By Ahmad Amir Azfar, former President of the Association of History, Politics and Strategy Students of UKM 

(Pic from Kuala Lumpur post)

It truly has been a trying time for Malaysia, experiencing one shocking disaster to another and perhaps arguably without enough time to actually fully recover from the earlier trauma. Now, we as a nation are confronted with yet another gruelling test and this time, it is from Mother Nature herself.

At the moment, Malaysia together with Thailand and Indonesia are hit by their worst flooding ever in more than a decade and since mid-December have left almost a staggering 300,000 people homeless. The heavy flooding have destroyed homes, roads, vehicles, livestock and public infrastructures, vanishing it from eyesight in a vast sea of muddy water.

Starving flood victims have been trapped for days without basic necessities like medical supplies and thick blankets to keep them warm at night. They also face greater risks of contracting fatal diseases besides having to worry about the dangerous fast currents of flood water which have so far drowned 24 poor lives.

Environmental crises are as devastating and detrimental to our population as any armed conflicts can be and this recent flooding has demonstrated this. I believe it is now time for us to really be asking ourselves this very important question – what is the real problem which has led to this environmental calamity?

Floods have been known as a recurring natural disaster in Malaysia but the worrying trend is that it is becoming deadlier every single time. The cause of this is pretty obvious: our horrendous ignorance to climate change and our reprehensible human greed. This is our real problem and it has led to this unprecedented catastrophe.

What puzzles me is that, if we already know that flooding is an endemic phenomena here in our country, why has our government not been investing heavily in a proper flood mitigation mechanism which includes effective flood control and complex warning systems since aeons ago? I know I am not a river engineer but even if the flooding could not have been prevented through human intervention, at least an early warning system could have evacuated hundreds of thousands of lives.

We as citizens should be questioning our leaders and holding them accountable for not empowering our Meteorological Department and the Department of Irrigation and Drainage to develop these critical technologies in preventing such environmental disasters. Netherlands and other European low-lying countries are at the moment the best in flood control engineering and it is time for us to look to them for solutions in our country.

It is time we do some justice for our environment. This recent flooding will not be the last of Mother Nature’s backlash and before it is too late, we need to change our capitalistic religion guiding our developmental philosophy towards sustainable development which places a strong emphasis on environmental preservation and conservation.

What is  the value of billions of Ringgit or towering high-rise buildings crowding our cityscape if there is no more clean air for us to breath in, not a single tree for our children to see or when millions of us be displaced as environmental refugees when rising sea waters finally drown our homes?

Crimes committed against our environment are as evil as any crimes can be. Even more so when it is motivated purely by human greed and therefore it must not go unpunished. Again, we as citizens must demand the complete halt of blatant development projects currently ravaging our forests and killing our ecosystems. The public must demand a moratorium on these projects and that the perpetrators of these environmental crimes be brought to justice.

Climate change is real and so are the people trying to destroy our precious Earth. Unless we take climate change and the environment seriously, more news of events like this awful flooding and other environmental disasters will be too frequent in the future. By the time Malaysia is fully drowned under water it would be too late.

*The opinions expressed by the author in this article does not necessarily represent the views of The Rocket