This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of forest and climate change dynamics in Malaysia, with particular focus on Sabah and Sarawak. It examines historical and recent trends in forest cover, highlighting the impacts of agricultural expansion, logging, and infrastructure development on deforestation and forest degradation. The chapter outlines Malaysia’s forest governance system, emphasizing decentralized state-level authority and the implementation of sustainable forest management (SFM) policies. It also reviews national and subnational climate change strategies, including REDD+, forest monitoring systems, and carbon mitigation commitments. While Malaysia retains significant forest cover, the chapter underscores ongoing challenges in governance coordination, Indigenous rights, and balancing development with conservation.
Tag: degradation
Analysis of the drivers of deforestation and degradation in Sabah
This chapter analyzes the drivers, patterns, and impacts of deforestation and forest degradation in Sabah, Malaysia. It identifies major direct causes such as logging, agricultural expansion (especially oil palm), infrastructure development, and forest fires, as well as underlying drivers including economic development, governance structures, and global market forces. The chapter highlights how land-use change has transformed Sabah’s forest landscapes, producing both economic benefits and significant environmental and social costs, including biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and threats to local livelihoods. It also reviews mitigation strategies such as sustainable forest management, forest certification, REDD+, and multi-stakeholder partnerships, emphasizing the need for integrated, equitable, and evidence-based forest governance.
The political economy of deforestation and degradation in Sabah – The processes behind the drivers
This chapter examines the political economy underlying deforestation and forest degradation in Sabah, Malaysia. It analyzes how historical legacies, development policies, political dynamics, and global market forces interact to shape forest use and governance. The chapter highlights the role of logging regimes, agricultural expansion, patronage networks, and economic globalization in driving forest loss, while also exploring how policy reforms such as sustainable forest management have shifted practices over time. It emphasizes that deforestation is not only an environmental issue but also a product of complex political, economic, and institutional processes that require integrated, equitable, and long-term governance solutions.
Governance of forest and land use in Sabah – Effectiveness, efficiency, and equity
This chapter assesses forest and land-use governance in Sabah, Malaysia, through the lenses of effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. It examines how policies such as sustainable forest management (SFM), REDD+, certification schemes, and conservation initiatives have contributed to reducing deforestation and supporting climate mitigation. While a comprehensive legal and institutional framework exists, implementation outcomes are mixed due to economic pressures, political dynamics, and competing development priorities. The chapter highlights persistent challenges, including weak coordination, high implementation costs, and inequitable land tenure systems that marginalize Indigenous communities. It concludes that achieving sustainable and just forest governance requires stronger policy coherence, inclusive participation, and recognition of customary rights.
Forest Governance and Social Forestry in Sabah, Malaysia: Context, actors and institutions
This book presents an overview on the context affecting forest and climate change policies in Sabah with special emphasis on sustainable forest management and social forestry. Written by a team of academics, university and CSO researchers and local government practitioners, it adds to understanding the complexity of forest and land use governance in Sabah, Malaysia specifically. The different chapters discuss how forest governance and climate change policies are structured, deforestation and forest degradation in Sabah and the involvement of local and indigenous peoples in managing land and forest. The final chapter provides a reflection and concludes on how effective, efficient and equitable the governance of forest and land use in Sabah has been.
Taking Stock of Carbon Rights in REDD+ Candidate Countries: Concept Meets Reality
In the discourses on who should benefit from national REDD+ implementation, rights-based approaches are prominent across various countries. Options on how to create viable property rights arrangements are currently being debated by scholars, policy makers and practitioners alike. Many REDD+ advocates argue that assigning carbon rights represents a solution to insecure individual and community property rights. But carbon rights, i.e., the bundle of legal rights to carbon sequestered in biomass, present their own set of theoretical and practical challenges. We assess the status and approaches chosen in emerging carbon-rights legislations in five REDD+ countries based on a literature review and country expert knowledge: Peru, Brazil, Cameroon, Vietnam and Indonesia. We find that most countries assessed have not yet made final decisions as to the type of benefit sharing mechanisms they intend to implement and that there is a lack of clarity about who owns rights to carbon as a property and who is entitled to receive benefits. However, there is a trend of linking carbon rights to land rights. As such, the technical and also political challenges that land tenure clarification has faced over the past decades will still need to be addressed in the context of carbon rights.
