Penampang District of Malaysia is located in Sabah’s West Coast Division, with Donggongon Town as its capital and main town, where it functions essentially as a suburb of Kota Kinabalu. It is one of the primary industrial, cultural and commercial centers of the region and is the fourth largest commercial area in Sabah (following Kota Kinabalu, Sandakan, and Tawau).
IUC Helpdesk and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) met online with Penampang’s representatives on 13 October 2020. The meeting’s objective was to review, refine and finalize the proposed climate mitigation and adaptation actions, which have been developed based on the recently completed Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (CRVA) and greenhouse gases (GHG) inventory report by UTM and CDP.
The GHG inventory for Penampang has shown that CO2 emissions in 2017 stood at 455 kilotons of CO2 equivalent. The stationary energy was the dominant source of GHG emission, accounting for 59% of net emission; the transportation and waste sector contributed 25% and 16%, respectively. Energy-related GHG emissions were disaggregated by different types of buildings and facilities, as per the sub-sectors. The 36% of net GHG emission was estimated to be from the industrial, 11% from residential,10% from residential, and 2% from agriculture. Penampang’s per capita emission was estimated at 3.1 tCO2eq.
The meeting reviewed the proposed target to reduce 45% GHG emission intensity by 2030 compared to the base year 2010. In addition, there were three adaptation goals suggested by UTM, namely 1) reduce property damage due to rainstorm and flooding by 50% by 2030 compared to 2017; 2) reduce downtime of utilities caused by tropical storms by 30% by 2030 compared to 2017; 3) achieve zero unregulated hill cutting and deforestation by 2030.
Climate change adaptation in Penampang would, in large part, focus on flood prevention, rainstorm, and tropical storm. Penampang has been facing the constant threat of major flooding that costs them significant socio-economic loss. Some of the adaptation strategies that would be of most benefits to Penampang include infrastructure reinforcement to gain resilience and robustness when faced with floods, the improvement of flood warning systems for communities in flood-prone areas, and the need to protect all existing green spaces.
Harmonizing with Malaysia’s Low Carbon City Framework LCCF), the planned actions were proposed to explore theme-based actions in these four themes: Sustainable Harnessing of Resource, Green Commuting, Resilient Infrastructure, and Community Based Climate Response. An additional category, society, has been complemented to fully represent the range of actions that can be taken to lower emissions. Actions have also been labeled to demonstrate how their benefits help achieve the CAP’s goals: mitigation, adaptation, or both.
In the last section, the city representative provided comments on how to enhance the interim CAP. Specifically, they emphasized the need to translate the document to the local language to allow large-scale dissemination and implementation. And also they added the input to strengthen the proposed action.
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