00:00This week on Wu Says, we turn our focus to sustainability and what it really means for ASEAN's future beyond 2030.
00:08How is Malaysia faring in its progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals compared to its regional peers?
00:14Here's a segment from the conversation with Professor Emeritus Datuk Dr Wu Wingtai.
00:21SDGs is more than climate action. It's also biodiversity protection.
00:26You know, you could have no climate change but still wiped out species on a large scale because of pollution, for example.
00:38And just mindless deforestation or the use of unsustainable agricultural tactics.
00:46And it's just like you could be very rich but that could be highly unequal society.
00:53So you have some very rich people but you have a bunch of very poor who have very short, miserable lives.
01:02So SDGs is much more broader than just climate action.
01:06So there's good news of the climate action but not so good news on all the other indicators in the world.
01:12We are not on track, the world as a whole, to achieve any of the SDGs.
01:19And in the case of Malaysia, my organisation publishes an annual score which gives you the level of SDG achievement in each country of the world.
01:36Oh, wow.
01:36So we call that the SDG index.
01:39That has become the standard for the world because the SDG index is cited in 40% of the reports submitted under the nationally determined contributions of each country.
01:57Each country submits a report to the UN and 40% of them cite this.
02:01Let me tell you this, the Malaysia score on the overall ranking on SDGs has been going up.
02:10Like in 2024, we were roughly 64 in over 100 and now we are around 69 over 100.
02:19So that's definitely progress.
02:22That is like being happy by having low expectations.
02:27Because we clearly can go a lot faster.
02:30I'll tell you why.
02:31Because if you look at our rank, in 2020, we ranked number 60 out of 167 countries.
02:41But we have been falling every year since.
02:45By 2023 at the end of COVID, we had fallen to 78 in the world out of the 167 countries.
02:53And the latest report that came out in June 2025, we have fallen to 84.
03:01So we have went from 60, rank 60 in 2020 to 84 in 2025.
03:10Catch the full conversation on Awani International and across our social media platforms.
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