State Governments must immediately adopt the National Forestry (Amendment) Act 2022
In conjunction with International Day of Forests celebrated on 21 March every year, Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) urges the remaining states in Peninsular Malaysia who have yet to adopt the National Forestry (Amendment) Act 2022 gazetted on 20 September 2022 to do so immediately.
As of today, the amendments to the National Forestry Act 1984 have only come into force in Perlis on 01 April 2023 and the Federal Territories of Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya and Labuan on 01 February 2025.
One of the most significant amendments to the Act is the introduction of a new section 11, replacing the old in relation to the excision of a permanent reserved forest (PRF). The new amendment allows for such excision to take place subject to the conduct of a public inquiry (siasatan awam), in accordance with the rules which are to be drawn up subsequently by the state.
This is a very important provision, which currently exists only in the 1985 Selangor Forestry Enactment. Such a provision for a public inquiry prior to any degazetting of PRF ensures transparency, and accountability on the part of the States and is important for ensuring good governance.
Apart from this, other amendments include the inclusion of ‘state park forest’ (hutan taman negeri) as an additional category in the PRF classification, and increased penalties for offences to deter prospective violators.
The purpose of these amendments is to tighten the process of degazetting and the simultaneous replacement of PRF through a public inquiry. Any PRF that is degazetted must be simultaneously replaced with a land area of equal or larger size under Section 12 of the Act. If states do not adopt these amendments immediately, further exploitation of forest resources will continue, which could impair biodiversity functions of forests and impact the achievement of sustainable forest management, which is a cornerstone of the nation’s forest management.
These amendments must be incorporated urgently into each state’s respective forest enactments to ensure that there is uniform implementation in the governance and management of forests. The rules on the conduct of public inquiry must also be drawn up quickly and shared with the public for comments and feedback prior to them being approved and implemented.
Apart from the adoption of amendments, what is most important is how much of the PRFs are further gazetted as protection or conservation forests in Peninsular Malaysia. The oft-repeated claim by the Malaysian government that 55 per cent of the country’s land area is still under forest cover should be justified with actual data of how much exactly of this are actually protected or conservation forests. Based on the data published in the Compendium of Environment Statistics 2018 and analysed by SAM, 50 per cent of the forest cover or 27 per cent of our country’s land area has been permanently reserved as production forests, chiefly for logging with a significant portion designated for conversions into monoculture plantations. Only 29 per cent of our forest cover or 16 per cent of our country’s land area consist of protected or conservation forests.
Therefore, SAM hopes that, in conjunction with this year’s International Day of Forests, state governments will immediately take steps not only to adopt the amendments to the 2022 Act but to also further gazette PRFs as protection or conservation areas under the National Forestry Act 1984. This would increase our forest cover for protected and conservation areas.
Meenakshi Raman
President
Sahabat Alam Malaysia
Letter to the Editor, 21 March 2025