On 24 February, for the first time, a fair share carbon budget for Malaysia has been identified.
In its report, “Estimating a Fair Share Carbon Budget for Malaysia”, RimbaWatch sets out an analysis based on legally-accepted methodologies, providing a concrete benchmark which it hopes will serve as a baseline for government and corporate guidance, targets and legislation on climate mitigation.
Malaysia’s annual and historical contribution to global emissions makes it a significant polluter, largely due to its current role as a major oil and gas producer and consumer, and ongoing activities such as deforestation.
As the report outlines, Malaysia’s contribution of 0.62% of global greenhouse gas emissions for 2024 makes it the 28th-highest emitting country in the world, with annual emissions similar to other extractive economies such as Spain, France and the UK.
Despite this, Malaysia’s climate policies and targets fail to effectively address mitigation, with no plans for a complete and immediate phase-out of polluting activities such as fossil fuels and deforestation.
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These shortfalls are underpinned by the lack of attempt by the Malaysian authorities to establish a fair-share carbon budget for the nation, aligned with a 1.5C pathway.
A carbon budget is the concept that, to stabilise global warming to the Paris Agreement’s threshold, global emissions need to be capped to an amount that would cumulatively not exceed a 1.5C threshold.
For example, for a 50% chance of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C, the remaining global carbon budget is 380 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023.
To divide this global carbon budget to a national level, the concept of a fair-share arises. This concept accounts for a nation’s historical emissions responsibility and current capacity to transition, based on its historical and present share of the global carbon budget, global emissions and global gross domestic product (GDP).
To conduct this estimation, RimbaWatch adopted the methodology employed by Pelz et al (2023; 2025), which has been accepted by both Swiss and Dutch courts as a credible method.
Based on this, the report identifies four options for estimating Malaysia’s fair-share carbon budget:
- ‘Equality’, based on equal per capita division of the global carbon budget accounting from 2015
- ‘Responsibility’, based on equal per capita division of the global carbon budget, accounting from 1990
- ‘Capability’, based on Malaysia’s relative per-capita GDP, accounting from 2015
- ‘Responsibility and capability’, based on Malaysia’s relative per-capita GDP, accounting from 1990
The report finds that, as of 1 January 2023, Malaysia has overshot its remaining carbon budget under the capability, responsibility and combined responsibility-capability approaches, by 600 million tonnes, 1.4 billion tonnes and 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2 respectively.
While the country was still within its fair-shares under the equality approach in 2023, this budget was overshot in 2024.
Therefore, every tonne of CO2 emitted by Malaysia since these overshoot dates contributes to Malaysia’s “atmospheric appropriation” – emitting more greenhouse gases than its equitable share. The report argues that this contributes to worsening climate change, disproportionate harm to other nations that have contributed the least to climate change, and means Malaysia must make deeper, faster emission cuts to align with realistic climate targets.
The findings of this report underscore the necessity for the government of Malaysia to seriously improve the scientific and practical credibility of its mitigation efforts.
The report recommends that an official national carbon budget be established in order to provide a scientific foundation for climate policies and targets.
Further, sectoral budgets should be set, specifically for the domestic energy and forestry sector, taking into account both production and consumption. Both these budgetary allocations should be reflected in the upcoming climate change act.
Based on this budget, Malaysia should impose an immediate moratorium on all forest degradation and conversion in existing forestry and plantation concessions across Malaysia, and legislate the target to maintain permanent natural forest cover above a certain minimum percentage of land cover, which must be set at Malaysia’s current and existing natural forest cover.
Further, Malaysia should commit to a phase-out of all fossil fuels, including legislated targets to achieve a phase-out of all fossil fuels consumption, including fossil gas, from the domestic energy grid at the soonest possible date, and end the provision of all upstream licences.
Further, Malaysia should join other developing economies, such as Colombia, Pakistan and Cambodia, in endorsing the call for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, which would establish a global mechanism to manage a global just transition away from coal, oil and gas. – RimbaWatch
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