Hazed andconfused

Words by Marc Jitab

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as local and regional experts Warn of the Worst

haze season yet, exacerbated by the el niño Weather

pattern, esquire exaMines the causes, the culprits

and the casualties of this Man-Made environMental

probleM, and asks What can be done to release the

region froM its choking grip.

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the folks of taMan Johan setia in Klang are a proud bunch. For decades, they have been known for their vegetables and pineap-ples, with the latter almost being synonymous with the place. Jariah has been in the pineapple business for the past few years, and plies her trade out of a simple hut on Jalan Johan Setia. Acres of flat plantation land line both sides of this small town’s main road, with the odd strip of small village houses appearing every few kilometres. Jariah’s pineapples are remarkably sweet and well textured, and these specially crossbred fruit barely make one’s tongue tingle after having one too many pieces.

Pineapple varieties like Mores, Yenkee and MD2 have been an important source of income for the poor townsfolk, many of whom are farmers. It is the rainy season now and, true to form, rain clouds gather over this wide-open space; it starts to drizzle, then pours heavily. But the people here aren’t always so lucky. Taman Johan Setia is also well known for an-other thing: haze. Much of the land here is de-graded peatland, and many farms are either on drained peat or situated next to degraded peat.

“Yes, it’s raining, cool, and the ground is moist now, but the farmlands burn during the dry season, due to the unscrupulous throw-ing of cigarettes or small-scale rubbish burn-ing. Sometimes, organic matter is burnt to produce fertiliser,” Jariah explains. “The wind blows the fires underground and they spread over two or three acres. Due to the nature of peat fires, sometimes, they spread into the

plots of innocent farmers, who actually end up becoming victims themselves. They lose thousands of plants, and many more thou-sands in investment and lost income; they are also fined by the authorities even if they didn’t start the fires.”

During the dry season, the fire department monitors the area day and night, but the oc-currence of burning peat and haze happens anyway, which envelopes the entire town in haze. The fires destroy precious crops, which can take almost two years to mature. Farm-ers are often blamed for the haze during the dry season, but for a demographic so reliant on crops, they have much to lose financially, if they conduct unscrupulous burning. Rather, the problem is far, far bigger than two or three burning acres of farmland.

AseAn’s biggest environmentAl problemTrans-boundary haze is, by far, the biggest en-vironmental problem in Southeast Asia. The Global Environment Centre (GEC), based in Petaling Jaya, worked closely with the Asean Secretariat and member states at the policy level during the peak of the 1997–1998 haze crisis. Although peatlands cover only five to 10 percent of Asean countries’ land size, they contribute to more than 90 percent of trans-boundary smoke haze.

Peat, which is usually very wet, is made of un-decomposed organic matter, primar-ily formed from roots and vegetation. Peat-lands are also a natural habitat of many flora and fauna that have developed a special con-nection with the damp, acidic forests. Penin-sula Malaysia’s peatlands are about eight- to 10-metres deep. In Sabah and Sarawak, this depth doubles to about 25 metres, and what one has is basically 10 storeys of fuel that have been collecting for 10,000 years over an area of many thousands of hectares. In fact, peat soil is the precursor of coal. Peat, depending on the circumstances, can become brown coal in 100,000 years. Hence, degraded or drained peat is fundamentally a pile of coal or a lake of oil that’s waiting to catch fire.

In Indonesia, peat covers six million hec-tares in Sumatra, and seven million hectares in Kalimantan. Together, Indonesia’s peatlands are 20 million hectares, and the encroach-

ment of urban areas onto these peatlands is degrading the peat and turning them into tick-ing time bombs. The problem begins when the peatlands are opened up and disturbed when the torrents of water stored in them are drained. Then, the upper layer dries up and the soil runs the risk of burning; although the vegetation on top burns quickly and thorough-ly, it is the soil below that burns for months if left unchecked. It is the layers of burning peat soil that are extremely difficult to put out or control once the fires start. A rule of thumb is that, if the fires can’t be put out in a day, it will take a month to put them out, says Faizal Par-ish, Director of GEC.

In the first quarter of 2014, unusually long, dry spells caused haze to spread all over the peninsula, with fires originating from Pahang and Selangor. The main fires came from south-east Pahang, where fires broke out along the border of peatland that lies between Kuantan and Rompin, which is about 200,000 hectares in size. The second main source of the fires came from northern Selangor, specifically the North Selangor Peat Swamp Forest, which stretches from Kuala Selangor to Sabak Ber-nam, and is about 70,000 hectares in size. The fires occurred at the edge of the peat swamps due to the opening up of land and poor wa-ter management in these areas. “Plantations weren’t deliberately burning, but created con-ditions for fires to take place, because they lowered the water table by draining their plot of land, and, inadvertently, drained adjacent lands, the [peat] forests,” Parish says.

above A woman walks

through haze as a forest fire burns bushes and fields

in Siak Regency, Riau Province,

Indonesia, June 2013. The fires in Sumatra caused record smog in

Malaysia and Singapore.

