Recent floods linked to massive urbanisation - experts
Development site in Shah Alam, Selangor, back in 2020 during the Movement Control Order. (Source: 123rf)
According to the Urbanization in Malaysia 2020 report, in 2020, 77.16 per cent of Malaysia’s total population lived in urban areas and cities.
The growth is expected to continue as people from rural areas migrate to urban centres due to the economy and employment opportunities, continuing to shift from agriculture to industry and services.
Although there only 1.31 million inhabitants in Kuala Lumpur and about 500,000 people in 18 other urban areas nationwide - which is relatively small considering Malaysia’s entire population amounts to around 31 million, how does rapid development affect the environment and natural landscape?
According to Geospatialist Dr Nisfariza Mohd Noor, urbanisation plays a prominent role to the country’s environment and climate.
She highlighted that urbanisation was a major factor that led to the unprecedented floods which hit six states in Malaysia last month.
She also said that there were climate change or nature elements to be taken into account such as the monsoon season, heavy rains and typhoons happening at the same time that worsen the floods.
However, she said based on the satellite images comparison where she compared buildings developed in the flood-affected Shah Alam areas from year 1984 and 2020, it showed that massive urbanisation developments were present.
“Looking at the satellite images comparison, we can see that there’s no more space for development since every spot has been added with more roads, houses as well as commercial and industrial buildings,” she told Sinar Daily.
Nisfariza stated that urbanisation causes the decrease of water body or surface water as some lakes were recclaimed in order to make space for more development in certain areas.
She said the issue with urbanisation meant there were more pavements thus less water to soak into the ground.
This, she said, results to less underground water.
“The runoff from the increased pavement goes into storm sewers, which then goes into streams. This runoff, which used to soak into the ground, now goes into streams thus causes flooding.
“Not only that, many houses were built with non-absorbent materials which only speed up the process,” she added.
Nisfariza highlighted that it was important for research to be done for all areas in Malaysia on the issue.
She said she analysed the satellite images in the Taman Sri Muda, Section 25, since it was badly affected by the floods.
“I really wanted to study about Taman Sri Muda and Shah Alam so that I can distribute the information to the public and we can do something about it once we are able to make the people understand what is actually happening.
“We should not just focus on Taman Sri Muda and Shah Alam for research, but at least we can start from here and hopefully we can do this for other areas too,” she added.
Meanwhile, Environment and Research Association of Malaysia (Ensearch) President Abdul Aziz Long agreed that urbanisation do plays a big role in the recent floods that hit Malaysia recently.
He said urbanisation in Malaysia was massive, especially in developed areas like Shah Alam where the landscape had changed immensely compared to previous decades.
“I have been staying in Shah Alam since 1985 and the areas within 5 km radius surrounding Shah Alam used to be covered by rubber trees and oil palm, whereas what you can see now are four lane highways, houses, commercial areas and industrial estates,” he told Sinar Daily.
Abdul Aziz said urbanisation was happening rapidly in the country and led to environmental impacts.
He said it led to generation of more household and industrial wastes, emission to air from industries and vehicles, emission to our rivers due to discharge from industry and opening of new land.
He said these affects contributed to the floods, which the government declared “once in a century” disaster.
However, he said, urbanisation should not take the blame alone.
“Everybody whether politicians, planners, policy makers, developers have to take the blame.
“Where we fail are in our inability to work together, to learn from past experience to plan and forecast, and to take relevant and appropriate mitigating measure to reduce impacts from extreme weather conditions due to the effect from global warming and climate change which is a result of our own (human) behavior,” he added.
