Malaysia has been ranked 25th out of 132 countries in the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) 2011.
It is Malaysia’s best ranking in the index thus far.
Malaysia EPI team head Prof Datuk Dr Zaini Ujang said the rankings were announced at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.
It puts Malaysia in the same league as high scoring countries like Germany, Iceland, Findland, Denmark, Japan and Belgium.
“Based on this new benchmark, Malaysia showed the best performance among Asean countries and was third best in the Asia-Pacific region after New Zealand and Japan.
“In 2010, Malaysia was ranked 54th out 163 countries with Singapore in 28th place. The city-state dropped to 52nd place last year,” Dr Zaini told reporters here.
Dr Zaini, who is Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) vice-chancellor and chairman of the Malaysian Environmental Council, said the EPI was developed by Yale University and Columbia University in the United States in collaboration with the European Commission and the WEF to evaluate the performance of countries’ environmental management with the two main objectives being environmental well-being and pollution control.
He said the EPI also served to create awareness on planning and policymaking by countries so as to ensure targets were set for enviromental management and provision of accurate data on it based on 25 indices.
He said among the aspects evaluated were climate change, agriculture, fisheries, forestry and air and water pollution.
“Based on the results released, Malaysia showed very good performance in terms of air pollution scoring 97.3%, agriculture 95% while for biodiversity and habitats it was 90.1%.
“However, Malaysia needs to take proactive steps to improve the indices on climate change and forestry as the score was 28 and 17.4% respectively,” he said.
He added the achievement was the result of the importance placed on environmental matters in the country’s New Economic Model and put Malaysia in a good stead to attract even more investors and tourists.
