Sarawak API hits 475 as Kalimantan peat fires push the worst haze since 2015

Malaysia's Air Pollutant Index at Serian, on the Sarawak side of the Borneo border, printed 475 early this week. Anything above 300 is classed as hazardous. Kuching, Samarahan and Sri Aman all sat above 300 at the same hour. On one August day six Sarawak sites were in the hazardous band. On another, seven were. The smoke is coming off peat and forest fires in Indonesian Kalimantan and riding the seasonal wind across a land border that fire does not recognise.

Al Jazeera called it the region's worst haze since 2015, when Indonesian fires sent smoke over tens of millions of people and left more than 500,000 with respiratory illness. Deputy Health Minister Dante Saksono Harbuwono said on Monday that about 13,500 people in Indonesia were treated for respiratory infections in July and August. He put the number of people on Borneo and Sumatra directly exposed to smoke at about 5.5 million.

The hotspot count

Sarawak's own monitors found nine active hotspots inside the state. Kalimantan had 1,180 on the same snapshot. Between January and late August, Kalimantan logged 15,587 hotspots. More than 13,000 of those were in August. The ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre had already counted more than 7,200 Kalimantan hotspots on 18 August, against 614 the week before.

Douglas Uggah Embas, who chairs Sarawak's Disaster Management Committee, said cloud seeding could run between 3 and 5 September if the right clouds are there. "Cloud seeding can only be carried out when suitable cloud formations and atmospheric conditions are present. It cannot create rain in the absence of suitable clouds," he told reporters. The same flights are meant to refill reservoirs after a long dry spell. Malaysia has activated the National Open Burning Action Plan and the National Haze Action Plan.

What Indonesia says it is doing

President Prabowo Subianto has been briefed on the firefight. Jakarta has used water bombing and weather modification. The ambassador in Kuala Lumpur, Raden Mohammad Iman Hascarya Kusumo, said joint teams of civilian agencies, police, the armed forces and local governments are on the ground. Visibility in parts of Kalimantan has fallen to between one and ten metres. Daytime drivers have been using headlights. Flights have been delayed. Schools in Sarawak were shut in an earlier wave, affecting nearly 600 schools and about 200,000 students.

Indonesian prosecutors have opened files on concession holders and subsidiaries accused of illegal open burning and clearing, a pattern that returns every dry year in the pulpwood and oil palm belt. El Nino has sharpened this season. The official line in Jakarta is that anyone who lights an open fire will face charges. The satellite count is the measure of whether that line is changing behaviour.

The health ledger

Hazardous air is not an abstract index. An API of 475 means outdoor work, school sport and Independence Day parades get cancelled, which they did. Clinics on both sides of the border are logging asthma, bronchitis and eye complaints. The 2015 episode is the comparison because it is the last time the same peat basin produced a regional public-health event of this size. The difference this time is the speed of the August hotspot jump, from hundreds in a week to thousands. Cloud seeding on 3 September will not put those fires out. It may knock particles out of the air over Kuching for a day if the clouds cooperate. The fires themselves will last until rain returns to Kalimantan in force.