This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 9, 2026 - March 15, 2026
For decades, the global climate crisis debate has been framed as a contest between the Global North’s historical responsibility and the Global South’s right to develop. A common argument holds that because industrialisation in wealthy Western nations drove this crisis, the Global South should not bear comparable financial or development burdens.
That framing, however, overlooks a material shift. Emissions from emerging and carbon-intensive economies in the Global South have risen sharply. Collectively, they have accounted for roughly two-thirds of global annual emissions growth over the past three decades. Whatever the politics, the atmosphere does not respond to claims of fairness. As we can see and feel, it responds to cumulative greenhouse gas concentrations.
Malaysia, itself a growing middle-income economy, does not escape such criticism. In 2024, it ranked 28th globally for total greenhouse gas emissions, broadly comparable to France and the UK in absolute terms. The bulk of our emissions are rooted in over 50 years of fossil fuel extraction and consumption, energy-intensive industries and large-scale deforestation for industrial monocultures.
Yet, Malaysia’s latest climate targets — including its updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC 3.0) — do not set out a clear pathway for rapid mitigation. There is no defined timeline for a full phase-out of fossil fuel production or use, nor is there a comprehensive strategy to deliver the scale of absolute emissions reductions required to align with a 1.5°C trajectory.
Closing this gap requires more than just political will; it requires anchoring national targets in the non-negotiable metrics of planetary physics. The central aim of the Paris Agreement is to limit global warming to 1.5°C. To do this means operating within a finite “Global Carbon Budget”, the total amount of CO humanity can emit while retaining a credible chance of remaining below the threshold.
The carbon budget framework has been advanced by the Global Carbon Project led by the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute. By quantifying every tonne of human-generated CO emissions and tracking the declining absorptive capacity of land and ocean sinks, the budget provides a high-fidelity accounting system for the emissions that determine how much budget remains.
This is not an abstract data set. The remaining carbon budget defines the physical limits within which fossil fuel and land-use change must be constrained if the 1.5°C objective is to remain viable and planet Earth is to remain liveable. The unresolved question has never been the physics; it has been allocation. How should the remaining, rapidly shrinking budget be divided among nations in a manner that is both scientifically credible and ethically defensible?
If Malaysia is to move beyond rhetorical positioning and towards coherent target-setting, it must define what its equitable share entails. A landmark report produced recently by RimbaWatch and launched with the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, Estimating a Fair Share Carbon Budget for Malaysia, provides a data-driven assessment of precisely this question and sets out the scale of adjustment required if Malaysia is to align its development pathway with biophysical reality.
RimbaWatch utilised a rigorous methodology (which has already been accepted by European courts) formulated by Setu Pelz et al (2023) and grounded in peer-reviewed science and climate law to calculate Malaysia’s fair share of the remaining carbon budget. The approach does not look at emissions alone; it weighs equity principles, such as equal emissions per person, ability to pay and historical responsibility for emissions.
Even under the most generous interpretation, based purely on equality, Malaysia likely exhausted its limit by 2025. In effect, every additional tonne of CO emitted now draws down a rapidly depleting atmospheric commons. Exceeding the 1.5°C limit is not a symbolic breach. We are now, to put it politely, “borrowing” from a communal bank account, leaving the most vulnerable communities and future generations to repay not only the interest but also to return the capital. The scientists have issued us with a very clear warning: breaching this critical 1.5°C tipping point will trigger the collapse of vital planetary systems, the catastrophic results of which include dramatic sea level rise submerging our coastal cities, a collapse in agricultural yields and heat-related mortality. The choice before Malaysia is stark: align transparently and collaboratively with physical limits, or absorb the accelerating costs of delay, recognising that the recent disasters we have experienced are the tip of a now rapidly melting iceberg.
Mitigation is feasible but requires courage to think and act differently:
● First, Malaysia should embed a legally binding national carbon budget within the forthcoming Climate Change Act. The budget must be anchored in scientific evidence, including the foundations laid out in the RimbaWatch analysis, and translated into clear national and sectoral ceilings for energy and forestry. It must account for both production and consumption emissions so that responsibility is not displaced.
● Second, fossil fuel expansion must end and a managed phase-out must begin — not on paper but operationally. Approvals for new oil and gas fields should be rescinded, as they risk locking in billions of tonnes of additional CO and methane. A science-aligned timetable, including a 2035 coal exit and a 2045 retirement of natural gas in the power sector, would provide regulatory certainty and redirect capital towards grid modernisation rather than stranded fossil fuel assets. Carbon capture and storage should be tightly restricted to genuinely hard-to-abate industrial processes, with an explicit ban on its use to justify new high-CO sour gas developments.
● Third, natural carbon sinks must be treated as strategic national assets. Protecting forests, mangroves, seagrass meadows and wetlands is not optional; it preserves the remaining carbon budget at a far lower cost than speculative and unproven technological fixes. A total ban on forest conversion for industrial monoculture should be enforced. At the same time, fiscal instruments such as the Ecological Fiscal Transfer mechanism should be strengthened to reward states that maintain forests and coastal ecosystems. A moratorium on coastal conversion, paired with incentives to support the transition away from high-impact aquaculture and industrial zoning in sensitive wetlands, would reinforce this approach.
Taken together, these measures shift climate policy from aspiration to enforceable limits. But we must also confront the fiscal implications honestly.
A modest increase in the Global Stocktake (GST), calibrated and transparently communicated, would more than offset projected losses from a structured fossil fuel phase-out. This is not an abstract debate about global fairness. Malaysia has likely exhausted its equitable share of the remaining 1.5°C carbon budget. Our national carbon reality now requires behavioural change, institutional reform and political candour.
Given the scale of what we need to do, incremental communication will not suffice. Malaysia should convene a national emergency climate briefing as is being done in other nations. The public deserves a clear presentation of the carbon budget, the fiscal trade-offs, the health implications and the transition timeline. Markets require certainty. Citizens require honesty. Without a shared understanding of the constraints, alignment will remain elusive.
Malaysia’s future depends on abandoning the false binary of environment versus development and recognising that economic planning cannot override the laws of nature. The atmosphere does not negotiate. It accumulates.
Prof Tan Sri Dr Jemilah Mahmood, a physician and experienced crisis leader, is the executive director of the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health at Sunway University, Malaysia. She is the founder of Mercy Malaysia and has served in leadership roles internationally with the United Nations and Red Cross for the last decade. She also sits on several corporate and nonprofit boards globally and nationally. In 2019, she was the first Malaysian recipient of the Asean prize.
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