The haze is back – the air is smoky, visibility is down, and in some parts of the country, the air quality has reached dangerous levels.
Fires across Indonesia, particularly in Sumatra and Kalimantan, are sending smoke across Southeast Asia once again.
What is doubly worrying is that they are burning through one of the world’s largest tropical peatland ecosystems.
We’ve been living through and talking about Southeast Asia’s haze problem since the 1990s, we’ve had agreements, action plans, firefighting operations and repeated promises to tackle the problem at its source.
Yet here we are again.
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Back in 2015, during one of the region’s worst haze episodes, environmental researcher Dr Teckwyn Lim sent a memo to Indonesia’s then-president Joko Widodo. Its title was simple: ‘Block the drains, stop the haze.’ The argument was that we need to look beyond the fires themselves, and ask why these landscapes are able to burn in the first place.
So, 11 years on, what have we learned? And are we still dealing with the same underlying problem? Teckwyn, who has worked in the peatlands of Sumatra and Kalimantan, joins BFM to share his thoughts.
Presenter & producer: Juliet Jacobs | Production: BFM
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