PM: Malaysia keen to list Sabah's Maliau Basin as a world heritage site

Muguntan Vanar The Star 29 Jan 11;

MALIAU BASIN (SABAH): Malaysia is very keen to list Sabah's Lost World, the Maliau Basin as a world heritage site.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, in endorsing the state government's proposal, said that a World Heritage listing by UNESCO would bring immediate world attention and interest in the 58,400-hectare untouched tropical rainforest, just slightly smaller than Singapore.

He said the heritage listing of Mount Kinabalu National Park, George Town, Gunung Mulu National Park and Malacca had seen a jump in worldwide interest in such areas of natural or historical importance.

However, he said there was a lot of work to be done to obtain such a World Heritage status as the government and various had to meet with various guidelines to be able to meet the requirements of Unesco in listing it as a world heritage site.

“I would support the Chief Minister in getting this place listed as a world heritage site," he told reporters after becoming the first Prime Minister to step foot in the Maliau Basin where he opened the Maliau Basin Studies Centre and also launched the study of the Stability of Altered Forest Eco-Systems (SAFE) conducted by Royal Socieity of UK and sponsored by Sime Darby Foundation.

Najib said that Maliau Basin was becoming an integral part of an ecological experiment in an area that contained rare flora and fauna, including six types of pitcher plants and more then 80 species of orchids and endangered wildlife, from rhinocerous to orang utans.

''Only about 25% of Maliau Basin has been explored. From four major expeditions between 1986 to 2005, we learned it has the greatest number of waterfalls any where in Malaysia.

“About 40 of them, in all, including the famous seven-tiered Maliau Falls and Sabah's only ox-bow lake called Lake Linumunsut."

However, he said conservation required funding and hoped the private sector, local and international, could play a significant role in sustaining and extending Malaysia's conservation efforts.

''This will be crucial in making Maliau Basin Studies Centre a premier facility for tropical rainforest, research and scientific discovery in the region," he added.