What do you imagine Malaysia’s future will look like?
Would a better Malaysia that preserves a strong future for our children through a focus on rakyat’s health and wellbeing, economic sustainability and protecting our diverse ecosystem be part of it?
If it is, then the time to imagine is at an end. What we need now is to put our thoughts into action through our votes in our 15th General Election (GE15).
We need to #Vote4Climate | #UndiIklim
How do we start?
The most important part of voting is to make an informed decision when deciding who we are voting for and where their priorities lie.
Do you know which politicians actually know or care about climate change?
The purpose of this project is to provide you with more information about whether members of parliament recognise, care and talk about protecting Malaysians from the devastating impacts of climate change and environmental destruction.
We want you to make an informed decision about who is promoting pro-climate policies and taking meaningful actions to implement them.
Most of all, we want to increase transparency about our government and help Malaysians know where their vote can make a difference, especially in GE-15.
What did we do?
As part of Gabungan Darurat Iklim Malaysia'(GDIMY) committee, our efforts for the #UndiIklim campaign focused on 2 main areas of research on environment in the Malaysian political realm:
- What MPs have said in parliament on environmental topics.
- What MPs are saying and doing in public, related to the environment based on media coverage.
How can you use this data?
If you love data, jump right into the full dataset!
We published the raw data findings from the parliamentary Hansard documents. You can see for yourself the full list of questions being asked related to the environment and climate change. *Data updated on 11 November 2022
Have more questions but don’t see the answers you’re looking for?
Reach out & let us know your question. And follow us on social media to stay updated on new findings as we dig deeper into the data.
MOST IMPORTANTLY:
#VOTE4CLIMATE #UNDIIKLIM this GE-15!
Check out your voting stations and find out more about how to vote.
How did we do this? (Our Methodology)
- We selected a list of 91 distinct keywords in Malay (and 80 corresponding keywords in English) that are linked to environmental topics relating to climate change, extreme weather, pollution, waste, ecosystem destruction, fossil fuels, deforestation, land use change, water and other environmental issues. See our full list of keywords here.
- Parliamentary Questions: We scraped data from all the federal parliamentary question transcripts (Hansard documents) between 2018 – Oct 2022 to identify which questions were raised by MPs in parliament related to environmental topics (based on our keyword list).
- Public / Media Coverage: We searched media coverage of all federal MPs to identify public statements, commitments, reported actions, and positioning related to climate change and the environment.
- By cross-checking and combining our findings, we have developed a comprehensive database to highlight if and how Malaysian federal MPs are talking about the environment.
Disclaimers
This study scraped parliamentary transcripts (Hansard questions asked by federal MPs) for Environmental Keywords from 2018-2022. It should be noted that mentioning environmental keywords alone does not necessarily indicate a pro-environmental stance.
Our deeper analysis is a work in progress, focused on examining specifically why and how MPs are talking about the environment. We may update with new data findings and ways of filtering & sharing the data.
(Have ideas about how we can further analyse the data? Let us know!)
Greenpeace Malaysia is non-partisan and does not seek to support any political party. Our goal is to hold all politicians accountable for protecting the environment and addressing climate change, and to help citizens be more informed and empowered to vote for a sustainable future.
Gabungan Darurat Iklim Malaysia (GDIMY)
GDIMY in partnership with Gabungan Bertindak Malaysia and CSO Platform for Reform will be conducting #UndIklim – A Climate Emergency General Election (CEGE15), interviewing as many candidates for GE15 as possible.
The objective of the interview is to spotlight the candidates’ stand on Climate and Manifesto Rakyat, which will be posted to the site created by GBM called MP Profile.
The information shared on the MP Profile will provide information for voters to assess the candidates standing in their constituencies so they can vote based on information given by the candidates and data collected and shared about them. GDIMY aims to interview all candidates.
Greenpeace Malaysia is supporting the GDIMY by sharing research on media and parliamentary hansard scraping as a committee member of the GDIMY coalition.