Ecowatch: We must act before the climate switch flips – permanently

Sled dogs resting near a thin sea ice edge in Eastern Greenland. Between 2002 and 2025, the Greenland ice sheet shed 264 gigatonnes of ice per year, causing global sea level to rise by 0.8mm. This is something that can affect Malaysia directly, as rising seas threaten our low-lying coasts and Klang Valley infrastructure. — AFP

MOST of us understand climate change as something gradual. A little hotter each year, a little more rain in the wrong season. But climate scientists have long warned of a different kind of danger: tipping points, thresholds in the Earth’s systems that, once crossed, do not reverse on human time-scales.

Coral reefs can flip from living colour to algae-smothered rubble. The Amazon rainforest can dry out and stop generating its own rain, turning from a carbon sink into a carbon source. The great ocean currents that regulate our weather can slow to the point of collapse. These are not slow slides. They are switches, and once flipped, they tend to stay flipped.

This is why a new United Nations Environment Programme report, released earlier this month and titled Limiting Overshoot, deserves every Malaysian’s attention, not just policymakers’.

It confirms what scientists have long feared and warned us about: the world is now on track to cross the 1.5°C warming limit set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement, likely within the next few years. Under current pledges, the report’s best-case scenario still sees temperatures peak around 1.8°C before, hopefully, coming back down. But under current policies, and without significantly stronger action, the median projection is closer to 2.6°C by the end of the century.

The report names four systems now at heightened risk of tipping if warming stays high for too long: the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Atlantic Ocean’s overturning circulation, and the Amazon rainforest.

Here is the part that matters most for us: The report does not argue that the fight is lost; quite the opposite, in fact. It is explicit that an “overshoot, peak, and decline” pathway, going above 1.5°C temporarily, then bringing temperatures back down as fast as possible, is still achievable if the world acts with urgency now. The size and length of the overshoot is still within our control.

Every fraction of a degree we shave off the peak, and every year we shorten the time spent above it, meaningfully reduces the risk of triggering an irreversible tipping point. In other words: It is not too late, but it does require all of us, governments, businesses and citizens, to move together and move now.

For Malaysia, this cannot be viewed as happening somewhere else. We sit on the frontline of several of these risks. Rising seas threaten our low-lying coasts and Klang Valley infrastructure. A weakened Amazon and shifting ocean currents will scramble monsoon patterns that our farmers, fishermen, and food security depend on. Heat stress is already a public health emergency in our cities.

This is why I am convinced that the climate emergency deserves to be treated as a national security issue, on par with any other threat to our people, our food and water supplies, and our economic stability. It should sit firmly on the agenda of the National Security Council, not be left to environment ministries alone to manage.

This is also, encouragingly, a moment of real opportunity. With Budget 2027 due to be tabled next month, there is a chance to put real money behind climate resilience and health protection, not as an afterthought, but as a national priority.

Malaysia already has the foundations for this in the proposed National Planetary Health Action Plan (NPHAP), which links climate action directly to public health, food security, and disaster preparedness. Funding and operationalising the NPHAP would replace Malaysia’s ministry-by-ministry firefighting after each flood or heatwave with a single, coordinated response to climate risk.

None of this works, however, if ordinary Malaysians do not understand what is at stake. “Tipping points” and “overshoot pathways” sound like technical jargon reserved for scientists and diplomats, but they describe very real risks to the air our children breathe, the quality and availability of the food on our tables, and the safety of our homes.

Building genuine public understanding of climate science in our schools, our media, and our communities is not a nice-to-have. It is what will determine whether Malaysians support the difficult decisions and investments needed in the years ahead, or resist them out of confusion or fear.

This is why it matters that the Global Tipping Points Conference will be held in Malaysia in October 2026, the first time this gathering of the world’s leading climate scientists has come to Asia.

It is a rare chance for Malaysia’s policymakers, businesses, and the public to hear directly from the researchers tracking these thresholds, and to position Malaysia and our region not just as a place vulnerable to tipping points, but as a source of the positive tipping points, in clean energy, nature restoration, and public health, that the world urgently needs.

The science is clear that we are already on the cusp of dangerous thresholds. It is equally clear that the outcome is still not written. What happens next depends on whether we treat this as someone else’s problem, or as the shared, urgent work of an entire nation, starting now.

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.