Comparing Malaysia’s attitude towards the environment with other ASEAN, Asia-Pacific or neighboring country using the measure of EPI(Environmental Protection Index), Malaysia has significantly scored low coming in 68th position worldwide and 6th in the neighboring zone with a score of 47.9 while the neighboring country like Brunei and Singapore has scored 54.8 and 58.1 respectively. The comparison between the neighboring countries is significantly low and It's not appropriate to compare the European or developed country's environment quality with Malaysia as they place higher importance on their environment protection since they spend 1.6 percent of their government spending compared to Malaysia only 0.7 percent as seen in the article reference and the location of their country. Whilst the EU countries are much more economically developed to spend such amount on the environment.

Another fact to take account is that Malaysia has taken great initiatives in the past such as a ban on single-use plastic, Smoking in public areas, and encouraging CSR of MNC to implement environmentally friendly initiatives such as water-wastage or energy conservation. However, Malaysia is also heavily bounded by its privatized or fuel/oil, rubber, and private industries where the production of those goods causes environmental deterioration whereas the revenues or income collected from them contribute significantly to the fiscal revenue of Malaysia so it’s difficult to completely comply with environmental quality initiatives. To make drastic changes such as aggressively converting to electric vehicles for example will hurt the national oil and fuel company Petronas. 

1. How the pollutant threat and environmental quality deterioration is affecting Malaysian companies and population.

2. How well is Malaysia doing in terms of environmental initiatives compared to other ASEAN or neighboring countries in the environmental aspect?

3. Recommend initiatives that are sustainable, feasible, and beneficial to Malaysian economic growth

 

Approaches such as mitigating this issue could be solved by implementing environmental controlling incentives, establishing authoritative policies in the forms of carbon taxes, goverment subsidies in green energy and technology without heavily impacting the country’s overall economic growth. While Malaysia’s budget for the environment vastly expresses on protecting biodiversity, little has been pursued by the government on pollution and environmental quality protection.