Application of chemometrics techniques to solve environmental issues in Malaysia

There has been a growing concern on the rising of environmental issues in Malaysia over the last decade. Many environmental studies conducted in this country began to utilise the chemometrics techniques to overcome the limitation in the environmental monitoring studies. Chemometrics becomes an important tool in environmental fields to evaluate the relationship of various environmental variables particularly in a large and complex database. The review aimed to analyse and summarize the current evidences and limitations on the application of chemometrics techniques in the environmental studies in Malaysia. The study performed a comprehensive review of relevant scientific journals concerning on the major environmental issues in the country, published between 2013 and 2017. A total of 29 papers which focused on the environmental issues were reviewed. Available evidences suggested that chemometrics techniques have a greater accuracy, flexibility and efficiency to be applied in environmental modelling. It also reported that chemometrics techniques are more practical for cost effective and time management in sampling and monitoring purposes. However, chemometrics is relatively new in environmental field in Malaysia and various scopes need to be considered in the future as the current studies focused on very limited number of major environmental issues. Overall, chemometrics techniques have a lot of advantages in solving environmental problems. The development of chemometrics in environmental studies in the country is necessary to advance understanding, thus able to produce more significant impacts towards the effective environmental management.