“Due to the nature of peat fires, they spread

into the plots of innocent farmers, who actually

end up becoming victims themselves. They

lose thousands of plants, and many more

thousands in investment and lost income; they

are also fined by the authorities even if they

didn’t start the fires.”

—Jariah, pineapple entrepreneur from klang

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rice in Java where rice is grown on the slope of a volcano, a canal is built between two rivers, and the irrigation flows down the slope of the volcano. Even though the peatland in Central Kalimantan had a lot of water, the same Java-nese concept was followed, and canals—each about 50 to 60 kilometres long, 10 metres deep, 30 metres wide—were dug, so the water from the river could flow into the drained peat.

However, there was a major oversight to the whole project, one that would make all of this futile from the very beginning and threatened the lives of millions. “A circle was drawn on a map over a swampy area of more than a mil-lion hectares to make it the new rice bowl of Indonesia, not knowing that rice doesn’t grow on peat,” Parish says. “If it were peat of half a metre, maybe, but even then, there would be no grain. So it was doomed from the start; it was a totally inappropriate development.”

Böhm and Siegert echo this sentiment: “Peat itself, even with ample fertilisation with additives like volcanic ash and limestone (to counteract the acidity of the peat soil), sustains only pineapples and some types of oil palms. Mineral storage capacity and the water table are the most important parameters in soil qual-ity. Only alluvial regions with peat layers of no more than two to three metres can be consid-ered for yields of significance. The soil, as well as the hydrological, ecological and social condi-tions of the region make it highly unlikely that the planned production capacity of the area can ever be attained. Rice cultivation will require massive inputs of limestone, fertilisers and soil supplements to counteract the… infertile soils.”

The aggressive burning used to clear the land here ended up in a raging fire across half a million hectares in Central Kalimantan, and it was a major source of haze for Borneo. At the time, Kuching’s air pollutant index (API) was 800, similar to the API of 746 in Muar during the 2013 dry season.

blAme the flAmeEven though Asean nations recognise that 90 percent of the haze comes from peat swamp,

the megA blunderDuring the late ’90s, Indonesia embarked on the Mega Rice Project, a failed effort by the pre-vious Suharto regime. The impetus for the pro-ject was that the main rice-producing region in Java was experiencing a fall in rice production levels, as urban areas were encroaching onto agricultural areas. Indonesia was fast becom-ing a rice importer, a marked shift from its com-fortable position as a rice exporter; so from a policy perspective, the Indonesian government wanted to go back to rice self-sufficiency. The project started in April 1996 when irrigation channels were dug into the peat swamp, and encompassed more than one million hectares in Central Kalimantan, which is about 40 times the size of Kuala Lumpur. The site sat between four rivers—Sebangau, Kahayan, Kapuas and Barito—and thousands of people were primed to move in to settle the land.

Doctors Hans-Dieter Viktor Böhm and Flo-rian Siegert of Kalteng Consultants had studied the project in-depth, and assessed the socioec-onomic impact of this immense failure. “[The project] had a major concentration of ‘hot spots’ because burning for land clearance had been started at the onset of the dry season,” the two

researchers write. “In June 1997, months before fires and smog had become a serious health hazard to millions of people in Southeast Asia, the areas upstream of the reclamation project had already suffered serious food shortages. A marked drop in the water level of major riv-ers and, hence, lack of water for irrigation, com-bined with smog-caused poor visibility, which hindered food transport, made the planting of crops impossible. By September/October 1997, famines were reported for the entire area.”

They continue: “It is now estimated that up to one billion tons of carbon were released during the fires of July–October 1997. This equals the entire European output of one year. Burning and oxidised peat is largely respon-sible for these huge releases. An estimated two to four billion tons of carbon are stored between peat layers in the [project]. Research data show that carbon sequestration and stor-age in the forests of Central Kalimantan are among the highest recorded sustained values anywhere in the world.”

The intense flurry of activity here from 1996 to 1998 saw 4,600 kilometres of irriga-tion tunnels dug to drain the water from this immense area. Using the concept of growing

t h e s c i e n c e o f s M o g “The atmospheric pollutant that most consistently increases with biomass smoke is suspended micro-particulate matter. These small, solid combustion particles comprise of organic matter, black elemental carbon (soot particles) and inorganic materials, such as potassium carbonate and silica... The main gases produced during the biomass burning process are carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO), methane (CH4), oxides of nitrogen (NO and NO2) and ammonia (NH3). Methane, carbon monoxide and oxides of nitrogen lead to the photochemical production of ozone (O3) in the troposphere. Carbon dioxide, methane and ozone are greenhouse gases that can lead to global warming. In addition, particulates absorb and scatter incoming solar radiation, and hence, can impact the climate on a local, regional and global scale.” — narayan sastry, rand corporation

top A C130 aeroplane dropping 3,000 gallons (11,356 litres) of water on peat fires near the Kambas Reserve in Lampung, Sumatra, November 1997.

bottom In June 2013, Johor was among the worst hit by the haze, as well as Singapore.

right A close-up

satellite image of the forest

fires in Sumatra, June 2013.

