Amira Aliya first learnt about climate change in the pages of a textbook. But the issue became real for the teenager in August 2024, when she visited a welfare home in Johor, on the southern tip of the Malay peninsula.
There to teach basic life skills to youths from abusive and underprivileged families, she was struck by how they had been affected by flooding from the state’s recent monsoon season. The home’s kitchen, laundry and common area were all outdoors, making them difficult for the youths and their caretakers to access. “The infrastructure of that home is not made for rainy seasons,” she noted.
Aliya said she put “two and two together”, realising the environmental challenges of severe flooding and the social challenges faced by youths at the home were related and systemic.
“It made me realise that protecting the environment is not just about the trees and the animals. It’s also about the people that are living in the environment itself … You know, us,” she tells Dialogue Earth.
Aliya was part of her school’s environment and nature club, where she organised workshops on composting food waste. But as floods continued to batter Johor every monsoon season, she worried that her efforts did little to address the root causes of the crisis. The scale of flooding, she explained, opened her eyes to how climate change is “not something that is natural”.
In April, Aliya – 18 years old at the time – filed a judicial review with five other young people aged 20-30, against the Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability and the Malaysian government at Kuala Lumpur’s high court.
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I think, with this lawsuit, [young people are] seeing that we are not as powerless as we think we are, [that] there’s a lot of ways that we can take action for the things that we are concerned about.
Amira Aliya, student activist
With the slogan Mana hutan kami, meaning “Where is our forest?”, the applicants are demanding the government halts deforestation and upholds a long-standing commitment to maintain at least 50 per cent of the country’s land under forest cover.
The Mana hutan kami case
The applicants are asking for a formal declaration that the government’s failure to address deforestation violates four legal and constitutional principles. These include the doctrine of legitimate expectation, or the expectation that the government honours its promises, and the public trust doctrine, which requires the government to hold public resources in trust for the public and future generations. They also include two rights guaranteed in the Malaysian federal constitution: the right to life, and the right to equality.
Additionally, the applicants are seeking a binding directive to force the government to halt deforestation.
In 1992, during a speech at a Kuala Lumpur preparatory meeting for the Rio Earth Summit, the then-prime minister Mahathir Mohamad rejected demands to halt deforestation. He said that doing so violates Malaysia’s right to use their own timber for economic development.
However, seeking to strike a strategic balance between growth and environmental protection, Mahathir committed Malaysia to permanently maintaining 50 per cent of its land as forest cover. While the pledge was never signed into law, it has since been enshrined in many policy and planning frameworks.
The applicants allege that this promise has been broken. They cite a 2026 independent expert report from environmental think-tank RimbaWatch. It uses spatial forest cover datasets to show that land already earmarked for conversion into commercial ventures would total over 4 million hectares, an area around the size of Switzerland. That would lower Malaysia’s forest cover to between 47.4 per cent and 49.6 per cent – significantly lower than the 2024 official government estimate of remaining forest cover, 54.6 per cent.
The government’s definition of “forest” currently includes industrial monoculture plantations such as oil palm and timber plantations, whereas RimbaWatch’s does not. A naturally regenerating forest contains layered vegetation and complex interactions that have developed over centuries. But a plantation is more uniform in species, age structure and ecological function, explained Abe Lim, a climate researcher, advocate and applicant in the case, in an April interview on Malaysian radio station BFM 89.9.
“If we treat plantations and natural forests as interchangeable, we actually risk creating a very, very misleading public impression,” she said.
One hurdle for the applicants in this case is locus standi – the legal right for a party to sue, challenge an administrative decision, or be heard in court. This requires applicants to be directly affected or connected to an issue before they can bring it to court.
This has been an issue in other Malaysian climate cases. In April 2026, the federal court ruled that two environmental NGOs who challenged the degazettement (the loss of legal protection) of the Bukit Cherakah forest in Selangor did not have locus standi. Because the NGOs were established after the degazettement, they could not have been affected by the decision, the court stated.
