Kerbside Consult

I wrote that sentence twenty-nine years ago, and I have been quietly embarrassed by it ever since. Not because it was wrong. Because it was a warning I assumed would date.

The Vads Corner haze page has been online since 22 September 1997. It exists because readers asked for one — I had built an enterovirus outbreak page earlier that year, and requests came in for the same treatment of the haze. Within three weeks it had taken fourteen thousand hits and the counter had given out. The column came afterwards: Hazedous appeared in the October 1997 issue and was partly a report on what had happened.

What the guestbook from those weeks records — it can still be found from the guestbook link on my index page — is not praise but need. A reader in Sangatta, in East Kalimantan, wrote that here at last was information which allowed them to make appropriate decisions about their family's health. A man in Brunei said much the same. An engineer in Finland was faxing the pages to colleagues in Pekanbaru because nothing was available to them locally. And a reader in Kuala Lumpur, having visited the ministry and department sites, described them as full of official air and lacking in relevance.

On 2 August 1999 the BBC listed the page in the Internet links panel of its Haze '98 special report — as “Haze links”, at its GeoCities address, since I did not yet have a domain of my own. There were six sites in that box. The others were Indonesia Online, ASEAN's own haze site, the International Forest Fire News, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Rainforest Action Network. Most of that company was institutional.

Two days later a reader in Singapore arrived from the BBC to sign the guestbook, ask how on earth I had managed it, and suggest I get a proper URL. He was right. The page was one doctor with a modem and no institutional backing.

Most of the links on that page are now dead: the Yahoo news pages, the Straits Times archive, the ASEAN Secretariat press releases from the Third Ministerial Meeting on Haze in 1998. What survives is the structure — a list of Air Pollutant Index portals, a set of MEDLINE searches, a page on how to wear a face mask, and seven of my own Cybermed columns on the subject, running from Hazedous to HAZE-OC.

The links rotted. The problem did not.

As I write, on 26 August 2026, Malaysia is nineteen days into a transboundary haze episode. At its worst it closed more than a hundred schools and put Kuching at the top of the world air quality rankings; it eased, and then it came back. Our government has responded by writing to the ASEAN Secretariat — the same letter to the same secretariat that we have been sending since before this page existed to record them.

This is not the first time I have written this column. It is the first time I have been able to link the evidence.

What is actually happening

Malaysia's Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability dates the current episode from 8 August 2026. ASEAN had already raised Alert Level 2 on 3 August, obliging Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Timor-Leste to file daily reports on fires and haze.

The proximate driver is meteorological: an El Niño coinciding with the Southwest Monsoon, producing below-average rainfall across southern Peninsular Malaysia and western and southern Sarawak, higher temperatures, and prevailing winds that carry smoke from Kalimantan north into Sarawak and from Sumatra across the Straits.

The distal driver is land clearing, and the arithmetic is not ambiguous. Sarawak’s own Natural Resources and Environment Board, citing ASMC data, recorded 7,286 hotspots in Kalimantan between 1 and 19 August against 148 in Sarawak over the same period. On a single day, 11 August, satellite monitoring detected 12 hotspots in Malaysia — one in Pahang and eleven in Sarawak — against 60 in Sumatra and 354 in Kalimantan. Indonesia's Forestry Ministry has recorded more than 5,000 hotspots on Borneo. Some 285,000 hectares have burned in Indonesia this year, of which 182,000 burned in July alone — nearly twice the total for the entire first half of the year.

It is worth being precise about the word transboundary, because we are not blameless. In the same statement dating the episode from 8 August, our own ministry attributed the deterioration in Sarawak to transboundary haze and to local fires — a landfill fire under Sibu Municipal Council covering about 1.5 hectares, and forest and bush fires at Sri Aman covering around a hundred. Johan Setia in Klang has been a recurring domestic hotspot for years, and by 26 August it stood at 158. The great bulk of the smoke is imported. Not all of it is.

Nor is that only my inference. By 26 August Sarawak’s environmental authorities were naming transboundary smoke and local peat and forest fires as the primary drivers together, while NRES attributed the national picture to prolonged dry spells linked to El Niño, suppressed rainfall, and rampant open burning both domestically and regionally. That is the government’s own account.

