Genting Highlands, March 25: The mountain has been here for 130 million years. Long before the casinos and the cable cars, before the neon and the theme park rides and the queues that snake through air-conditioned lobbies on a hot Malaysian weekend, the forests of Genting Highlands stood in silence, holding their biodiversity like a secret. Chan Teck Ling understood that secret better than almost anyone alive. And he spent the last twelve and a half years making sure the world did not ignore it.
The Mountain No One Was Watching
Chan Teck Ling was not, by any conventional measure, a conservationist. He was a schoolteacher, a YMCA programme director, a tennis coach, and a corporate trainer, a man whose career had been spent in service of people rather than ecosystems. When he and his wife arrived at Genting Highlands more than a decade ago, the plan was modest: lead casual forest walks for resort visitors during what both imagined would be a gentle, earned retirement.
The forest had other plans.
Beneath the canopy of one of Southeast Asia’s richest montane ecosystems, something shifted in Chan Teck Ling. He was not walking through scenery. He was walking through one of the most ecologically significant and least understood mountain rainforest systems in the region, 3,500 feet above sea level, in a landscape that had never been fully catalogued, never been institutionally protected, and never been positioned as anything other than a backdrop to the resort that dominated the summit above it.
That realisation did not produce a petition or a press release. It produced a department. Today, Chan Teck Ling serves as Resident Naturalist, Environmental Services Manager, and Green Bonding Consultant at Resorts World Awana, where he leads Genting Nature Adventures, a conservation and education operation he built from scratch, structured around a concept he calls Bio Tourism: ecological travel rooted in biodiversity education, conservation science, and the conviction that millions of resort visitors can be transformed into genuine environmental stewards.
The numbers behind that ambition are not small. According to the Entrepreneur’s Diaries April 2026 print feature on Chan Teck Ling, Genting Highlands recorded 28.7 million visitors in 2019, with projections exceeding 53 million annually beyond 2030. Meanwhile, as reported by Malay Mail in January 2026, Resorts World Genting alone attracted over 20 million visitors in 2025. The scale of human traffic passing through or near this mountain ecosystem every year is, depending on your perspective, either the greatest threat to its survival or the greatest opportunity for its protection. Chan Teck Ling chose to see it as opportunity.
Building the Department That Did Not Exist
Genting Nature Adventures, under Chan Teck Ling’s leadership, has done things that bear repeating slowly. The department has gazetted four Bio Parks as long-term wildlife sanctuaries. It has built fifteen kilometres of paved exploration trails through montane forest. It has established the 4,000-square-foot BERSVC centre, the Biodiversity, Education, Research, Sustainability, and Visitor Centre, a facility that functions simultaneously as a public education hub and a collaborative base for field scientists. It has engaged over 115,000 guests in active conservation activities. It has assembled a team of young graduate scientists tasked with protecting 92 percent of Genting’s privately owned montane forests.
That last figure deserves context. Genting Malaysia manages more than 10,000 acres of montane rainforest, according to the company’s own documentation, including the most accessible cloud forest habitat in Peninsular Malaysia. These forests support over 460 species of higher plants, including rare orchids, montane pitcher plants, wild conifers, and native highland tea. They provide sanctuary to siamangs, dusky leaf monkeys, over 254 bird species, and a biodiversity inventory that scientists are still actively building. The GNA team, including resident scientists Lim Wing Yun and Nur Najmin, is doing that building in real time.
The scientific credibility of the operation was underscored in 2025 when it was confirmed that Chan Teck Ling himself had spotted an entirely new plant species along the Clearwater Way trail. That species, subsequently identified through collaboration with Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM) research officer Siti Munirah Mat Yunoh, was named Thismia limkokthayi. It is a mycoheterotrophic plant from the genus Thismia, tiny and otherworldly, which had gone undescribed by science until a retired schoolteacher with sharp eyes and a decade of forest walking noticed something unusual beside a quiet path. The discovery was presented at GNA’s Conference of Experts and Collaborators 2025, held in May of last year, according to coverage by The Rakyat Post.
Turns out, the retirement walk had become something considerably more serious.
The Architecture of Stewardship
What separates Chan Teck Ling’s approach from conventional eco-tourism is the structural seriousness with which he designed the GNA framework. This was not a programme assembled around the assumption that good intentions were sufficient. It was built around four environmental stewardship pillars: conservation, preservation, sustainability, and education, and it was engineered to be financially self-sustaining through the very commercial tourism economy it operates within.
That design logic matters. Chan Teck Ling’s department does not survive on grants or philanthropic generosity. It survives because it has made itself useful to the business interests that surround it, while simultaneously advancing conservation goals that those business interests would not have prioritised on their own. It is, in the clearest sense, a model for how ecological protection can be embedded into commercial enterprise rather than positioned in opposition to it.
A critical turning point in that journey came when Tan Sri Lim Kok Thay, Chairman and CEO of Genting Malaysia, personally championed the vision. According to the Entrepreneur’s Diaries feature, this executive endorsement drove corporate investment in ecological infrastructure, heritage initiatives, and responsible development at a scale that would not have been possible through departmental advocacy alone. With that organisational backing secured, Genting Nature Adventures evolved from a passion project operating at the margins of a resort into a strategic pillar of the company’s ESG and public identity.
The results have been recognised externally. GNA won the HAPA Award for Best Eco Green Activities in Malaysia for 2023 and 2024. In 2025, the department received the TDM Travel Trade Excellence Award for ESG Initiative of the Year. Conferences convened under GNA’s banner have drawn over 40 experts per session from national institutions and conservation bodies. Formal collaborations with the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia and PERHILITAN, Malaysia’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks, have anchored the department’s scientific credibility in the country’s institutional conservation infrastructure.
