PETALING JAYA: An interim committee on climate change in Sabah has set itself the task of developing an enactment on carbon exchange within a year.
The committee chairman, former chief forest conservator Sam Mannan, said the Sabah Foundation would take the lead in carbon exchange deals.
He said the state government had recently landed a deal on carbon exchange after 10 years of deliberation, involving 80,000ha of forest land in Kuamut, Bernama reported.
An advance payment had been made by a UK-based partner of the state government. However “due to business considerations, the sum earned so far cannot be disclosed,” he said at a press conference.
He did not name the company; however, he said it had received an award for the best carbon project in the tropics for 2022, based on their assets outside Sabah.
Mannan, currently technical adviser on forestry to the Sabah chief minister, said the committee believed that Sabah did not need a third party to venture into business dealings on the carbon exchange market.
The state had years of experience and its own experts in environmental conservation efforts. “Sabah is blessed with the perception in the region that we have a high level of governance in conservation. But the big difference is on pricing of carbon,” he said.
“The carbon exchange market was quite underdeveloped for many years. But now it is (developed) because of pollution. Organisations buy carbon credits to offset their own pollution.
“Sabah needs to build a carbon exchange legislation to regulate how the state markets this because we want to lead the market. We don’t want to go through a third party,” he said.
Carbon credit trading is a market-based system designed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming, especially carbon dioxide, by creating a financial incentive to do so.