The readings

On 12 August, Tebedu in Sarawak exceeded API 200 — the “very unhealthy” band — and six schools shifted online; IQAir had ranked Kuching the most polluted major city in the world the previous day — a class of ranking DOE has previously disputed, on the grounds that sensor-based indices are not comparable with its own verified API. By 13 August more than a hundred schools had closed, and in West Kalimantan Pontianak suspended schools indefinitely. By the 20th it was far larger: schools across ten Sarawak districts shut for two days — 509 primary schools with 107,590 pupils, and 82 secondary schools with 89,733 students. Nearly two hundred thousand children, kept indoors by smoke from another country.

The episode has not been uniform. On 15 August nine areas of Sarawak were unhealthy while 46 nationwide were moderate and 13 recorded good air; by 17 August it had eased to three unhealthy localities; and by 22 August it had worsened again, with eleven stations unhealthy, 57 moderate, and not one of the 68 stations recording good air — Serian 196, Kuching 189, Samarahan 179, Sri Aman 176, Sarikei 173, Sibu 162, Mukah 158, Bintulu 157, Samalaju 153, Bukit Rambai in Melaka 152 and Miri 143.

On 21 August Serian breached the very unhealthy threshold at 204, and by the following morning had reached 239. NREB warned that conditions could persist if biomass burning beyond the state’s borders continued to increase, noting that ASMC had observed moderate to dense transboundary smoke in West Kalimantan drifting north into western Sarawak.

Nor is there one network. The readings above are the Department of Environment’s. Sarawak also runs its own, and on 22 August the Natural Resources and Environment Board’s Daily Haze Watch recorded fourteen of its eighteen stations unhealthy at noon — Serian 192, Kuching 185, Lundu and Lubok Antu 179 each, down to Lawas at 109 — while DOE was reporting eleven unhealthy nationwide. Both are true. They are counting different things, and nothing published says so.

It had not eased by the 23rd. At 8am that morning seven areas were unhealthy — Serian 197, Kuching 185, Sri Aman 178, Samarahan 176 and Sarikei 128, all in Sarawak, with Sungai Petani in Kedah and Taiping in Perak at 126 each. Readings move by the hour, so the count is not directly comparable with the previous day's; what matters is that Serian was marginally worse than it had been twenty-four hours earlier, and that Kedah and Perak had joined the list.

Then it crossed the South China Sea. By 10am on the 24th ten areas across four states were unhealthy. By the morning of the 26th there were seventeen, and six of them were in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya — Shah Alam and Johan Setia at 158, Batu Muda 152, Klang 151, Banting 144, Petaling Jaya 123, with Cheras and Putrajaya both at 159. Nilai in Negeri Sembilan stood at 162, higher than Kuching. Tangkak in Johor 153, Bukit Rambai in Melaka 143, Taiping in Perak 108.

Sarawak still led the country — Sri Aman 167, Serian 166, Samarahan 162 — but the story of the third week is that the capital is in it.

One footnote on precision. The Star counted sixteen unhealthy stations at 9am; Malay Mail counted seventeen at 8.45. Readings move by the quarter-hour, which is worth remembering whenever a single figure is quoted at you, including in this article.

The response has moved beyond schools. On 22 August the Sarawak Disaster Management Committee postponed the state-level National Day celebration in Kapit, along with two other events, and advised organisers of outdoor programmes and mass gatherings to do the same. A state postponing its own National Day is a fair measure of how bad a fortnight this has been.

For readers who have lost track of the bands: 0–50 is good, 51–100 moderate, 101–200 unhealthy, 201–300 very unhealthy, 301–500 hazardous, and above 500 an emergency — at which point non-essential government services are suspended and ports in the affected area closed.

None of this was unforeseen. On 24 June the Singapore Institute of International Affairs published its Haze Outlook 2026 and rated the region red.

The Outlook is worth knowing about, because it is the closest thing we have to an annual forecast. SIIA is a Singapore think tank — the oldest, founded in 1961 — chaired by Simon Tay, a professor of law at NUS and a former chairman of Singapore's National Environment Agency. It has published the Outlook every year since 2019, drawing on meteorology, commodity markets and consultations with governments, businesses and non-governmental organisations, and rates the year ahead on a three-tier scale: green, amber, red. Red means a high risk of a severe transboundary haze event affecting Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

In eight editions it has gone red twice. The first was 2023. The second is this year, and the report named August and September as the peak danger period. It is now late August.

