Haze episodes have occurred in southeast Asia nearly every year since. Back in 1998, and for years afterwards, Tan didn’t think too deeply about them. Yet at some point in his late 20s, he began to wonder: where did the haze come from? And why did it keep coming back?
Dirty air
Air pollution kills around 7 million people every year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), accounting for one in eight deaths worldwide in 2012. The main causes of death were stroke and heart disease, followed by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), lung cancer, and respiratory infections among children.
It is especially bad in the Asia-Pacific region, which has a population of over 4.2 billion and high population density. China and India alone, with a combined population of around 2.7 billion, are both enormous sources and victims of air pollution.
In 2010, 40% of the world’s premature deaths caused by air pollution were in China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, according to a survey published in the Lancet. The University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health reported more than 3,000 premature deaths in the city in 2013, and the situation in many mainland Chinese cities is reckoned to be far worse. A poll by the U.S. Pew Research Center found that 47% of Chinese citizens thought air pollution to be a “very big” problem in 2013 (up from 31% in 2008) . It is now a central focus for many Chinese environmental groups and a growing source of anxiety for the country’s leadership.
Similar health concerns are building in India, where air pollution is now the fifth-leading cause of death. Between 2000 and 2010, the annual number of premature deaths linked to air pollution across India rose six-fold to 620,000, according to the Center for Science and Environment, a public-interest research and advocacy group in New Delhi. In May 2014, the WHO said that New Delhi had the worst air of 1,600 cities surveyed worldwide and that rising air pollution had increased the risk of strokes, cancers and heart disease. Another 2014 study has linked a significant drop in India’s wheat and rice crop yields to rising levels of two air pollutants — black carbon from rural cooking stoves and ground-level ozone formed from motor vehicle exhausts, industrial emissions, and chemical solvents — between 1980 and 2010.
In both China and India, air pollution is one consequence of a massive exodus from farm to city that has occurred in recent decades. The change has contributed to rising emissions from both vehicles and factories, especially coal-fired power plants, and an emerging middle class that increasingly desires a range of consumer goods that are common in Europe and the United States.
Southeast Asia has encountered similar problems in recent decades as its economies and populations have boomed. In fact, according to the WHO, nearly one million of the 3.7 million people who died from ambient air pollution in 2012 lived in southeast Asia.
But on top of smokestacks and tailpipes, the region faces an added burden: smoke haze produced in Indonesia that is a by-product of the world’s $50 billion palm-oil industry.
Palm oil
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That could be a pipe dream. But according to Wilson Ang, assistant director for Sustainability at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, the haze of June 2013 made the Singaporean public “much more involved” in the issue. Along with PM Haze, the episode spawned the creation of the Haze Elimination Action Team, another grassroots community group. Both groups have since gone on site visits to Indonesia, opened dialogues with palm-oil companies, and offered feedback or recommendations to Singaporean officials. “Such a ground-up approach is very much welcomed by the government,” said Ang.
Taking action
Haze, however, is still a growing public health concern for many countries, especially lower-income ones. “We put a lot of legislation in place to control point sources, and still, when you add it up, ambient conditions don’t get better,” said Jacqueline McGlade, chief scientist at the United Nations Environment Program. Other challenges, she told me, are linking air pollution data with research on impacts and holding governments accountable for enforcing pollution laws.
More than ever, air pollution is a prominent target of policy reforms and public health interventions. Many lower-income countries, grappling with the environmental and health consequences of their booming populations, are tightening air pollution standards. International aid and development agencies are also rolling out projects to monitor or regulate particulate emissions.
In southeast Asia, haze has recently resurfaced on ASEAN’s political radar. In early July 2014, officials from Riau province announced that they would conduct a large-scale “compliance audit” of local officials and agroforestry companies linked to peatlands. On August 5, Singapore’s parliament passed a law that allows the government to fine both domestic and international companies up to $2 million Singapore ($1.5 million) for causing or contributing to haze. And on 16 September, Indonesia’s parliament finally ratified ASEAN’s 2002 trans-boundary haze agreement after 12 years of resistance.
Also that summer, a senior adviser to Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, then Indonesia’s President-Elect, said the new administration planned to renew the 2009 Indonesian law that banned peat burning when it expires in 2015. Widodo himself said he planned to streamline land governance by creating a “one-map” forestry policy. “The haze is caused both by the people and also the companies,” he told the Straits Times, a Singapore newspaper, in late August. “If we have good, tough law enforcement, then it can be resolved.”
How significant are these developments? In conversations with several haze-watching analysts across south-east Asia, I heard a wide range of opinions. Some, like Helena Varkkey, aren’t especially optimistic, mainly because Indonesia and ASEAN have so far made so little progress on the haze problem. Neither the Singaporean law nor the regional haze agreement, they pointed out, would be enforceable in Indonesian courts. And if climate change increases the number of droughts and wildfires around the world, as many scientists predict it will, the incidence of peatland fires may also rise — and pose additional enforcement challenges.
But others said it is positive that the Indonesian and Singaporean governments are at least taking action — the sort that could breathe new life into existing Indonesian laws designed to tackle haze. The recent political activity gives them hope that annual peat fires will not become southeast Asia’s status quo for future generations.
“Jokowi did say that he aims to take action against the haze,” said Tan Yi Han, the haze fighter. “That’s just words, but it’s better than nothing.”
Copyright 2014 The Wellcome Trust. Some rights reserved.