Still, the awards do not fully capture what is happening on the ground.
Bio Tourism in the Age of Intelligence
Chan Teck Ling has a name for the era he believes is arriving: the Bio Age. It is not a marketing phrase. It is a framework for understanding how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and bioinformatics are beginning to converge with ecological science in ways that have profound implications for how biodiversity is documented, understood, and protected.
GNA’s 2026 roadmap reflects this orientation directly. The department is moving into Bio Informatics, Bio Tech, Bio Economics, and Bio Lifestyle, and it is integrating SmartForest visual recognition technology into the visitor experience. The practical ambition is striking: that millions of visitors will learn more about biodiversity during a single walk through a Genting forest trail than most people encounter in a lifetime of urban existence.
That ambition aligns with two significant global frameworks. Chan Teck Ling’s ten-year development plan is built in deliberate alignment with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the international agreement adopted in 2022 that sets binding targets for protecting 30 percent of the planet’s land and water by 2030. It also tracks against Malaysia’s National Policy for Biological Diversity 2022 to 2030. Genting Nature Adventures, in Chan Teck Ling’s strategic vision, is not a local attraction or a regional curiosity. It is a model, a replicable demonstration that commercial tourism infrastructure and serious ecological science can be made inseparable, and that the result can be measured.
For what it’s worth, the timing of this ambition sits against a backdrop of genuine ecological pressure. The Entrepreneur’s Diaries feature notes that unprecedented infrastructure development stretching from 2013 through at least 2035, combined with the planned urbanisation of nearby Bentong into a metropolitan city, threatens the ecological integrity of the montane forests Chan Teck Ling has spent over a decade studying and cataloguing. The mountain is not in danger of being forgotten because no one cares. It is in danger because development is enormous and fast and indifferent to what it disrupts. Chan Teck Ling’s response has been to make disruption economically irrational.
A Career Built Entirely in Service
To understand Chan Teck Ling, you have to understand the full shape of the career that preceded the forest.
He taught in schools. He ran programmes through the YMCA. He coached corporate teams on leadership and resilience. And he coached Malaysia’s first wheelchair tennis Paralympian to the 2004 Athens Games, a fact that appears in his profile with the economy of a man who considers it one achievement among many rather than the centrepiece of a biography.
That coaching achievement, navigating an athlete through the institutional and physical demands of Paralympic preparation in a country with limited infrastructure for disability sport, required the same combination of skills that defines his conservation work: patience, systems thinking, the ability to build credibility within institutions that were not designed for what he was trying to do, and a complete indifference to the question of whether the work would be recognised.
His leadership principle, according to the Entrepreneur’s Diaries feature, is lead by example and foresight. It is not a management slogan borrowed from a business school seminar. It is, as the publication puts it, a biography.
The junior scientists currently working under him at Genting Nature Adventures, Lim Wing Yun, Nur Najmin, and a rotating cohort of interns from Malaysia’s universities, are the living evidence of that principle. They are doing real field science. They are mapping ecosystems, contributing to national biodiversity databases, engaging guests, and discovering new species. The work they are doing will outlast Chan Teck Ling’s tenure. That is, by design, the point.
The Junior Rangers programme extends this investment further still. Through that initiative, children and students are introduced to biodiversity through nature journals, smartphone photography, and mobile applications, trained not as passive recipients of information but as active field observers with their own documentation practice. At GNA’s Conference of Experts and Collaborators 2025, three Junior Rangers, children named Ziann Kok, Won Dao Her, and Ho Hayley, delivered presentations that, according to coverage by The Rakyat Post, had seasoned conservation professionals taking notes.
The Mountain After Chan Teck Ling
There is a particular kind of leadership that does not require the leader to be present in order to function. Chan Teck Ling has been building that kind around the mountain at Genting for over a decade.
The physical infrastructure is there: fifteen kilometres of paved trails, four gazetted Bio Parks, the BERSVC research and education centre, the Mile-Long Gallery of interpretive exhibits stretching across the Awana Trail. The institutional infrastructure is there: collaborations with FRIM and PERHILITAN, alignment with national and international biodiversity frameworks, award recognition from Malaysia’s tourism and hospitality industry. The human infrastructure is there: young scientists doing field work, executives pioneering sustainable tourism models, interns learning conservation practice in a real-world setting.
And there are 115,000 guests who have passed through GNA’s programmes and left knowing things about the forest above Kuala Lumpur that they did not know when they arrived. Some fraction of them became advocates. Some smaller fraction became donors or volunteers or researchers. A few of them were children who are now in secondary school and will spend their careers thinking about biodiversity because Chan Teck Ling led them through a cloud forest when they were nine years old and showed them something worth protecting.
The Bio Age he describes is coming regardless of whether any individual chooses to prepare for it. What Genting Nature Adventures represents is the argument that preparation is possible, and that the commercial tourism industry, operating at scale in sensitive ecosystems, does not have to be a net negative for those ecosystems. It can be, with architecture and intention and the kind of leadership that makes itself unnecessary, something that lasts.
The mountain was here before the resorts. Thanks to Chan Teck Ling, it may well outlast them.
Connect With Us On Social Media [ Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn ] To Get Real-Time Updates On The Market. Entrepreneurs’ Diaries Is Now Available On Telegram. Join Our Telegram Channel To Get Instant Updates.
Isabella is a global business journalist and former McKinsey analyst from Brazil. She brings sharp insights on economic shifts, policies, and founder journeys from around the world.
