Timely for Singapore, Indonesia govts to prove that haze policies work

Margaret Sembiring Straits Times AsiaOne 11 Sep 15;

With the onset of the El Nino season, forest fires in some Sumatran and Kalimantan provinces of Indonesia have generated thick clouds of haze across the Malacca Strait. Just within the past week, thick haze has paralysed airports in Pekanbaru, Batam, Kualanamu (Medan), Aceh and Jambi, with incoming and outgoing flights getting delayed for hours or cancelled altogether.

Schools were also closed for days to allow children to stay at home and minimise their exposure to the smog. Concurrently, the PSI readings in Singapore have worsened over the past few days.

The recurrence of haze is expected but still unacceptable. Haze incurs hefty costs on health and the economy, and often strains Singapore-Indonesia relations.

For years, numerous efforts have been taken to address forest fire issues in Indonesia's affected provinces. Besides other initiatives, Indonesia has put land and/or areas prone to forest fires under surveillance; collected data and information relating to hot spots and the spread of haze; mapped burnt areas; and used the Fire Danger Rating System to monitor forest fire risk.

Additionally, Indonesia has developed standard operating procedures in preventing and suppressing land and/or forest fires; strengthened and raised community awareness through public education; introduced early prevention activities or training; strengthened the institutions and legislation that support a zero- burning policy; and coordinated law enforcement across different agencies, including the Corruption Eradication Commission.

Forest fires in Riau Province, which severely enveloped Singapore and parts of Malaysia in mid-2013, were even regarded as a national emergency, during which the National Agency for Disaster Management was called upon to suppress the fires.

To complement its domestic efforts, Indonesia forged bilateral co-operation with Singapore and Malaysia to build local capacity in dealing with forest fires in Jambi and Riau provinces respectively.

Indonesia also takes part in the ASEAN Peatland Management Strategy (2006 - 2020), a regional initiative aimed at managing community livelihood on peatland, thereby preventing forest fires.

Despite these continuing efforts, the haze has recurred.

Myriad factors can explain this. They include deep-seated economic interests in slash-and-burn techniques; lack of fire-suppression systems deep in the forests; and the sheer size of fire-prone areas and limited capacity to access and protect them. Overlapping land claims add to the complexity of forest fires and resultant haze problem.

Just before former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ended his term in October last year, the Indonesian Parliament finally ratified the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution.

The ratification generated mixed reactions, with some perceiving it as a positive development after 12 years of waiting, while others regarded it as no more than signing a non-enforceable agreement.

His successor, President Joko Widodo, merged the ministries handling the environment and forestry with the hope of improving bureaucratic coordination and improving efficiency in responding to environmental and forestry issues, including forest fires and the haze pollution triggered.

A coalition of environmental groups in Indonesia, however, has cautioned that such a merger would only further complicate inter- sectoral coordination.

During the same period, the Singapore Parliament passed the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act 2014, which aims to deter firms or entities in or outside Singapore from taking part in activities that contribute to transboundary haze affecting Singapore.

Critics, however, have said that the effectiveness of the new law largely depends on the ability to accurately identify errant firms or entities, as well as on law enforcement and co-operation from the Indonesian counterparts.

Indonesia's overlapping concession maps have often been cited as one of the main reasons that hinder law enforcement efforts in affected areas.

In December last year, Indonesia launched the much-anticipated One Map of National Thematic Geospatial Information.

It put into effect the One Map Policy which was mandated in an Act on Geospatial Information three years earlier.

As the One Map attempts to create one reference, one standard, one database, and one portal for otherwise various and often overlapping maps, it is expected to provide a better avenue for stronger co-operation and coordination for national development, including responses to forest fires and the resulting haze.

The current haze episode, therefore, is the first to occur after these major measures were taken in Indonesia and Singapore.

How different will things be now?

Criticism was levelled against the new initiatives when they were first introduced.

With the fast thickening smog in Singapore and parts of Indonesia's Sumatran and Kalimantan provinces, it is timely for both governments to prove that their policies do work.

Ultimately, bringing the real culprits to justice, suppressing the fires quickly, minimising future occurrences of forest fires, and making the region haze-free would be the real indicators of success of these measures.

The writer is a senior analyst at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University.

This article first appeared in RSIS Commentary.

Haze: Health, wealth at stake
Samantha Boh THE STRAITS TIMES AsiaOne 10 Sep 15;

The haze is back.

After creeping up over the last few days, the 24-hour Pollutant Standards Index (PSI), an indication of air quality, reached unhealthy levels (101-200) on Tuesday morning.

The National Environment Agency (NEA) has warned that the conditions might worsen, although rain over parts of Singapore yesterday provided some respite.

Forest fires are raging in Indonesia due to the widespread clearing of forests for oil palm plantations, and smoke has been blown over here by prevailing winds from the south and south-west.

In Sumatra, air quality hit hazardous levels on Tuesday in Pekanbaru and Dumai, both in Riau, with flights grounded at the Pinang Kampai airport by poor visibility. An operations manager for Pelita Air has even likened the conditions to the haze in 2013.

It is bad news if the haze turns out to be as bad as that in 2013. In June 2013, the three-hour PSI, an indicator of the amount of air pollution in the previous three hours, hit a historic high of 401, and the 24-hour PSI was at a high of 246.

Continuous exposure to unhealthy PSI levels over a few days can cause irritation of the eyes, nose and throat in healthy people. The effects are worse for the elderly, pregnant women and children, and people with chronic lung or heart disease.

The haze is unhealthy for the economy too.

