PETALING JAYA: Climate change is already disrupting livelihoods across Asia, with shifting monsoons, warming seas and recurring heat threatening farmers, fishing communities and outdoor workers, Sultan of Perak Sultan Nazrin Muizzuddin Shah said.
“These are not abstractions. They are effects being felt today, this week.
“They are real and they are immediate,” he said in his royal keynote address at the Global Tipping Points Conference 2026 at Sunway University yesterday.
He added that Asia should not be seen merely as a region vulnerable to climate change, but also as one with the capacity to drive solutions.
He also said the region is home to coral reefs, tropical rainforests, monsoon systems and river networks that sustain hundreds of millions of individuals, while its fast-growing economies and cities are helping shape the 21st century.
“We are not a region to be rescued. We are, in significant part, a region where the rescue is already underway, however unevenly, however incompletely.”
Sultan Nazrin said while the language of tipping points could evoke alarm, the conference was founded on the premise that environmental systems could shift towards recovery as well as harm.
“What distinguishes this gathering is its insistence that tipping points run in both directions, that just as systems could tip toward harm, they could tip toward repair, and that this second kind of change could be understood and, through understanding, be accelerated.
“That is a more demanding proposition than despair. Despair asks nothing of us.”
He added that effective environmental stewardship required honesty, humility and leadership, as well as efforts to bridge divides between science, finance, law, values, faith, health and communities.
He also said Asia had long-standing traditions of managing shared natural resources and was not entering the climate conversation without its own experience and knowledge.
“Long before the language of planetary boundaries existed, communities across the region managed shared forests, fisheries and water systems through customary institutions built on the understanding that no single generation owns what it inherits.
“We bring inheritance as well as exposure. Both belong to this room.”
Citing Royal Belum in Perak, Sultan Nazrin said the forest, often described as more than 130 million years old, demonstrated how sustained conservation efforts could deliver measurable results across generations.
He added that active poachers’ snares in the forest had fallen by more than 90%, with none recorded since 2022.
He also said camera traps had also captured images of a tigress with four cubs and, more recently, another with two cubs.
“This is what stewardship looks like once the speeches end: generational, incremental and measured not in declarations, but in cubs born and snares removed.”
Sultan Nazrin said the declaration to be shaped at the end of the conference should go beyond documenting discussions in Kuala Lumpur and reflect the decisions made and action carried forward.
The Global Tipping Points Conference 2026, held from Oct 12 to 15, is being hosted in Asia for the first time.
It brings together scientists, policymakers, health leaders, financiers, business leaders and youth advocates to discuss climate risks, positive tipping points and collective action.