October 3, 2016
ASIA / PACIFIC
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 5
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PARTICULATE PROBLEM. Students ride on a boat on the way to school while haze from wildfires blan-
ket the Musi River in Palembang, South Sumatra, Indonesia, in this September 17, 2015 file photo. Indonesian
forest fires that choked a swath of Southeast Asia with a smoky haze for weeks in 2015 may have caused more
than 100,000 premature deaths, according to new research that will add pressure on Indonesia’s government
to tackle the annual crisis. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana, File)
Study estimates 100,000
deaths from Indonesia haze
By Stephen Wright
The Associated Press
AKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesian
forest fires that choked a swath of
Southeast Asia with a smoky haze
for weeks last year may have caused more
than 100,000 deaths, according to new
research that will add pressure on
Indonesia’s government to tackle the
annual crisis.
The study by scientists from Harvard
University and Columbia University to be
published in the journal Environmental
Research Letters is being welcomed by
other researchers and Indonesia’s medical
profession as an advance in quantifying
the suspected serious public health effects
of the fires, which are set to clear land for
agriculture and forestry. The number of
deaths is an estimate derived from a
complex analysis that has not yet been
validated by analysis of official data on
mortality.
The research has implications for
land-use practices and Indonesia’s vast
pulp and paper industry. The researchers
showed that peatlands within timber
concessions, and peatlands overall, were a
much bigger proportion of the fires
observed by satellite than in 2006, which
was another particularly bad year for
haze. The researchers surmise that
draining of the peatlands to prepare them
for pulpwood plantations and other uses
made them more vulnerable to fires.
The estimate of early deaths linked to
respiratory illness and other causes covers
Indonesia and its neighbors, Singapore
and Malaysia. It dwarfs Indonesia’s offi-
cial toll of 19 that included deaths from
illness and the deaths of firefighters. How-
ever, the possible scale of serious health
consequences was indicated by a state-
ment from the country’s disaster-manage-
ment agency in October that said more
than 43 million Indonesians were exposed
to smoke from the fires and half a million
suffered acute respiratory infections.
The study considered only the health
impact on adults and restricts itself to the
effects of health-threatening fine parti-
culate matter, often referred to as PM2.5,
rather than all toxins that would be in the
smoke from burning peatlands and forests.
The bulk of the estimated deaths are in
Indonesia, by far the most populous of the
three countries and the country with the
biggest land area affected by haze.
The fires from July to October last year
in southern Sumatra and the Indonesian
part of Borneo were the worst since 1997
and exacerbated by El Niño dry conditions.
About 261,000 hectares of land burned.
Some of the fires started accidently, but
J
many were deliberately set by companies
and villagers to clear land for plantations
and agriculture.
Rajasekhar Bala, an environmental
engineering expert at the National
University of Singapore, one of five experts
who reviewed the paper for The Associated
Press and were not involved in the
research, said the study is preliminary and
involved a “very challenging” task of
analyzing the sources and spread of fine
particulate matter over several countries
and a lengthy timeframe.
Even with caveats, it should serve as a
“wake-up call” for firm action in Indonesia
to curb peatland and forest fires and for
regional cooperation to deal with the
fallout on public health, he said.
“Air pollution, especially that caused by
atmospheric fine particles, has grave
implications for human health,” he said.
Frank Murray, an associate professor of
environment science at Australia’s Mur-
doch University, said the death estimates
are not “precise health outcomes,” but
their overall scale should trigger intensi-
fied efforts to deal with the crisis. The
study is a major contribution to addressing
an international problem, he said.
The study finds there is a high statistical
probability that early deaths ranged
between 26,300 and 174,300. Its main
estimate of 100,300 deaths is the average
of those two figures. It predicts 91,600
deaths in Indonesia, another 6,500 in
Malaysia, and 2,200 in Singapore.
The researchers involved in the study
say the model they developed can be
combined with satellite and ground
station observations to analyze the haze in
close to real time. That gives it the
potential to be used to direct firefighting
efforts in a way that reduces the amount of
illness caused, they say.
The annual fires have strained relations
between Indonesia and its wealthier
neighbors Singapore and Malaysia, who
are at the mercy of winds that carry the
haze into their territory from Sumatra.
But the brunt of the crisis is faced by
millions of Indonesians in Sumatra and
Kalimantan, many of them poor and with
little or no means to protect themselves
from the blanket of smoke.
“Particles penetrate indoors, and hous-
ing in Indonesia is very well ventilated, so
I don’t think there is any avertive behavior
that people there could have taken that
would have been effective,” said Joel
Schwartz, an air-pollution epidemiologist
at Harvard who co-authored the study. “In
Singapore, if you close all the windows and
turn on the air conditioning you get some
protection, which may have happened.”
Continued on page 7
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