The reasoning was not only meteorological. El Niño, possibly a strong one, with a positive Indian Ocean Dipole expected to develop around July or August. But SIIA also flagged an economic mechanism that got less attention than it deserved: disruption at the Strait of Hormuz raised fuel and fertiliser costs, which drove demand for biofuel as countries increased the vegetable oil content of diesel at the pump. Sustained demand for biofuel feedstock is an incentive to clear more land. The fires are lit for agronomic reasons; the price signal that makes clearing worthwhile can come from a shipping lane half a world away.

The diplomacy, which is where it gets interesting

On Friday 21 August, our Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability conveyed Malaysia's position by official message to the ASEAN Secretary-General, restating our commitment to a haze-free ASEAN by 2030 through effective implementation of the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution.

On the same day, Indonesia's Foreign Ministry told a press briefing that it had received no formal complaint from either Malaysia or Singapore. “We have not received anything so far,” was the phrasing.

Both statements are almost certainly true, and the gap between them is the whole story. Malaysia wrote to ASEAN. Indonesia was waiting to hear from Malaysia. This is not a breakdown; it is the system working exactly as designed. In 2023 the same minister's predecessor wrote directly to his Indonesian counterpart and to the embassy, and was still waiting for a reply weeks later while Kalimantan burned.

There has been genuine movement alongside the theatre. At the 37th ASEAN Senior Officials on Environment meeting, Malaysia and Indonesia agreed to exchange hotspot monitoring information, coordinate enforcement against open burning, and share airspace and possibly assets for cross-border cloud seeding. The ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Transboundary Haze Pollution Control finally opened its Jakarta office on 22 April 2026, a decade after Indonesia was designated to host it. Indonesia has warned it will prosecute anyone starting open fires.

Why the agreement cannot bite

The ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution was signed in Kuala Lumpur on 10 June 2002 and entered into force in November 2003. Malaysia was the first to ratify. Indonesia was the last, in 2014. Article 3 does place a responsibility on states to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction do not harm the environment or the health of other states — but as SUHAKAM's 2024 report puts it, the Agreement lacks any legally binding mechanism for member states to hold each other to account on that responsibility. It was watered down during negotiation and emerged with no enforcement and no dispute resolution mechanism. In twenty-three years, no state has brought a claim against another.

Which brings us to the part Malaysians rarely mention. In 2019 Indonesia sealed land belonging to 62 companies over forest fires; twenty were foreign-owned, of which six were Malaysian and nine Singaporean.

Singapore passed a Transboundary Haze Pollution Act in 2014, which reaches any entity — foreign or domestic — whose conduct contributes to haze in Singapore. Malaysia drafted an equivalent in 2018, tabled it in 2019, and shelved it in August 2020. The environment ministry's written reply to Parliament explained that prosecution would require location maps, coordinates, landowner details and company information from within another sovereign state, which was difficult to obtain for reasons of confidentiality, security and sovereignty, and that a diplomatic approach was preferable. The Malaysian Bar objected at the time. It is also worth noting that our draft, unlike Singapore's, would have reached only domestic firms.

So the position is this: we ask Jakarta to control fires on Indonesian land, while declining to legislate against Malaysian companies that may be lighting some of them, on the grounds that we cannot get evidence from Indonesia.

I am not the only one saying this, and it is worth quoting someone who is not a doctor. On 25 August Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye, chairman of the Alliance for a Safe Community, said ASEAN must stop treating transboundary haze as an annual ritual: more than two decades after the Agreement was signed the region remains trapped in the same cycle of fires, deteriorating air quality, health concerns and economic disruption, and its collective response has not been effective enough. Twenty years, he noted, have produced agreements, action plans, committees, meetings and declarations. What we now need is results.

He called for an urgent high-level review of the Agreement and a time-bound, enforceable regional action plan, with joint prevention and early-warning systems established before the dry season rather than after the air turns dangerous. And he made the point this piece has been circling: the current climate forecasts gave us advance warning, and we must use that warning to act.

SIIA rated the region red in June and named August and September. The warning was given.

