Environmental issues and sustainability in Malaysia – A community perspective

In 2020, Malaysia began to face Covid-19 pandemic that slowing down the economy from the beginning of March, and at the same time, environmental issues have been a source of pollutant. It has been perceived as the twenty-first century's greatest threat to nature and civilization and has also been one of the foremost environmental problems globally, especially in Malaysia. Environmental issues like global warming, climate change and sustainability has been impacting to the economy, infrastructure and society today. Climate change resulted from a rise in the persistence and the severity of adverse meteorological conditions such as droughts, floods, and hurricanes. Primarily carbon dioxide from automobiles, manufacturing area, construction site, power station, and logging all contribute to climate change by emitting heat-trapping pollutants. Besides, global warming has been primary environment issue in Malaysia. When gases like carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and fluorinated gases clump together, they act as a dense shield, warming the world, changing the climate, and jeopardizing human health, economics, and natural ecosystems. Meanwhile, sustainability has become an issue as the community are not very aware with the sustainability. Community required fresh air, sources of nature, and a clean environment in order to shape good healthy communities. In this research, a closed based Likert-type scale questionnaire were built to determine the community perspectives on the environmental issues as mentioned above. There were 153 respondent's data gathered and then analyzed by statistics method. IBM SPSS Statistics 25 software was used to performed a simple frequency distribution, mean and relative important index (RII) in order to obtain the highest RII, mean score and the ranking of the aspects. The importance aspect which is climate change condition has been ranked 1 with the highest RII (0.946) value and mean score (4.73). This proven that community are very particular with the climate change and in order to overcome with the issue, community are advisable to practices sustainability activities such as recycling to sustain the environment. © 2023 Author(s).