Archetypes of tropical moist forest change
Despite growing commitment for tropical forest conservation, the understanding of complex spatio-temporal deforestation patterns and their underlying drivers remains limited. This study uses archetype analysis to examine global spatio-temporal deforestation patterns in tropical moist forests (TMFs) over the last two decades. This work underpins our attempt to develop a systematized diagnostic of tropical forest policies, aimed at stemming deforestation and forest degradation. We identify seven archetypes of forest state and its change in tropical moist forests, assess conversion from forest to other land uses in deforestation areas, and evaluate deforestation risk in landscapes with high remaining forest cover and low historical deforestation. Our analysis covers approximately 2.8 billion hectares of land area in the tropics that contained tropical moist forest in 2000 – equivalent to about three quarters of the world’s TMF landscapes – and thus includes both forest and non-forest areas within those units. Only less than a third of TMFs were classified as intact forest areas (i.e., high forest cover, low deforestation), while approximately a quarter were classified as deforestation areas (i.e., high deforestation). TMFs in Southeast Asia are showing higher proportions of deforestation areas and degraded forests than other regions. Central and South America has the largest absolute area of deforestation areas. While deforestation rates in sub-Saharan Africa have historically been lower, the proportion of deforestation areas is similar to that in the other continents. We could not discern clear patterns linking deforestation areas to specific types of land-use conversion, which suggests that local context plays a more significant role in shaping deforestation patterns. Low accessibility provides passive protection to a substantial part (34%) of intact forest landscapes with good agricultural suitability, particularly in the Amazon, the Congo Basin and southern New Guinea. These results indicate that tropical moist forests remain under continued pressure, with deforestation persisting at high rates. Once elevated deforestation levels are reached, they become difficult to reduce. The archetypes approach is a pragmatic tool to classify tropical deforestation, identify important hotspots under threat, and support spatially targeted policy interventions.
The present paper provides the analytical foundation for four country reports, each examining deforestation policies through the lens of deforestation archetypes in a specific national context: Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Indonesia, and Peru. Together, these five papers introduce the deforestation diagnostic framework.
Spatial Dimensions of Existing Conservation Areas and Other Land Uses in the Congo Basin
Remote sensing (RS) techniques and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for earth observation have significantly improved the ability to map and measure forest composition, estimate height and biomass, detect degradation and deforestation, implement land use planning, track land use changes as well as monitoring the implementation and respect of land development policies at a finer scale. Machine learning approaches further enhance these capabilities by integrating multiple data sources to produce improved maps of forest attributes and track changes over time. Recent advances in remote sensing techniques and artificial intelligence (AI) now enable detailed mapping and modelling of conservation areas especially the demarcation of High Valued Conservation Forest. National governments follow an administrative procedure for national map design, validation, and standardization. National governments together with the national mapping institutions select particular government officials, the private sector, civil society organizations, and foreign partners to produce national maps. On the other hand, scientists use a rigorous methodology that combines cutting-edge tools and peer review approaches. Even if some of the maps mentioned have not undergone the validation process by the various governments of the sub-region, they are widely used or referred to in international negotiations and discussions. Adopting innovative policies on mapping (Indonesia’s one map policy, Rwanda National land registry) and spatial data management (Geoportal for the Region, The INSPIRE Directive) will be very helpful in planning and conserving the Congo Basin. Non the less, Gabon, the DRC and Cameroon have made exceptions by producing and using renowned National Geoportal.
Options for Enhancing the Contributions of Forests to Social and Economic Resilience
In this Chapter we identify the resilience-enhancing potential of management and governance interventions, or ‘response options’ that have forests at their core or that could address forest social-ecological systems, for instance, by seeking to improve forest extent, condition, and biodiversity. Interventions may be focused on reducing the drivers of deforestation and degradation or on enhancing and amplifying positive forest-based actions (e.g., governance, social, cultural). We identify response options that may contribute to improvements in forest condition and/or the reduction of drivers of forest decline and degradation. We consider a range of more common and more nascent response options, and the overarching frameworks that may support their application. We examine resilience-enhancing response options by incorporating widely recognised social-ecological, resilience-enhancing attributes and placing an emphasis on well-being, including social and economic attributes, which have so far received less focus or, in some cases, been supplanted by environmental, legal, or technical priorities. We also consider the scale at which interventions are applied and their propensity to support incremental or transformative change, as well as the potential for divergent outcomes in the Global North versus the Global South. We explore whether common interventions are sufficient and if there are additional options that hold promise for enhancing resilience. Further, we identify intervention adjustments or calibrations that may be required to increase their resilience enhancing potential, and point to cross-cutting elements and approaches that may advance
forest contributions to social and economic resilience in particular, and to social-ecological system resilience more broadly.
State of the Forests 2025: The Forests of the East and Southern Africa
This publication offers a comprehensive, evidence-based assessment of the status, trends and governance of forests across Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. Drawing on regional data, national forest inventories, geospatial analyses and policy reviews, the report examines how forests continue to underpin livelihoods, economies, biodiversity and climate resilience – while facing mounting pressure from deforestation, degradation and competing land uses.
The report explores key dimensions shaping the region’s forest landscapes, including forest typologies and ownership regimes; timber production and markets; REDD+ progress and challenges; legal and policy frameworks; community forestry; sustainable woodfuel management; wild meat trade; women’s rights and participation; and forest monitoring, data management and sharing. Across these themes, the report highlights both persistent gaps and emerging opportunities for more inclusive, effective and sustainable forest governance.
Beyond documenting trends, this report serves as a practical resource for decision makers. It identifies technical and policy options to strengthen sustainable forest management, improve institutional coordination, enhance community participation, and align national actions with regional and global commitments under the Paris Agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Sustainable Development Goals. Produced as a flagship output of the EU-funded East and Southern Africa Forest Observatory (OFESA) project, this volume reflects the collective expertise of researchers, government agencies, civil society organisations and regional institutions. It is intended to inform policy dialogue, guide investment and support collaborative action to safeguard forests as critical ecological, social and economic assets for present and future generations in East and Southern Africa.