IN June 2026, in a wood-panelled room in London, I sat in a gathering hosted by the British government, one graced by King Charles, dedicated to one of the most consequential environmental issues of our time.
Around me were scientists, policymakers, and advocates from across the world. Among them was Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah – the mother of Ella, a nine-year-old girl who died in 2013 after years of severe asthma attacks. In 2020, a landmark inquest ruled that air pollution had contributed to Ella’s death, making her the first person in the United Kingdom, and possibly the world, to have air pollution officially recorded as a cause of death.
I left that room thinking about Malaysia. Not because our situation mirrors London’s, but because the distance between Ella’s story and our own is far smaller than we imagine.
The pollution that killed her was the kind we have normalised – pollution that sits over us during haze season, that comes from the slow burn of peatlands, from exhaust fumes, from refrigerants leaking from the air conditioners we depend on more with every passing year.
Super pollutants, known formally as short-lived climate pollutants, are a group of substances that do not linger in the atmosphere the way carbon dioxide (CO2) does. CO2 can persist for centuries; super pollutants typically cycle out within years or decades. But what they lack in longevity, they more than compensate for in potency.
> Methane has more than 80 times the warming power of CO2 in the first 20 years after its release.
> Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the refrigerants in our air conditioners and refrigerators, can be thousands of times more warming per tonne than CO2 when they are released.
> Black carbon, the fine soot produced by incomplete combustion, is second only to CO2 in its total climate impact.
Together, super pollutants are responsible for up to 45% of the warming our planet is currently experiencing.
They come from sources most of us encounter every day; diesel engines, open fires, agricultural burning, peatlands, and landfills.
When Malaysia’s peatlands burn, the fires release enormous quantities of black carbon. During the catastrophic haze of 2015, more than 60% of the population of the Greater Klang Valley was exposed to hazardous air quality conditions. That was not a natural disaster. It was a super pollutant event on a massive scale.
Then there is the paradox in our homes: as Malaysia gets hotter, we install more air conditioners, and the resulting surge in electricity demand, manufacturing, and refrigerant leaks releases more HFCs and CO2, warming the atmosphere further. The hotter it gets, the more we cool. The more we cool, the hotter it gets. This cycle is already in motion.
Yet there is a genuine reason for hope. Super pollutants are short-lived so cutting them produces results on a human time-scale. Reduce methane today, and the atmosphere responds within years, not generations.
Adequately addressing all super pollutants could prevent more than half a degree of additional warming by 2050. In a world racing against a 1.5°C threshold, that is not a marginal gain.
On HFCs, Malaysia has made meaningful commitments. We ratified the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol in 2020 and developed a Kigali Implementation Plan committing our nation to reducing HFC consumption by up to 80% by 2045, with the first stage projected to cut emissions by 2.7 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually from 2029.
To realise this requires enforcement, investment in alternative technologies, and public awareness that the refrigerant in your air conditioner is not a neutral substance.
On methane from palm oil, there is cautious optimism. By December 2024, 170 mills – 38% of all operating mills – had implemented biogas capture facilities, surpassing the National Agricommodity Policy target and preventing 4.9 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in emissions. They are proof that one of our most strategically important industries can be part of the solution.
On haze and black carbon, the path is harder and requires regional cooperation that has historically proven difficult. Peat burning persists because economic incentives remain powerful, particularly for industrial plantation operators whose ownership and financing often cross national borders. Changing that requires policy, enforcement, and the political will to hold polluters accountable, including those whose capital originates closer to home.
Then there is what happens in our kitchens and supermarkets. Malaysia generates 16,667 tonnes of food waste every day, of which nearly a quarter is food that is still edible. When that food rots in landfills, it releases methane.
Organisations like the Lost Food Project are already showing what is possible, rescuing surplus food from manufacturers and retailers and redistributing approximately 30,000 meals weekly to vulnerable communities across the Klang Valley.
Feed the hungry, not the landfill: it is a slogan, but it is also a climate strategy.
What connects all of these is the need for a systems approach. Super pollutants do not respect the boundaries between ministries or sectors. They move through our air, our water, our food systems, and our bodies.
Malaysia has shown it can lead. Nine months after the prime minister launched Malaysia’s National Planetary Health Action Plan, progress remains mixed. Education and health have started to move forward, but governance, without which meaningful progress is unlikely, has stalled, largely because of unresolved turf issues between agencies.
This is telling, since we already understand at a policy level that these areas are connected. If we are serious about tackling this planetary crisis, it is time to stop deliberating, stop competing and start collaborating.
Prof Tan Sri Dr Jemilah Mahmood, a physician and experienced crisis leader, is the executive director of the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health at Sunway University. She is the founder of Mercy Malaysia and has served in leadership roles internationally with the United Nations and Red Cross for the last decade. She writes on Planetary Health Matters once a month in Ecowatch. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.
