Causes/threats

• Logging: In the 1980s, Malaysia became the world's largest exporter of highly valued tropical wood.
• Road building: Roads constructed provide access to logging and mining areas, new settlements and energy projects
• Mineral extraction: tin mining is established and drilling for oil and gas has recently started
• Commercial farming: Malaysia is the largest exporter of palm oil in the world. Ten-year tax incentives encourage more deforestation for more plantations
• Subsistence farming: short-term clearance is small scale and sustainable BUT 'slash and burn' fires can grow out of control, destroying larger areas of the forest
• Population pressure: poor people from urban areas move into the countryside from rapidly growing cities= transmigration has set up settlements and palm oil plantations