The most thorough Malaysian account of all this is Silent Enemy: Report on Haze Pollution and the Right to Clean Air, published by SUHAKAM on 24 September 2024 — the Commission's first environmental report, arising from a complaint lodged by the CERAH Coalition in December 2021. It is free, it is thorough, and it is better on the law than anything I can offer. Its six recommendations include amending the Federal Constitution to recognise a right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment; enacting a Clean Air Act with a mandatory ambient standard and an explicit transboundary section; and improving the AATHP. None has been enacted.

One detail from that report deserves to be better known. Counsel to the roundtable observed that Article 4(3) of the AATHP already obliges member states to adopt legislative measures to implement their obligations under it — which can be read as requiring precisely the domestic transboundary haze legislation Malaysia shelved. If that reading is right, we are not merely declining to legislate. We are in default on an agreement we were the first to ratify.

What the smoke does — the short term

Haze is not smog and it is not dust. Peat smoke is disproportionately fine. Measurements at Putrajaya, Bukit Fraser and Kota Samarahan, and at Chiang Mai in Thailand during the 2019 burning season gave a mean PM2.5 to PM10 ratio of 0.93 on haze days against 0.89 on normal days — a modest difference in the means, but the same study found a higher total deposition fraction in the human respiratory tract on haze days.

Drained peat burns below the surface, smoulders for weeks, resists rainfall, and releases far more fine particulate per hectare than surface vegetation. It is the worst fuel in the worst places.

The acute effects are well characterised and clinically unsurprising. A 2019 review in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found consistent links between haze exposure and acute respiratory, cardiovascular, neurological and psychological morbidity and mortality. A 2024 Malaysian analysis of 92 government hospitals over twenty years, using distributed lag non-linear models, related PM10 exposure to respiratory admissions during haze periods, stratified by age, sex and diagnosis.

What presents in the first week: exacerbations of asthma and COPD, upper and lower respiratory infection, allergic conjunctivitis, rhinitis, dermatitis, headache, and — the one we under-recognise — acute cardiovascular events. Fine particulate crosses the alveolar membrane. It is a cardiovascular exposure as much as a respiratory one, and the myocardial infarction that presents on day four of an episode does not get coded as haze-related.

The surveillance puzzle, which deserves the profession's attention

On 23 August the Health Minister reported that monitoring between epidemiological weeks 32 and 33 showed asthma cases up 259% and upper respiratory tract infection up 124%: URTI at 3,674 cases from 1,637, asthma at 219 from 61. Conjunctivitis fell 7%, from 157 to 146.

Eight days earlier, on 15 August, the Ministry had told Bernama there was no significant increase in cases in any state compared with the situation before the haze. In Sarawak, monitoring at twelve sentinel health clinics showed URTI down from 1,473 in week 31 to 1,347 in week 32, asthma down from 195 to 122, and conjunctivitis up from 15 to 43.

Two statements, eight days apart, on the same episode. Read together they raise three problems, and none of them is about the officers doing the counting.

The first statement was not reassurance. It was a lag. Nothing about the smoke changed between the two announcements — the API was unhealthy throughout — but the panel took eight days to register it. Anyone who read the 15 August statement as good news was reading an instrument that had not yet caught up with the exposure. That is a serious problem for a system whose purpose is to tell people when to act.

The two statements are not comparable, and nothing published says so. The first names its scope exactly: Sarawak, twelve clinics. The second gives no geography and no facility count. A reader cannot tell whether they describe the same population. The one thing that is certain is that they cannot both be Sarawak — 122 asthma cases at twelve Sarawak clinics in week 32 against 61 nationally in the same week is arithmetically impossible, so one of those figures covers something other than what I have assumed.

Which brings me to a comparison rather than a complaint. Singapore's Communicable Diseases Agency publishes a Weekly Infectious Diseases Bulletin every epidemiological week, reporting average daily polyclinic attendances for acute respiratory infection from a sentinel network of polyclinics and general practitioner clinics — each figure set against the same week last year and the five-year median. It is also on the national open data portal, machine-readable, with an API. Thailand's air quality data is open enough that researchers routinely link it to national mortality records; that is how the northern Thailand work on particulate exposure and non-communicable disease mortality was done at all.