In 2013, the Singapore Retail Association estimated an 8 per cent to 12 per cent dip in business during the normally busy school-holiday period.

The 1997 haze here, which lasted three months, is estimated to have led to economic losses of almost US$300 million (S$426 million) by Professor Euston Quah, head of Nanyang Technological University's Department of Economics.

Some economists have also estimated the damage to Singapore from Indonesia's forest fires at $5 million a day.

When the haze hits, it is not just the health of Singaporeans that is at stake but that of the economy as well.

Hazing rituals
After all the meetings and promises, the smog in South-East Asia still proves ineradicable
The Economist 11 Sep 15;

OF COURSE there is an app for it. Air4ASEAN, produced by the Thai government, sends smartphones a pretty if depressing map of the parts of South-East Asia afflicted with “the haze”, the foul smog that has been almost an annual curse for two decades now. It also offers data for each of the ten member countries of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Tap “Indonesia”, however, and the page that loads is one of several with nothing but the word “soon”. That is apt. The haze emerged as a man-made catastrophe in 1997, when forest fires in Indonesia and Malaysia shrouded much of the region, causing severe disruption and untold damage to human health. Ever since, ASEAN, and in particular Indonesia, the biggest source of the haze, have been promising to tackle it. However, ASEAN’s efforts have tested the organisation’s aspiration to become more than a talking-shop among governments and to forge a co-operative “community”.

ASEAN was designed precisely to foster the kind of regional co-operation that cross-border pollution seems to demand. And the scourge affects all its members. Smog caused by burning forests in Myanmar is now an annual event in northern Thailand. Last month Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, the ASEAN countries that share the Mekong river, met for the fifth time to discuss haze-prevention. It is, however, in the southern ASEAN countries—Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore—that the smog has become perennial and seemingly insoluble.

This haze season is the first since Indonesia ratified the “ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution”, 12 years after it was signed, and launched its “one map” initiative, a cartographic exercise which was supposed to make it clearer who owns the land where fires are burning. This would give teeth to a “Haze Monitoring System” which ASEAN introduced in 2013. But if it knows whose land the fires are on, Indonesia is not telling its neighbours. Simon Tay and Lau Xin Yi of the Singapore Institute for International Affairs, a think-tank, lamented in an article this month that “the progress and co-operation” of past years may now be receding. It did not help that earlier this year Indonesia’s vice-president, Jusuf Kalla, castigated Singaporeans for complaining about the haze instead of thanking Indonesia for the 11 months a year when they enjoy “nice air from Indonesia”.

In little Singapore such comments evoke a deep-seated fear of being at the mercy of its huge neighbour. And now the smog is back. The island’s Pollution Standards Index (PSI), which measures air quality, has been creeping into the “unhealthy” level of over 100, reaching a three-hour average of 137 on September 10th. So far this year’s haze has been mild compared with 2013, when the PSI briefly passed 400 (above 300 is considered “hazardous”). Yet the level is still alarming for a regional hub that relies on providing a pleasant and healthy place to live, in comparison with, for example, more polluted Hong Kong. Last year Singapore passed a law enabling legal action to be brought in its own courts against those accused of poisoning its air.

Singapore’s murky air is still pristine compared with the peasouper choking parts of Sumatra, the big Indonesian island nearby. In Riau province, in the north of Sumatra, the PSI reached 436 on September 3rd. Poor visibility closed the airport, and children were kept home from school. In all, six provinces in Sumatra were put on “emergency alert” as hundreds of “hotspots” of burning trees and vegetation flared and smouldered. They were being fought with water-bombing from helicopters and cloud-seeding aeroplanes. On September 10th more than 1,000 soldiers were deployed to fight fires. Four days earlier Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, visited South Sumatra, one of the worst-affected provinces. Mr Joko said he had ordered the police to get tough on companies found to have started the fires, with a new task-force formed to co-ordinate the battle of the fires. But he sounded exasperated: “Everyone knows what needs to be done.”

He had a point. Everybody knows the fires are lit as the cheapest way of clearing land for farming or a plantation—especially for oil palm. Some burn out of control and some, on peatland, can smoulder underground for years, flaring up during a prolonged dry spell (linked, this year, to the Pacific-wide El Niño phenomenon). Everybody also knows that the solution is not to find more effective ways to fight the fires, but to stop them being lit in the first place. That means making sure everybody knows how much harm they do, as well as changing the firelighter’s calculation of risk and reward. Peter Holmgren of the Centre for International Forestry Research, with its headquarters in Indonesia, sums up the solution in two words: propaganda and prosecution.

Keeping the home fires burning
The propaganda seems to have worked at least among the big palm-oil producers, most of which now flaunt their green credentials, seeking to have their produce certified as “sustainable”. Since 2011 Indonesia’s government itself has imposed a moratorium on clearing primary forest and peatland for plantations. And the police in Sumatra have this year caught 39 people suspected of illegal land-burning. Yet the remnants of what just a generation ago were vast swathes of virgin rainforest still smoulder and flame. Oil palm remains a lucrative crop. Powerful interests perhaps still profit too much from the fires, and local governments fail to implement orders issued from Jakarta, the capital. The central government may be failing to share information simply because it does not have it.

Even if it is wilfully secretive, ASEAN cannot realistically enforce disclosure. Its guiding principle is not to meddle in its members’ internal affairs. All it can do is embarrass them, and invoke “the ASEAN way” of consensus and co-operation. But Indonesians are suffering the worst of the haze. If their government cannot solve the problem for them, it is unlikely to be shamed into doing so for the sake of gasping Singaporeans and Malaysians.