When children are sent home because the air is unsafe, haze is no longer a seasonal inconvenience. It is a regional failure. After two decades of ASEAN agreements, Brunei must ask: who profits, who is accountable, and why must innocent lungs continue paying the price for preventable fires across borders?
Brunei’s schools have shifted home, public health is threatened, and smoke again crosses borders. After decades of regional promises, ASEAN must explain what will change this time.
By Malai Hassan Othman
Children in Brunei were sent home early on 1 September as deteriorating air quality turned an environmental emergency beyond our borders into an immediate national concern.
Government and private educational institutions were subsequently advised to implement home-based learning from 2 to 3 September, after official readings entered very unhealthy territory.
The decision was prudent. It was also disturbing evidence that transboundary haze is no longer merely obscuring skylines. It is disrupting education, threatening health and narrowing everyday life.
At 4pm on 1 September, Brunei-Muara recorded a Pollutant Standard Index reading of 215, while Belait reached 211, according to official monitoring.
Tutong registered 168 and Temburong 164. Under Brunei’s classification, readings between 101 and 200 are unhealthy, while anything exceeding 200 ranges from very unhealthy to hazardous.
These figures matter more than social media photographs. They establish that Brunei was not merely experiencing reduced visibility, but breathing air officially judged harmful.
The Ministry of Health warned that haze exposure could cause coughing, eye irritation and runny noses, while aggravating asthma, lung disease and existing heart conditions.
People were advised to limit outdoor activities, remain hydrated, use appropriate masks when necessary, and seek treatment if persistent coughing or breathing difficulties developed.
This is where the diplomatic language surrounding transboundary haze must meet its human consequences: children indoors, vulnerable patients at risk, workers exposed and families watching the sky.
Smoke Without Borders
Regional monitoring indicates that widespread fires across Kalimantan and Sumatra have produced moderate-to-dense smoke, carried by prevailing winds across northern Borneo.
The ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre reported widespread hotspot activity over Kalimantan and Sumatra, alongside unhealthy to hazardous air quality across parts of Borneo.
Hotspots are satellite detections indicating possible fires. They are not automatically separate confirmed blazes, and totals vary according to cloud cover, satellite passes and reporting periods.
That qualification, however, does not make the crisis less serious. It makes careful reporting essential when numbers are changing almost as rapidly as the wind.
Sarawak Disaster Management Committee chairman Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas said 1,180 hotspots were detected across Kalimantan on 29 August, compared with only nine in Sarawak, as smoke moved towards Malaysian territory.
Uggah told reporters after the same SDMC briefing that Kalimantan had recorded 15,587 hotspot detections over that period, including 13,212 during August alone, revealing an extraordinary concentration during the dry season.
Indonesia’s fires are not exclusively a neighbouring-country inconvenience. Indonesian communities are breathing the same smoke, enduring school disruption, respiratory illnesses, dangerous visibility and environmental destruction.
The crisis has also devastated forests and wildlife. Reuters documented the rescue of an orangutan near a palm-oil plantation in Ketapang, West Kalimantan.
The animal was treated for hypoxia linked to thick smoke and showed signs of an acute respiratory infection, according to the attending veterinarian.
That shared suffering matters. This should not become an exercise in blaming ordinary Indonesians, just as legitimate regional concern should not be silenced by diplomatic sensitivity.
Not Simply the Farmers’ Fault
Land-clearing fires are frequently associated with agriculture. Yet blaming “the farming community” collectively would oversimplify a complex chain of land ownership, commercial interests and regulatory failure.
Smallholders may use fire because it is cheap. Plantation operators, concession holders, illegal land clearers and other commercial actors may also benefit from cleared land.
Drained peatlands make the danger worse. Once ignited, peat can smoulder underground, resist conventional firefighting and release enormous quantities of smoke over extended periods.
Prolonged dry weather and strengthening El Niño conditions intensify the emergency. But drought does not strike a match, drain peatland or excuse weak enforcement.
The weather may explain why fires spread so quickly. It cannot, by itself, explain why the same preventable catastrophe repeatedly returns to the region.
Indonesian authorities have deployed personnel, aircraft, water-bombing operations and weather-modification measures. Suspects have been arrested, while companies connected with affected concessions are being investigated.
Indonesian officials told Reuters that 19 companies were under investigation over fires affecting more than 11,000 hectares. Authorities had identified 42 companies for scrutiny.
These actions deserve recognition. They also invite an unavoidable question: why must large-scale investigations and emergency mobilisation repeatedly begin after the smoke has already crossed borders?
Firefighting helicopters are indispensable during an emergency. They are not substitutes for year-round peatland restoration, transparent concession monitoring, enforceable corporate responsibility and credible prosecution.
Brunei and Malaysia Turn to ASEAN
The haze was discussed during the 27th Annual Leaders’ Consultation between Brunei Darussalam and Malaysia in Bandar Seri Begawan on 22 August.
