COMMENT | The Star recently published a piece asking whether Kuala Lumpur sits on one of the world's most intense urban heat islands. The answer, confirmed by peer-reviewed science and satellite data, was yes - and increasingly so.

The data is astounding on its own. Yet that an article like that was even published is a symptom of a deeper problem: in a city governed seriously, skyrocketing urban heat would not be a "true or false" question requiring a newspaper to fact-check foreign studies.

Government-mandated longitudinal data on Kuala Lumpur’s temperature would be part of domestic academic studies and deeply embedded into the institutions responsible for urban planning and policymaking.

It is worth asking if our leading universities are engaged in any such cutting-edge research to address these issues. The absence of these fundamentals should scare us all - except those who seem to be furthering it with a mixture of ignorance, incompetence, negligence, and denial.

Kuala Lumpur is a city that has been consuming voraciously and building relentlessly, while the well-established systems that are critical to making a tropical city liveable and resilient have been...