Project Assistant Professor, GSID, Nagoya University
Alla OLIFIRENKO
On 2 October 2025, the International Seminar on Asia-Pacific Perspectives on Climate Change and the Energy Transition: Reflections from Malaysia, Australia, and Japan took place at the Dayak Cultural Foundation in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia.
The seminar was jointly organised by our H2Governance project, the Kajima Foundation Research Grants for Specific Theme 'Empirical Study on the Social Acceptance of Low-Carbon Hydrogen Technology (Japan), and three Malaysian universities: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), University of Malaya, and Curtin University Malaysia.
The event brought together scholars and practitioners from Malaysia, Australia, and Japan specialising in law, economics, political science, management studies, and engineering to discuss multidisciplinary issues concerning climate change and the energy transition.
The programme included four thematic sessions, which covered topics of climate governance, technological innovation, investment, and community interests. I believe that such thematic diversity provided an opportunity for both the participants and audience to look at the problem from an angle drastically different from the one they are used to.
The opening keynote was kindly offered by His Excellency Noriyuki Shikata, Japanese Ambassador to Malaysia, who talked about the past, present and future of cooperation between Japan and Malaysia within the framework of Asia Zero Emission Community (AZEC) for decarbonisation, energy security and economic growth. The concluding keynote was given by Vice-Chancellor of UNIMAS, Prof. Ahmad Hata Rasit.
The full program of the seminar is available through the link.
Another column, with an overview of each session, was kindly written by UNIMAS.
To avoid repeating what has already been said by our co-organisers at UNIMAS, this time I would like to share my personal thoughts invoked by the speakers' presentations.
First of all, whether it was a reflection of the speakers' leanings (after all, all of them are working on climate change and energy transition in one way or another) or of a national trend – I had an impression that the development of renewable and low-carbon energy was a bigger topic in Malaysia than I had naively expected given its status as a fossil-fuel-rich country.
The presentation of Lavanya Rama Iyer quickly reminded me of one truth about the global climate crisis: its harrowing injustice. Even though Malaysia’s emissions are relatively low, and it has extensive forest cover (around 40% nationwide and about 60% in Sarawak), the country is one of those facing disproportionate risks from climate change, including the increase in devastating floods and other disasters. In this light, it is no wonder Malaysia is taking initiative in addressing climate change rather than waiting for other countries to lead. Even more so than for Japan – which sees green transition as a means to ensure national and economic security, according to Prof. Fang-Ting Cheng – for Malaysia decarbonisation may be a question of survival.
An interesting opportunity for Malaysia lies in joining forces with other developing countries to foster internal consumption of clean energy, including hydrogen. As Prof. Tamura mentioned, for low-carbon energy, international cooperation has been largely asymmetrical: developed countries would provide (patented) technology and investment, and developing ones would cheaply produce energy for export. But as cooperation is becoming more multilateral, these dynamics may change. Developing countries themselves can become large consumers of clean energy and investors in it, especially when joining efforts with countries that share similar realities and challenges.
Prof. Shanti Faridah binti Salleh seems confident that Malaysia, and especially Sarawak, has the capability to become the “green battery” of ASEAN. The area has a rich potential in hydropower, solar power and biomass, and is targeting to raise the share of renewables in its energy mix up to 70% by 2035. It is also actively looking into hydrogen energy, although its adoption and scaling up is notoriously conditional on securing stable demand.
This returns us to the opportunities of cooperation with developed countries, specifically Japan. As mentioned in Mr. Kohei Toyoda’s presentation, the primary hurdle for securing demand is the current high cost of hydrogen. The Japanese government and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) are implementing measures like price gap support and utilizing special financing operations to reduce the cost of capital and build a global hydrogen value chain, including infrastructure linking Malaysia to Japan.
Prof. Hiroshi Machida, who talked about technology and international collaboration concerning Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS), mentioned that Malaysia is one of the primary destinations for the transportation and storage of captured CO2 from Japan, which has limited domestic storage capacity.
This ignited a discussion in the audience. The thing is, the CCUS process is expensive, and the capture part accounts for roughly 60% of the total cost. Reduction of the overall cost is possible either through developing new cheaper capture technologies, or through cutting the transporting costs by reducing the regulatory standard for CO2 purity in transportation. Ms. Lavanya Rama Iyer noted that the latter may raise safety concerns in case of accidents en route. Who will bear the responsibility for the environmental harm? This remains an open question. What should be mentioned, though, is that Prof. Machida’s team is working on a technology to drastically reduce the costs of the capture stage by using the unutilized cryogenic energy (cold heat) from LNG vaporization.
The themes of responsible energy management and consumption, as well as sustainability and social justice, came up a lot both in presentations and audience questions. One of the hot topics worldwide right now is the carbon footprint of artificial intelligence. It is dependent on energy-hungry datacentres, and, to cite MIT Technology Review's article, one query to a popular text-based model uses resources “enough to carry a person about 400 feet (121 metres – author) on an e-bike or run the microwave for eight seconds”. This issue was mentioned by Prof. Shanti, and I wholeheartedly agree with her point that, even though AI technology is here to stay, we need to understand when its use is justified and when it is not. Ideally, it requires cost-benefit analysis, which can only be done with the resources of governments, business or academia; but what we can already start doing as consumers is to create a culture of refraining from using AI where unnecessary.
Professors Satoshi Yamazaki and Isamu Okada spoke about social acceptance (or social license to operate) for the successful, long-term deployment of low-carbon hydrogen, both among the general population of the country – as voters and consumers – and the communities residing near the project sites. This is an important condition not only for ensuring long-term viability and securing investment for projects, but for building an inclusive and sustainable energy policy – a goal of Malaysia, as mentioned by Tan Sri Abdul Wahid Omar, who talked about the country’s decarbonisation strategy.
As Prof. Ahmad Hata Rasit mentioned in his concluding keynote, Islam (the state religion in Malaysia) teaches that humans have the responsibility as environmental stewards. It may have insentivised Malaysians in forming the world's first Shariah-compliant carbon exchange, Bursa Carbon Exchange (to which Tan Sri Wahid Omar directly contributed as the Chairman of Bursa Malaysia, one of the largest stock exchange bourses in ASEAN), as a part of the “twin approach” to carbon pricing, where this voluntary carbon market is expected to work in combination with the upcoming carbon tax. Though Sarawak has a majority of Christians, as well as Buddhists, Hinduists and others, I am sure that similar environmentalist values can be found in most religions and cultures worldwide. I hope that Malaysia, Japan, my homeland Ukraine and other countries find more ways to include these universal virtues in their environmental policies and day-to-day culture.
Although the seminar was long – from morning until evening – it was wonderful to see that the audience remained engaged until the very end. I am grateful to everyone who helped make this event possible and look forward to more discussions like this in the future.
