IT'S terrifying to see the colossal wood debris and logs stuck in Sungai Kerau near Karak recently. At first glance, it looked like logging was the prime suspect in denuding upstream areas.
It turned out, as the Pahang Forestry Department's preliminary investigation indicated, there was a huge water surge in Sungai Kerau, which caused debris and uprooted trees to be swept downstream.
I don't believe the water surge was purely caused by heavy rainfall during the wettest months of the year.
I believe deforestation significantly contributed to the water surge that caused massive floods in Pahang, Kelantan, Terengganu, Johor and Selangor.
Floods are common in tropical regions. What exacerbated our situation is that there has been excessive conversion of inland tropical forests into oil palm and rubber plantations that significantly increased the number of flooding events during the wettest months of the year.
Notwithstanding the speed of development and disproportionate land use in low-lying areas without the presence of green lungs and redevelopment of coastal peatland — the situation will continue to be aggravated.
We are caught at the crossroads. There's a striking dichotomy between preserving nature and the desire for economic and development activities.
The conversion of inland forests into oil palm and rubber plantations has dealt a massive blow to our environment. There's evidence to show that deforestation could increase the number of flood days per month in large catchment areas during heavy rainfall periods.
Statistically, Malaysia still has good forest cover of 18.3 million hectares. The Energy and Natural Resources Ministry reveals that 3.3 million hectares are totally protected forests, 11 million hectares are permanent reserved forest and four million hectares are state land forests.
The federal government is protecting 14.3 million hectares of forest cover (totally protected and permanent reserved forests), but we fear that it is not the same with state land forests.
We fear state land forests will slowly disappear due to unscheduled and illegal logging or conversion into agricultural land use in the near future. That would be catastrophic.
Macaranga, a journalism portal covering the environment and sustainability, in an article in November last year examined the dynamics and mechanics of forest-use changes in Malaysia.
It indicated that most people saw logging in a bad light but few realised Malaysia has been guided by a national policy of sustainable forestry since the late 1970s.
The portal also said deforestation in Malaysia, particularly in the peninsula, peaked in the 1960s to 1970s when large swathes of virgin forests, some of the oldest on Earth, were cleared.
Official land-use data shows that between 1990 and 2019, Peninsular Malaysia lost about 140,000ha of forest more than Sabah and Sarawak, despite being only two-thirds the size of the latter.
Much of the Earth's carbon dioxide is captured by forests. Forests and other natural vegetation are key wildlife habitats and vital resources for humans.
Deforestation threatens this natural infrastructure, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, simultaneously reducing wildlife diversity and making our environment more susceptible to environmental disasters.
Forests today make up around 31 per cent of Earth's total land area, which covers 40.6 million sq km. Over three decades, the world lost more than four per cent, or 17.7 million sq km, of its forests, which equates to about half the size of India.
It is a known fact that forests absorb around 30 per cent of the world's carbon emissions each year, making them the most important carbon sinks on land.
When we pair this with the fact that deforestation contributes around 12 per cent of annual greenhouse gas emissions, the importance of forest preservation becomes clearer.
Europe and Asia are the only two regions that have significant overall forest growth.
There has been a slight reduction of forest growth in North and Central America while extensive deforestation occurred in Africa, South America and the Caribbean, which lost 15 per cent of their forests over three decades due to high demand for agriculture and cattle rearing.
Environmentalists believe Mother Nature has a way of repaying mankind for the destruction of the environment — poetic justice, if you want to put it that way.
When something goes wrong upstream, you'll see all hell breaks loose downstream. Haven't we learnt enough?
The writer, a former NST journalist, is a film scriptwriter whose penchant is finding new food haunts