For the first time, a fair share carbon budget for Malaysia has been identified. In their report, “Estimating a Fair Share Carbon Budget for Malaysia”, RimbaWatch’s analysis based on legally-accepted methodologies provides a concrete benchmark which it hopes will serve as a baseline for government and corporate guidance, targets and legislation on climate mitigation.
Malaysia’s annual and historical contribution to global emissions makes it a significant polluter, largely due to its current role as a major oil and gas producer and consumer, and ongoing activities such as deforestation. As the report outlines, Malaysia’s contribution of 0.62% of global GHG emissions for 2024 make it the 28th-highest emitting country in the world, with annual emissions similar to other extractive economies such as Spain, France and the United Kingdom.
Despite this, Malaysia’s climate policies and targets fail to effectively address mitigation, with no plans for a complete and immediate phase-out of polluting activities such as fossil fuels and deforestation. These short falls are underpinned by the lack of attempt by the Malaysian authorities to establish a fair-share carbon budget for the nation, aligned with a 1.5 degree pathway.
A carbon budget is the concept that, to stabilize global warming to the Paris Agreement’s threshold, global emissions need to be capped to an amount that would cumulatively not exceed a 1.5 degree threshold. For example, for a 50% chance of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, the remaining global carbon budget is 380 billion tCO2e as of 2023. To divide this global carbon budget to a national-level, the concept of a fair-share arises. This concept accounts for a nation’s historical emissions responsibility and current capacity to transition, based on its historical and present share of the global carbon budget, global emissions and global GDP.
To conduct this estimation, RimbaWatch adopted the methodology employed by Pelz et al (2023; 2025), which has been accepted by both Swiss and Dutch courts as a credible method. Based on this, the report identifies four options for estimating Malaysia’s fair-share carbon budget:
- ‘Equality’, based on equal per capita division of the global carbon budget accounting from 2015.
- ‘Responsibility’, based on equal per capita division of the global carbon budget, accounting from 1990.
- ‘Capability’, based on Malaysia’s relative per-capita GDP, accounting from 2015.
- ‘Responsibility and Capability’, based on Malaysia’s relative per-capita GDP, accounting from 1990.
Read more here.
