Wan Junaidi urges all quarters to follow DID's flood advice

He said this was because, apart from climate change factors, floods particularly in major cities worsened because of the poor irrigation and drainage systems planning.

"Listen to DID's advice because they have studied, meteorologically, on how much rain falls and so on. Therefore, we can build enough drains (to alleviate floods)," he told reporters after launching the NRE Interactive Gallery at Taman Eko Rimba here Thursday.

The gallery displays more than 300 interactive exhibits in the form of augmented reality (AR), quick response (QR) code and hologram as well as 100 species of plants, animals and minerals.

In his opening remarks, Wan Junaidi said the effort to set up the gallery was a starting point towards realising the physical development of a natural history centre in Malaysia.

"The centre will be at par with world-renowned natural history centres such as the Smithsonian Institution in the United States and the Natural History Museum in the United Kingdom which are the local reference centre and a centre of excellence for the management of flora, fauna and nature through various programmes such as scientific research and management of scientific collections," he said.

At the event, Wan Junaidi also launched the Malaysia Biodiversity Information System (MyBIS) database and a book entitled 'Birds in Malaysia - MyBIS'.

He said MyBIS was developed to meet one of the country's obligations under the Convention on Biological Diversity as a medium of information and knowledge sharing.

"To date, MyBIS contains more than 150,000 data involving data sharing collaboration between the ministry and more than 20 organisations, including universities and non-governmental organisations," he said.