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prevention measures are hard to put into ef-fect because most of the peat swamp is under provincial or state governments in Indonesia, and even in Malaysia. Moreover, Indonesia’s fire brigades are usually in the cities, not ru-ral areas; there exists a forest fire-fighting unit called the Forest Reserves, but when forests are converted into agricultural land, there are no agricultural fire fighters. Even in Malaysia, the fire-fighting capability in the rural areas is very limited.

The response to peat burning in Malaysia has been, at best, slow and small scale. Al-though the Department of Environment (DoE) has fined or compounded some people, the number is very low, and police don’t seem to see this as a priority action. GEC has been urg-ing the government to take action and arrest these problems to prevent future occurrence. Unfortunately, the DoE lacks the personnel at the local level and, until recently, this or-ganisation didn’t have enforcement power, so they had to involve the police whenever they needed to invoke environmental laws. Now, they have powers of arrest, but this has only happened recently, and DoE personnel are still undergoing training.

Environmentalist groups, who have worked with local farmers and interacted with them, have found that the root cause of haze is rarely the small, local communities; rather, the prob-lem is with the broader mismanagement of the

peatland system. The number one thing that causes haze is large-scale drainage, and this isn’t something that villagers can do because they would need large machinery. The large-scale drainage tends to be government projects done in the name of the community, or large govern-ment public works and drainage for logging.

In the instance of the recent North Selan-gor Peat Swamp Forest fires, the precursor to the event were the 500 kilometres of drains dug in the ’80s by loggers in order to get the timber out by letting cut timber ride on the water flowing out. After they were done, they didn’t block up the drains and weren’t legally required to do so. However, even though the root cause is known, why has little been done to solve the problem? The issue lies in the sheer scale of the peatland. The total area of peatland burned during the past decade is in the region of four million hectares, and to re-store water to these areas, you would be look-ing at blocking the drainage canals of four mil-lion hectares of land. Then, you would need to get some vegetation back. After the vegetation burns, lalang sprouts and it burns easily too.

“Getting the proper vegetation back and blocking the drains... what’s the cost of doing these things? Restoring peatland at an oil palm plantation is RM10,000 a hectare. If you’re looking at 30,000 hectares, that’s RM300 mil-lion to rehabilitate. Indonesia’s 2.5 million hectares of damaged peat? RM250 billion. But what’s the cost of forgoing the rehabilitation? What’s the impact on the economy? Health of millions across the whole region? One hun-dred and fifty million people affected, disrup-tion to their lives and work...” Parish says. “The tourism industry in Malaysia is very important to the economy—if haze occurs, then tourism drops. During the 1997 haze crisis, there was a USD10 billion impact on the economy, not counting long-term health costs. In areas of severe haze, 30 percent of the children have stunted growth. Haze smoke is carcinogenic; like how burnt meat is thought to give one

cancer, similarly, the smoke comes from par-tially-burnt organic matter.”

Something needs to be done, and that is preventing peatland fires. The best way to pre-vent fires is to keep the water level in the peat as high as possible and not allow any deliber-ate open burning. In 2002, GEC started work-ing in Kalimantan to prove everyone wrong, that one doesn’t need billions to do something about it. They took the biggest drain, the pri-mary irrigation canal, and blocked it by hand. It was 70 kilometres from the nearest road and 50 kilometres from the nearest village. GEC organised a team of about 80 villagers, divided into three teams, and took about four to six weeks to block the canal.

However, governments will need to act fast, as 2014’s mid-year dry season is set to be exac-erbated by the El Niño atmospheric condition. As we saw in the earlier part of 2014, unusual weather can wreak havoc on fires because of the shift in the wind direction, like in the North

“Plantations weren’t deliberately burning,

but created conditions for fires to take place,

because they lowered the water table by

draining their plot of land, and, inadvertently,

drained adjacent lands, the [peat] forests.”

—faizal parish, director of the global environment centre

Selangor Peat Swamp Forest. There’s been a change in global weather patterns, starting with the high-altitude jet streams, which usu-ally flow around the world in rings from west to east. Now, they are flowing from southwest to northeast. Dry, sinking air from the Chinese mainland is flowing into Southeast Asia, and dry air means much less rain. So what awaits us in an El Niño-afflicted dry season?

The 1997–1998 haze caused a 30 percent re-duction in oil palm output because of reduced sunlight, besides severe health problems to entire communities. Indonesia’s air quality spiked to an API of 800, and that was with-out El Niño. Indonesians have had to contend with two dry seasons in a row in Riau with fires. Last year alone, Riau suffered 400,000 hectares of burnt peat; that means of the four million hectares of peat in Riau, 10 percent burned. It’s primed to burn again, even hotter and longer this time, as El Niño descends upon the peatlands of Southeast Asia this year. 

left Logging and slash-and-burn agriculture level borneo’s rainforest.

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