Sustainable development lawyer Kiu Jia Yaw chairs the Malaysian Bar Council’s Environment and Climate Change Committee and is not involved in the Mana hutan kami case. He viewed the Bukit Cherakah ruling as a regression: “I think it reveals that there is a lot more work to be done in terms of strengthening the recognition of, in this case, environmental rights within our legal system,” he said, speaking in a personal capacity.
On 20 October, the Mana hutan kami campaign will face its leave hearing, where the High Court will determine whether the youths have legal standing to challenge the government. Kiu noted that though the government could dismiss the case on the basis that the applicants lack locus standi, doing so would contradict the stance of recent administrations that development affects all of society and requires civil society input.
Intergenerational injustice
A critical argument the applicants make is that the impact of deforestation on young people and future generations is an intergenerational injustice, and violates their constitutional right to equality. “Today’s environmental degradation imposes deferred costs on those who had no role in causing it,” they said in their affidavit.
Intergenerational equity is an established principle in the legal world, Kiu told Dialogue Earth. He explained that the concept is embedded in international law as principles of climate change instruments, as well as in specific areas of Malaysian law, such as family law, where unborn children have certain rights.
Given these precedents, Kiu praised the framing of the applicants’ judicial review as “very strategically logical, clear and conservative”, and said it would not require any “acrobatic” development of Malaysian law on the part of the judiciary.
Intergenerational equity is embedded in pre-colonial native customary laws, or adat. “In adat, the idea of using the environment to a degree that never threatens the ability of future generations to enjoy it is a basic tenet,” Kiu added.
This is in stark contrast to formal statutory law, Kiu suggested, which began in the colonial era as a means for foreign capital interests to exploit nature. It pegged values to natural resources to enable trading in commercial markets in England.
“As we slowly take ownership of the development of our own case laws, such cases are opportunities for our courts to evolve our laws towards the protection of Malaysian interests,” he said.
Anxiety and hope
“I couldn’t see a future,” Aliya said, adding that anxiety made it difficult for her peers to imagine having children.
“Heat waves in Malaysia are already bad enough right now: imagine what will happen in 10 or 20 years when my children will go to school. Do I really want that for myself and do I feel like I want to live in that future?”
This sense of overwhelming worry is what experts are calling eco-anxiety, an emerging mental health problem particularly affecting children and young people.
Aliya worries her efforts to reduce her own environmental impact pale in comparison to the impact of “billionaires and corporations doing way more damage to the planet than any regular person ever could”, she said. “It’s a dangerous fear because it makes you feel like there’s no point to it all [individual climate efforts].”
That sense of powerlessness is central to the eco-anxiety many young people feel about problems they have inherited, such as escalating heatwaves that have root causes in the past – beyond their control.
For young people, eco-anxiety is “a very rational response to repeated evidence that environmental decline is accelerating”, said Abe Lim on the radio programme.
On its own, eco-anxiety can be overwhelming and debilitating. But research has shown that it is often deeply intertwined with feelings of hope.
“Climate anxiety and worry could be needed to remind of the severity of climate change,” the 2022 study from Global Environmental Change noted, alongside “climate hope, to be able to live with knowing this and to be able to take climate action despite the risk of failing”.
The interplay between these two future-oriented feelings is a strong driver for climate action, the study stated.
In this light, hope drives action by reminding young people of their agency.
For Aliya, that came when she saw her sister, Amira Aisya, run for the Johor state legislative assembly. After being elected, she successfully lobbied for the establishment of a Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management Committee within the assembly.
Seeing her sister’s work made Aliya realise that taking action is “not just something that other people can do”.
Now, Aliya’s advocacy has sparked that same hope in many others. Online, the case has struck a chord with eco-anxious youth. Thousands have commented on social media videos from the campaign, sharing their own experiences of deforestation all across Malaysia, from Penang to Borneo. Many more have asked for ways to donate, sign their support, or echoed their call, even tagging the prime minister to ask the government: Mana hutan kami?
“I think, with this lawsuit, [young people are] seeing that we are not as powerless as we think we are, [that] there’s a lot of ways that we can take action for the things that we are concerned about,” said Aliya.
“We need to understand that we can still do something. That this is not the end.”
This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under a Creative Commons licence.
