanding of how and why some trees…

In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report outlining strategies the world can pursue to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and maintain healthy economies and…

Other animals see the world quite differently from us humans. Researchers at Dartmouth College teamed up with a student-based technology lab to develop an interactive virtual entry into the vision…

The chief minister of the Malaysian state of Sabah has called on construction crews working on the multi-billion-dollar Pan Borneo Highway project to avoid breaking up the region’s forests and…

JAKARTA — The European Commission has officially approved a measure to phase out palm oil-based biofuel by 2030. But while the move has angered major palm oil producers, it hasn’t…

Malaysia may ban further expansion of oil palm plantations in an effort to improve the oilseed's reputation abroad, reports Bloomberg. In an interview Friday, Minister of Primary Industries Teresa Kok…

This week, Norway released the 2018 investment holdings of its massive government pension fund. Notably absent were four plantation companies previously listed in the portfolio: Olam International, Halcyon Agri Corp,…