PETALING JAYA: There is a need for Malaysia to have a roadmap to address climate change and its effects on the environment, businesses and the community among others, industry leaders said.

Panellists of the StarBiz-Institute of Corporate Responsibility Malaysia forum entitled Climate change vs profits: Striking a balance yesterday also stressed the importance of the roles of regulators and corporates as well as the community in combating climate change.

The forum was moderated by Datuk Johan Raslan, chairman of the Institute of Corporate Responsibility (ICR) Malaysia and had as panellists Intel Malaysia Sdn Bhd managing director (MD) Atul Bhargava, AirAsia X chief executive officer (CEO) Azran Osman-Rani, Boh Plantations Sdn Bhd CEO Caroline Russell and Standard Chartered Bank Malaysia MD and CEO Osman Morad.

Climate change refers to long-term, significant changes in the climate usually as a result of human activity including carbon emission and deforestation.

A recent catastrophe linked to climate change was the floods in Pakistan.

Russell noted that although regulators and industry leaders were taking necessary steps to make changes, the scale of the problem was "immense."

Citing an example, Russell said Malaysia ranked 25th as the world's largest emittor of carbon dioxide and the ranking was too high when compared with the size of the country's population.

"Although the Prime Minister has committed to reducing carbon emission by 40% in the country by 2020 there is no roadmap to achieve that.

"Both the political will and industry initiatives still have a long way to go in meeting carbon production commitments. Greater impetus is required to address the problem of climate change," she said, adding that it was forecast that the country's carbon emissions could rise 73% by 2020.

In addition, Russell said there was a misalignment in terms of the aims of the regulatory authorities.

"Boh has been using biofuels for decades in our tea manufacturing process.

"We have been upgrading some equipment to use more fuel efficient methods.

"However, our application to the Department of Environment to implement that change required us to revert to fossil fuel," she said.

- The Star Online