Breaking new floor: Sustainability in Malaysia
Expertise is central to the nation’s sustainability agenda. Malaysia’s business hub, Kuala Lumpur, has rolled out a smart city plan, which incorporates accelerating digital transformation by specializing in training and selling cloud applied sciences and synthetic intelligence (AI), amongst different areas. The Malaysian authorities has additionally emphasised expertise funding in its Budget 2022, with as much as MYR 100 million (US$ 23.7 million) in grants for areas resembling sensible automation and not less than MYR 30 billion (US$ 7 billion) for government-linked firms investing in renewable power, supply-chain modernization, and 5G infrastructure.
Lately, Kuala Lumpur has additionally seen an rising variety of “greening” alternatives. As an illustration, the town governance has employed a sensible “City Brain”, which makes use of Alibaba Cloud’s computing techniques to optimize providers like site visitors management and even calculate the most effective routes for emergency providers. Worldwide expertise and mobility firms resembling Microsoft and Korea-based Socar, that are eyeing inexperienced innovation and enterprise alternatives, have additionally invested and expanded their operations in Kuala Lumpur. On the similar time, conventional industries, specifically power and electronics, have been making an attempt to reinvent themselves.
In mild of this shifting setting, this report explores what world firms in Better Kuala Lumpur are doing to realize their ESG targets, the alternatives the placement has to supply, and the way their native experiences could possibly be utilized globally.
The important thing findings of this report are:
Malaysia is dedicated to changing into a regional decarbonization chief. The nation’s present grasp plan that charts its financial improvement by 2025 contains quite a few applications aimed toward advancing sustainability by rising renewable energy-generation capabilities, creating inexperienced mobility options, and constructing sustainable and resilient cities. This sustainability dedication comes even because the nation continues to derive financial progress from historically carbon-intensive industries, resembling oil and fuel improvement, power manufacturing, and agriculture. But, whereas some international locations’ reliance on fossil fuels and different conventional industries weighs on their decarbonization commitments, Malaysia makes use of its deep, globally built-in trade clusters and provide chains to develop new, greener enterprise processes and fewer carbon-intensive manufacturing and logistics processes.
Better Kuala Lumpur has seen an rising variety of “greening” alternatives for among the nation’s conventional innovation clusters, specifically power, electronics manufacturing, IT outsourcing, and different digital financial system sectors. Asia’s fast-growing digital economies have additionally created distinctive synergies for digitally “native” corporations that wish to use Kuala Lumpur as a hub from which they will faucet inexperienced enterprise alternatives within the area. These embody Korean inexperienced mobility agency Socar, which is increasing its “people-to-people” ridesharing mannequin throughout Southeast Asia from its Kuala Lumpur base. And Schlumberger, which has one in all seven world “Innovation Factori” facilities in Kuala Lumpur. The middle works to speed up the adoption of its AI for reinforcing power transition efforts in East Asia.
Malaysia’s maturing sustainability stance is making a tradition of monitoring, measurement and, finally, accountability. This will function a framework for ESG-minded corporations to chart their very own journeys. Such efforts are removed from beauty, they’re important to a market’s financial prospects. International, sustainability-oriented corporations can each obtain their ESG targets by their Better Kuala Lumpur operations and use their Malaysian expertise as a template for sustainable innovation of their world operations. Malaysia’s function as a worldwide sustainability hub is vital, as its financial system uniquely straddles many trade sectors, together with excessive expertise and power manufacturing, that are pivotal in shifting the world’s improvement towards a low-carbon future. Collaboration and communication are important to those efforts.
This content material was produced by Insights, the customized content material arm of MIT Expertise Overview. It was not written by MIT Expertise Overview’s editorial employees.