Malaysia has the same instrument. Sentinel clinics, epidemiological weeks, respiratory attendances. What we do not have is the bulletin. If a weekly series exists somewhere — from all sites, and better still broken down by state — I have not found it, and I would be glad to be pointed to it. Failing that, the numbers above exist because a spokesman answered Bernama once and a minister took questions after a ribbon-cutting eight days later.

Two further observations, offered as caution rather than conclusion.

The indicators do not behave as expected. I had taken conjunctivitis for the cleanest of the three, since it tracks direct irritant exposure rather than infection. It fell in the week asthma tripled. None of the three is behaving predictably.

And the falls in the first statement may yet reflect protection rather than absence of harm — schools shut, outdoor activity curtailed, masks worn, patients self-managing at home with the inhalers they already had. Those are precisely the measures the Ministry advised. If they work, the system registers their success as an absence of disease, and cannot distinguish nothing happened from we prevented it.

None of the three conditions captures cardiovascular presentation. None captures mortality.

A panel that reports no significant increase and then a 259% rise in asthma eight days later, in the same episode, is not measuring the thing we care about in time to be useful. Sentinel clinic surveillance is what exists, and it was designed for infectious disease. The case is for adding emergency department attendances and cardiovascular presentations to it, publishing a weekly series, and eventually doing the excess-mortality analysis nobody has attempted here.

What the smoke does — the long term

Here the numbers stop being about clinic visits and start being about deaths, and they are large enough that I want to give the ranges rather than the headline.

A 2022 scoping review in PLOS ONE, which examined how these estimates are constructed, put health-burden estimates at approximately 100,000 deaths attributable to smoke haze across Southeast Asia, with published figures ranging from 1,064 to 260,000 depending on the cause of death, age group, study area and period examined. That spread is not sloppiness; it reflects genuine methodological disagreement about exposure assessment and about borrowing concentration–response functions from studies of urban PM2.5 rather than smoke.

For the 2015 episode — the modern benchmark — modelling published in Environmental Research Letters estimated around 100,300 excess deaths across Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. A 2022 study in Environmental Health, looking specifically at Indonesian peatland fires as a chronic rather than episodic exposure, estimated roughly 33,100 adult and 2,900 infant premature deaths per year, plus around 4,390 additional hospitalisations.

Note what that last figure implies. Most of the burden is not the crisis fortnight. It is the annual background of peat smoke that never makes the news.

For long-term exposure generally, a 2025 meta-analysis of Asia-Pacific cohort studies found that each 10 µg/m³ increment in PM2.5 was associated with a relative risk for all-cause mortality of 1.11, for cardiovascular disease 1.13, for ischaemic heart disease 1.13 and for stroke 1.12.

The paediatric evidence deserves care, because the version in circulation is not quite what the study found. Lo Bue's 2019 analysis (Economic Development and Cultural Change 67:969–1003; free full text) followed Indonesian children through the Indonesian Family Life Survey, using exposure to the 1997 fires between the ages of 12 and 36 months as an instrument, and comparing siblings of the same mother.

Exposure cost those children roughly nine-tenths of a standard deviation in height-for-age. That lost growth in turn predicted fewer completed grades of schooling — about 0.8 of a grade against the well-nourished reference population — and school entry some six months late. Exposure in the first year of life, and in utero, showed no detectable effect. The damage sat in a specific window between a child's first and third birthdays.

What the study did not find is an effect on cognitive test scores. The coefficient points the right way but is not statistically significant, and the author says so in her own abstract. The SUHAKAM report summarises the paper as showing lower cognitive scores, which is drawn from its table of raw descriptive statistics rather than from its causal estimates — the exposed group was small, 75 children, and younger than the comparison group. I flag it because it is exactly the sort of claim that gets repeated, and I repeated it myself before checking.

The finding that survives is bad enough. Three months of smoke, inhaled between the first and third birthdays, stunted growth sufficiently to cost most of a school year two decades later. Those children are in their early thirties now.

More recently, an ecological time-series from Palembang published in 2026 examined 366,632 childhood acute respiratory infection cases and 27,574 childhood pneumonia cases over 2011 to 2020 in a city subject to annual peat fires, and found strong associations between particulate concentrations and childhood respiratory morbidity.