His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah and Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim agreed to utilise ASEAN mechanisms in addressing the transboundary emergency.
Anwar subsequently said Malaysia’s Foreign Minister, Datuk Seri Mohamad Hasan, had been asked to manage the matter through the established regional diplomatic framework.
This was neither the creation of a “Borneo Bloc” nor an alliance against Indonesia. It was two affected neighbours acknowledging that smoke cannot be negotiated away bilaterally.
Brunei does not share a land border with Kalimantan. It shares Borneo, regional air currents and the consequences when fires elsewhere overwhelm political boundaries.
Malaysia and Brunei therefore have every right to raise the matter firmly. Their citizens should not be expected to accept hazardous air as an annual cost of regional neighbourliness.
Yet invoking ASEAN is only the beginning. The real test is whether ASEAN’s machinery can produce action beyond monitoring, ministerial discussions and carefully negotiated expressions of concern.
A Treaty Older Than Today’s Schoolchildren
ASEAN members signed the Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution in 2002. It entered into force in 2003 and eventually secured ratification from every member state.
The agreement was presented as a landmark regional commitment to prevent, monitor and mitigate land and forest fires through national action and international co-operation.
ASEAN now also has a Second Haze-Free Roadmap, covering 2023 to 2030, with the declared vision of achieving a transboundary haze-free region.
The architecture is therefore not absent. ASEAN has an agreement, specialist monitoring centre, ministerial structures, roadmaps, targets, technical programmes and years of accumulated experience.
The unresolved test is whether these instruments can produce measurable prevention and accountability when neighbouring populations repeatedly pay the price.
Without transparent compliance measures and publicly traceable national obligations, a legally binding agreement risks becoming stronger in ceremony than in effect.
What Brunei Should Ask
Brunei should support Indonesia’s firefighting and prevention efforts while pressing ASEAN for measurable outcomes, rather than another cycle of emergency meetings followed by seasonal forgetfulness.
Regional authorities should publish harmonised, time-stamped hotspot data, concession ownership information, burned-area assessments, enforcement actions and progress against the Haze-Free Roadmap.
ASEAN should establish clearer thresholds for requesting assistance, activating emergency co-ordination and reviewing whether affected member states have fulfilled their prevention and enforcement responsibilities.
Companies controlling fire-affected concessions should be identified through credible investigations. Penalties, restoration obligations and prosecution outcomes should be reported, not buried after visibility improves.
Affected countries must also examine whether their own investors, financiers, commodity buyers or supply chains are connected to land-use practices contributing to the fires.
Responsibility may begin where the fire is lit, but accountability can extend through boardrooms, lenders, contractors and markets well beyond the burned landscape.
Brunei, meanwhile, should not wait for another PSI spike before strengthening the protective framework tested by this episode.
The Government should publish a clear escalation protocol linking PSI levels and health risk to decisions on home-based learning, outdoor activity and workplace protection.
The protocol should identify who decides, when each measure activates and which institutions and workers are covered, reducing uncertainty as air quality deteriorates.
Standing haze measures should protect outdoor and construction workers, while suitable masks should remain readily accessible through health centres when conditions worsen.
Home-based learning protects children during dangerous conditions. It cannot erase the educational disruption, unequal household circumstances or working parents’ difficulties created by sudden closures.
Official communication should remain frequent and consistent, using Brunei’s PSI rather than mixing it with foreign AQI systems that employ different scales and measurements.
The Air Is a Shared Responsibility
No country controls the wind. Every government, however, retains responsibility for preventing activities within its jurisdiction from inflicting foreseeable harm upon neighbouring populations.
Indonesia cannot prevent every accidental fire across its vast territory. Its regional partners cannot reasonably demand perfection during increasingly severe climatic conditions.
They can reasonably demand prevention, transparency, early intervention, corporate accountability and evidence that lessons from previous emergencies have produced stronger enforcement before the next dry season.
Brunei and Malaysia have correctly taken the matter to ASEAN. Now ASEAN must show that its mechanisms protect lungs as effectively as its communiqués protect diplomatic language.
When schoolchildren are ordered home because the air outside has become unsafe, the haze has already moved beyond an environmental statistic or seasonal irritation.
It has become a public-health emergency, an educational disruption, an economic burden and a direct test of whether regional co-operation carries consequences.
The smoke will eventually clear. Skies will brighten, schools will reopen, and the emergency will gradually disappear from headlines and official social media feeds.
That familiar return to normality is precisely where failure usually begins—when urgency fades, accountability weakens, and prevention is postponed until satellites detect the next fires.
Brunei should not seek confrontation. But neither should neighbourliness require silence while its children, elderly citizens and vulnerable patients repeatedly breathe the consequences of preventable burning.
After more than two decades of ASEAN agreements and roadmaps, the region owes its people something more substantial than another promise to discuss the smoke.
It owes them clean air—and proof that those responsible for poisoning it will no longer find accountability disappearing as quickly as the haze.
.jpeg)
No comments:
Post a Comment