Managing Sabah’s rich biodiversity through SaBC

Sabah is strengthening the management, conservation, protection and regulations of its rich biological resources through the establishment of the Sabah Biodiversity Enactment (SBE) 2000.

The SBE, gazetted in 2000 and enforced in May 2002, shall be the guiding framework with Sabah Biodiversity Council (SBC) and Sabah Biodiversity Centre (SaBC) as government strategies in enhancing the governance of the biodiversity in the State.

The Enactment, and later with the formal setting up of SaBC, was due to the increasing concern and awareness for the need to manage Sabah’s biological resources for the state’s natural environment protection and socio-economic development.

According to SaBC director, Dr Abdul Fatah Amir, SaBC’s core activities include development of holistic and prudent biodiversity management strategy and sustainable optimum utilization in Sabah.

“SaBC will also promote education and knowledge of the biodiversity in Sabah as well as traditional knowledge and benefit-sharing of the biological resources.

“We will also be promoting the identification of new natural and biotechnological products derived from biodiversity and biological resources of the state,” he told Bernama.

He said SaBC had developed a platform to integrate information on State biodiversity. The state-funded project will cost RM1.9 million.

“This database system is to provide an integrating platform to store, integrate, presort, retrieve, share, access, analyze, infer, discover and report many heterogeneous across diverse domain aspects and voluminous biodiversity collection data from different key agencies,” he said.

Dr Abdul Fatah said, the state government through SaBC and UMS, has started a two-year (2013-2014) project to explore the state’s biodiversity for pharmaceutical and nutraceutical potential.

SaBC is also collaborating with the Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia (MyIPO) to establish the national Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (MyTKDL).

“MyTKDL is to protect the indigenous people’s traditional knowledge (TK) associated with biological resources in Malaysia.

“MyTKDL will be used as a resource by MyIPO patent examiners as a referral point in carrying out advanced prior art search and examination on non-patentable literature that deals with TK.

“SaBC has already signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with MyIPO last year, which will provide a platform for both parties to develop a mechanism in compiling and sharing relevant information to be incorporated into the MyTKDL,” he said adding that a State committee chaired by SaBC has been formed.

Source: New Sabah Times