The standard we hold ourselves to

The New Malaysia Ambient Air Quality Standard sets PM2.5 at 35 µg/m³ over 24 hours and 15 µg/m³ annually. The WHO 2021 global air quality guideline is 15 µg/m³ over 24 hours and 5 µg/m³ annually. Our annual figure is three times the WHO guideline; our 24-hour figure is a little over double it. So a year in which Malaysia fully meets its own standard is still a year of substantial attributable mortality.

But there is a sharper point, and I had it wrong until I read the SUHAKAM report properly. Malaysia's ambient air quality standard is not law. As the Commission puts it, the Department of Environment has produced the New Malaysia Ambient Air Quality Standard, but it is only policy guidance with no explicit relation to a legal basis. Our laws regulate industrial point sources; they do not regulate ambient air at all. There is no legally binding ambient standard, no institutional owner of ambient air quality, and no statutory duty on any body to produce a plan to improve it. SUHAKAM's blunt conclusion is that without a mandatory standard, public health is deprioritised and eclipsed by economic development pressures.

Which means the comparison above understates the problem. It is not that our legal limit is three times more permissive than the WHO guideline. It is that we do not have a legal limit — only a number the Department publishes and nobody is obliged to meet.

What could actually be done

This season — things that work within weeks

1. Pre-empt, do not react. Patients with asthma and COPD in affected districts should have written action plans, adequate inhaler supply and, where indicated, a stepped-up regimen before the peak rather than after the exacerbation. The Southwest Monsoon onset is announced publicly every May. That announcement is the cue.
2. Get the mask advice right. Surgical masks do not filter fine particulate. N95 or equivalent, correctly fitted, is the only respiratory protection worth recommending — and fit matters more than the rating.
3. Talk about indoor air. Air conditioning on recirculation, windows closed, no indoor smoking or burning. Where a commercial purifier is unaffordable — which is most households in Serian — a box fan with a filter taped to it is cheap, well-evidenced and grossly under-promoted in this country.
4. Fix the surveillance panel. Add emergency department attendances and cardiovascular presentations to the three sentinel conditions. Weight conjunctivitis appropriately. Interpret URTI with school-closure status in view.
5. Build a vulnerable-patient register. Every clinic knows who its brittle asthmatics, oxygen-dependent COPD patients, unstable cardiac patients and late-pregnancy mothers are. A district-level list and an SMS when the local station goes above 100 — into the unhealthy band — is achievable this season and costs almost nothing. I take that as the trigger because it is where DOE’s own classification turns unhealthy; because the Sarawak Education Department ordered schools to halt outdoor activities above 100 on 11 August; and because it is the level at which the Sarawak Disaster Management Committee advised the public this month to reduce outdoor activity, naming children, the elderly, pregnant women and those with respiratory or heart conditions. It is not a clinical threshold. Nobody has established the API at which a brittle asthmatic should be telephoned, and that gap is worth someone’s attention. But a warning pegged to an existing official trigger is easier to defend than a number of my own choosing.
6. Set school closure thresholds on PM2.5, not the API composite. The machinery already exists — Sarawak halted school outdoor activity above 100 within three days of the episode beginning — so this is not a request for a new mechanism, only for a better trigger. The API is a maximum-sub-index construct. During a peat episode the relevant number is the fine particulate concentration, and that is what should drive the decision.

The longer term — things that require a decision

7. Revive the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act, with extraterritorial reach. The 2020 objection was evidentiary. Singapore has operated such an Act since 2014 and faced the same evidentiary problem; the deterrent value of a credible statute is largely independent of how often it is used.
8. Enact a Clean Air Act with a legally binding ambient standard. Not an aspiration — a statutory limit with an institutional owner and a duty to plan. SUHAKAM's Recommendation 3 already specifies the contents: public health as the express purpose, a mandatory standard aligned to WHO with interim targets, a national administration structure, justiciable rights to clean air, and a section on transboundary pollution. The drafting has been done for us.
9. Fund peatland rewetting, because that is the actual fix. Drained peat is the fuel. Everything else is firefighting. This is where regional money should go, and it is where Malaysian plantation capital operating in Indonesia could be required to contribute.
10. Use the supply chain. Certification schemes, bank lending covenants and procurement standards act faster than treaties and do not require anyone's sovereignty to be infringed — and, as the biofuel mechanism above shows, they operate on the same price signals that make clearing worthwhile in the first place.
11. Push for an AATHP protocol obliging each member state to enact domestic legislation. I should be clear that this is not my idea: it is SUHAKAM's Recommendation 4, and it is the one structural change that would convert a cooperative agreement into an enforceable regime. Malaysia is well placed to propose it, and has been since 2024.
12. Commission a Malaysian excess-mortality analysis of haze episodes. We have death registration data and we have the API series. Nobody has linked them properly. Until someone does, every argument in this article rests on other people's countries.

