Consider Improving Ecology To Help The Economy, Suggests German Professor

By Ali Imran Mohd Noordin KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 16 (Bernama) -- A professor at the University of Stuttgart in Germany has proposed that Malaysia consider improving its ecology to help the economy. Prof Dr Silke Wieprecht (rpt) Wieprecht said: “To boost the economy, you have to take good care of the ecology. With good ecology, less money is needed to be spent on cleaning up pollution and less medical treatment is required for the citizens.” She stressed that issues relating to the ecosystem, such as rivers, had always been about land use planning, be it in developing countries like Malaysia and Thailand or developed countries like Germany. The influence of activities upstream, such as plantations, deforestation, use of pesticides in farms or terracing the hill slopes, causes sediment intrusion into the river, said Wieprecht, who is the Chair of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management of the Institute for Modelling Hydraulic and Environmental Systems at the university. “We have to find or define in an area what land use should be allowed and find alternatives to different kinds of cropping design system,” she told Bernama Tuesday at the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) World Congress held at the Putra World Trade Centre (PWTC), here. Realising that efforts to preserve the ecology will be a cost factor for labour, apart from policy makers’ intervention, Wieprecht said she believed that this was an important step in the efforts to ensure sustainable and balanced economic growth. “It is difficult because for many years we didn’t put interest in ecology. We thought that the whole system is working well, we feel we should have enough agricultural projects, enough products, enough water but nobody cared about the ecology. “We take drinking water from underground but now we realise that the underground water level has gone down globally. Maybe not so much in Malaysia because you have a lot of rainfall but in many other areas we need drinking water from surface water but it is dirty,” explained Wieprecht, who conducted research in Malaysia in 2016. The five-day congress will end on Aug 18. Founded in 1935, the IAHR is a global independent organisation of engineers and water specialists working in the field of hydro-environmental sciences and their practical applications. -- BERNAMA