Clearing the haze

The flaring up of hot spots in Australia and Papua New Guinea and reports of the haze reaching Sri Lanka are reason enough to treat this disaster as a phenomenon of global dimensions, and not merely a regional misfortune. Thousands of people have been hospitalised, and a few have even died because of the haze. Billions of dollars have been lost as the tourism industry took an unprecedented battering. But more catastrophic is the still-unfolding impact on biological diversity in Sumatra and Kalimantan.

Thousands of animals in Borneo and Sumatra have already died in the fires, and over a million and a half acres of prime forest habitat has been destroyed. But the haze did have one happy fallout. It helped jolt the ASEAN countries out of their ecological inertia and forced them to put environmental awareness upfront on their action agendas.

Singapore and Malaysia especially need to be commended for their initiatives. Instead of wasting time cavilling against the culpable party –neighbour Indonesia–they decided to lead by example and act positively, devising innovative strategies to combat the problem.

Even before the Pollutant Standards Index, the barometre of air pollution, had reached unhealthy levels, Singapore’s environment ministry had unfurled its Haze Action Plan (see chart), thereby keeping panic at bay. The PSI measures not just dust particles in the air, but also the five main pollutants: ozone, particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide.

The inter-ministry task force, set up in 1994, was activated to meet weekly and decide how dangerous the haze levels were. If the PSI hovered between 200 and 300, it would decide whether to ask factories and cars to cut down their emissions.

If the PSI was between 300 and 400, it would look into whether schools, childcare centres and sports facilities should be closed, and whether military training and outdoor work should stop. Although the level did hover in the unhealthy range for days, and even touched 278 on one occasion, Singapore was by and large not called upon to put the entire plan into action.

The Singapore Government also commissioned satellite pictures of the hot spots, and thus helped the Indonesian government pinpoint the worst-affected areas. Malaysia sent over 1,000 of its own fire-fighters to put out the flames in Borneo, where its own state, Sarawak, had also gone up in flames. Cloud-seeding was undertaken to induce rain. And the government in Kuala Lumpur even decided to resort to artificial cyclone technology from Russia –as yet untested–to try to clear the haze.

It announced it would be signing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Russian Government soon to try out the technology which it hopes will bring rain and reduce pollutants in the air. Of course, the rains have arrived before this method was tried out, but it could yet prove useful in the future. Usually, a cyclone develops when a mass of warmer and lighter tropical air meets a mass of colder and heavier air. The two masses flow in opposite directions and roughly parallel to one another.

The rotating masses reinforce their circular movements mutually, giving rise to winds of between 40 and 65 kmph. It also produces clouds and rainfall. But in the ultimate analysis, such measures are only palliatives. The best solution is prevention, and this is what the World Wide Fund for Nature has been urging the ASEAN governments to undertake. There is a strong consensus in favour of an ASEAN Fire Prevention and Control Management Strategy that would preempt a recurrence of these fires and its consequences in the coming years.

Even though Indonesia’s President Suharto has apologised for the disaster, it is too early to say whether the promises about preventing the recurrence of forest fires will be kept. After all, until 1994, Indonesia would not even allow the issue of the haze to be discussed on an ASEAN forum. Once when it was raised at the ASEAN Environment Ministers’ meeting in 1995, it was pushed under the carpet.

The Indonesian response has been critiqued on two accounts. First, while it stressed the need to persuade the poor farmers not to employ this relatively cheap method of clearing land and to explore alternative techniques of farming, no one even spoke of the role of the logging companies and the plantation owners in ushering in this ecological catastrophe. Secondly, it used the El Nino factor as a scapegoat for its own inertia. Although it’s certainly true that had there been normal weather conditions the fires would have been put out much earlier, the government itself could have acted with greater alacrity in cracking down on the logging companies and alerting the public.

Today, fortunately, Indonesian officials seemed to have learnt from past mistakes. They have now attributed 80 per cent of the forest fires to large-scale clearing of forests by plantation owners, and 20 per cent to traditional slash-and-burn farmers.

President Suharto announced an indefinite ban on land clearing by burning on September 9, and revoked the licences of 24 plantation companies who defied the ban.

Strict enforcement of already existing laws and more teeth to weak national legislation will be a deterrent for logging companies who put at risk the health and environment of not just their countries, but the world at large.

While the WWF has been calling for the implementation of an international cooperative strategy to control illegal activities relating to natural resources and pollution, it will remain a cry in the wilderness unless the governments decide to accord the issue top priority on their national agendas. It is high time they did, or the next time round, Nature’s hubris could be much more devastating.