One thing did change

I want to set against all of that the only unambiguous good news this page has produced in twenty-nine years. It comes from the dead links rather than the live ones.

Reading the archived headlines on my own haze page in sequence, the recurring story of 1999 to 2001 is not the fires at all. It is the index.

Malaysia withholds smog index numbers from public — 15 June 1999. Malaysia denounced for scrapping smog index — 18 June 1999. Angry calls to make public air pollution index — 17 July 2000. Minister defends ban on pollution readings — 19 July 2000. No API readings to avoid distortions — 19 July 2000. Public to get only morning API — 21 July 2000. Hazy Malaysia keeps air quality data under wraps — 11 July 2001.

Read those in order and you can watch a position being defended, then half-conceded two days later, then quietly abandoned.

I had thought that was my own reconstruction from a pile of dead links. It is not. SUHAKAM records it as a matter of fact: the Official Secrets Act 1972 was used to withhold information on air pollution, and the API was treated as a state secret during the 1997 and 2005 haze crises. Not withheld as an oversight. Classified.

The reason was tourism. I said so at the time: in the June 2004 issue I wrote that the reason for not disclosing the API was that it would scare the tourists away, and asked what was so wrong with releasing it when the crime reporting in our daily news was enough to frighten anyone off. I returned to it the following year in a column called Release AP-I. I was one of a great many people making the same point, most of them louder than me.

That argument is over. APIMS now publishes hourly readings from every station in the network — 68 of them as at August 2026 — free and without registration — and every API figure in this article, including the ones that make the Ministry's surveillance data look odd, comes from a government portal that once did not exist. When I wrote in 2006 that I was glad the index had finally been released after years of denial, I did not expect it to be the only thing on that page that got better.

It matters for two reasons. The first is practical. You cannot warn a patient, close a school, or trigger a clinic protocol against a number nobody will tell you.

The second is that it is a proof of concept — but it is worth being accurate about how it was won.

The noise was domestic first. Doctors, journalists, non-governmental organisations and ordinary readers were asking for the index well before anything shifted, and the archived headlines above are what that sounded like: an argument being made, publicly and repeatedly, against a government that had decided the numbers were not ours to see.

What Singapore did was make the argument unanswerable. The Pollutant Standards Index was being published daily an hour down the road, so the claim that releasing such figures was imprudent had a working counter-example in plain sight. That did not win the argument. It removed the last respectable reason for losing it. The pressure that followed nailed it shut.

The people now asking for a Clean Air Act and a binding Transboundary Haze Pollution Act are in a similar position. The counter-example again sits an hour down the road: Singapore has had both a statutory air quality framework and a transboundary haze law since 2014. What is missing is not the model, and not the drafting — SUHAKAM has done that — but the same sustained, unglamorous noise that eventually made withholding the index impossible.

In short

The fires are overwhelmingly Indonesian, though our own ministry named a Sibu landfill and bush fires at Sri Aman among the causes. The plantations are partly ours. The Agreement has been in force for twenty-three years and has never once been enforced; the domestic law was abandoned on evidentiary grounds we never tested; and our ambient air quality standard turns out not to be law at all. And a surveillance system that reported no significant increase in illness on 15 August recorded a 259% rise in asthma eight days later, without publishing a series that would let anyone see it coming.

I do not think the profession can fix the fires. I do think we are the only people well placed to say clearly what the smoke does, to count it properly, and to stop the annual pretence that a bad fortnight is the whole of the harm.

The Vads Corner haze page said it in 1997: retained as a reminder to us, as to what can go wrong if we are not careful. Twenty-nine years on, the reminder has outlived most of its links. I would like to be able to take it down. I do not expect to.

Sources worth your time

Peer-reviewed evidence

Monitoring and official sources

Archive