Up in smoke: why Southeast Asia failed to halt the haze

Dr Asma Zafirah doesn’t need satellite images to know when Kalimantan is burning. She sees it in the watery eyes and laboured breaths of the patients at her clinic in Sarawak, and the children who are kept home from school to protect them from the toxic air.

Southeast Asia’s transboundary haze crisis was meant to have been brought under control six years ago.

But Borneo is once again belching out dangerous emissions, as fires in the peatlands and forests of Kalimantan – Indonesia’s section of the island – send a wall of pollutants across Malaysia’s Sarawak and on to the wider region.

Repeated, prolonged exposure to haze wreaks havoc in the human body, triggering inflammation, asthma attacks and other respiratory problems.

“That is already a signal that their body is not simply being irritated,” Asma said. “It is having a clinically significant response to the exposure.”

Left unchecked, that exposure can scar lungs, cause cardiovascular illness and lead to cancer, as PM2.5 particles small enough to cross into the bloodstream and spread the damage far and wide.