Sustainable Sarawak

Our Story

In general, sustainable development is made of a linkage between economy, environment and society. Each of these pillars are interconnected with each other and inputs of stress on one pillar will affect the other two in an intricate feedback loop system. In recent years, institution and governance were also included in the pillars of sustainability as both influenced the decision-making and creation of policies which affects all three of the original pillars of sustainability.

To know why sustainable development is important to Sarawak, we have to understand that Sarawak itself is home to an ecosystem which is known to be rich in both biodiversity and natural resources. As such, it is easy for us to get carried away in extracting the riches of our lands and yet at the same time suffers from the impacts of our own actions. For example, we have seen that our forests are being trimmed down for plantations and timber logging for decades in which by all means have contributed to our state financial resources (economy) but at the same time, we enters areas which are known to be rich in biodiversity and wiping them out of their habitat (environment). Concurrently, we also have displaced communities of which are heavily reliant to forest resources for living (society) due to our land use-land change activities.

To visualize the example easily, the linkage is as follow:

Land use-land change (plantation/timber) --> increase financial flow (good for economy) --> displacing habitat (reducing environmental resilient) --> displacing communities (incur societal damage dependant on forest products).

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