The Damn Haze – What’s Always from Indonesia?

 

This year’s haze is particularly bad. And it has been lingering for so long!

And it could have been prevented in the first place!

Blame It on El Niño?

Every meteorological agency, including Indonesia’s own Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency BMKG (Badan Meteorologi, Klimatologi, dan Geofisika) says this year’s El Niño will be severe and could become one of the strongest, perhaps the strongest, in the modern instrumental record.

Yesterday (13 October 2026) BMKG reported that the Niño-3.4 anomaly had reached about +3.33°C in its latest 10-day analysis, while its three-month ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which is the overall Pacific climate system) index for August–October was +3.08°C. BMKG explicitly classifies this as “El Niño sangat kuat” — very strong El Niño.

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States) using a somewhat different dataset and baseline, measured Niño-3.4 at +2.1°C in its 8 October assessment and says a strong-to-very-strong El Niño is likely through January–March 2027.

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology recorded a weekly relative Niño-3.4 value of +2.81°C for the week ending 11 October — the highest in that particular weekly dataset, exceeding the comparable 2015 value. Most models project the peak around November–December and above +3°C on that measure.

The WMO goes further. Its latest forecast expects the October–December Niño-3.4 seasonal anomaly to reach roughly +3.7°C, potentially exceeding previous modern records, with the event peaking around December.

BMKG reports directly to the President and handles weather, climate, air quality, earthquakes and tsunami monitoring. However, it can do all the forecasting with good accuracy, it cannot force a bupati (a regency head) to act, stop a villager from burning rubbish, arrest somebody clearing land by fire, or compel a plantation company to obey the law. Indonesia's ability to convert their warnings into preventive action: much less impressive. It can tell the President three months beforehand that conditions are becoming dangerous. The important question is what the President does with that warning.

Indonesia’s Double Whammy

This is especially important to our earlier discussion about the haze. Indonesia presently has not only an exceptionally powerful El Niño but also a positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). BMKG measured the IOD at about +0.70 in early October. Both phenomena tend to suppress rainfall over much of Indonesia.

The result is quite dramatic. During the first ten days of October:

• 83.85% of Indonesia experienced low rainfall
• 87.72% experienced below-normal rainfall

BMKG has issued drought warnings across large areas of Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and elsewhere.

BMKG explicitly says that the combination of the very strong El Niño + positive IOD is reducing cloud formation and moisture over Indonesia and increasing the risk of forest and land fires.

Nature has dealt it an exceptionally bad hand this year.

But the leadership is so ill-prepared!

El Niño creates the tinderbox; it doesn't strike the match.

Peatlands don't ignite themselves simply because the Pacific warms. Human burning, drained peat, poor prevention and weak enforcement determine whether an extreme dry season becomes an international haze catastrophe.

And 2026 is precisely the sort of year in which a government that understood the danger should have been fanatically preventive months before the fires began.

Basically a Failure of Prevention and Land Governance

Much of the fire is burning in peat, not ordinary forest. Naturally wet peat does not readily burn. But when peatlands are drained for oil-palm, pulpwood and other development, the water table falls and metres of accumulated organic material become combustible. Once fire gets into the peat, it can smoulder underground for weeks, reappearing some distance away. NASA scientists say these underground fires can effectively continue until substantial rain arrives. Water-bombing helicopters deal mainly with the surface manifestation.

El Niño explains the severity, but not why the land was capable of burning. Indonesia is experiencing its worst fire season in roughly a decade, intensified by the strongest El Niño in more than ten years. But the important distinction is that drought does not create drained peatlands or start most Indonesian fires. Historically, the overwhelming majority of these fires have been associated with human activity — land clearing, agriculture, plantations and sometimes land disputes.

There has been a serious institutional gap. After the disastrous 2015 haze, Jokowi established the Peatland Restoration Agency, later BRGM. It concentrated on rewetting peat, blocking drainage canals and restoring damaged areas. Its mandate expired at the end of 2024, after which responsibilities became dispersed among different ministries. Indonesian parliamentary research itself warned that this fragmentation could weaken restoration and fire prevention.

Only on 24 September 2026, in the middle of the present crisis, did Prabowo announce a new National Peatland and Mangrove Management Agency. How pathetic!

The economic incentives favour clearing, while enforcement is much more difficult. Fire remains an extraordinarily cheap means of clearing vegetation. I do not believe large plantation interests are involved. The culprits are largely small smallholders and slash-and-burn nomadic cultivators who are oblivious to the danger of haze. Some of the problems can be attributed to overlapping concessions, unclear land titles, national-versus-local authority and uneven or hands-off enforcements. Research on Indonesian peat governance repeatedly finds fragmented responsibility and power struggles between government levels and interested parties.

Reactive rather than Preventive Mindsets

The government is still reacting after fires have become large. As recently as 13 October, Prabowo ordered additional resources as criticism intensified. Malaysia and Singapore have offered assistance, while Indonesia had not, at that point, accepted foreign help or declared a national disaster. Environmental groups estimate 637,000–900,000 hectares may already have burned in 2026. By the time tens of thousands of people, helicopters and water bombers are being mobilised, the crucial battle — preventing drained peat from igniting — has already been lost.

Indonesia demonstrated after 2015 that sustained peat restoration, canal blocking, monitoring and tougher enforcement can sharply reduce the problem. The World Bank specifically credits peat rewetting, zero-burning policies and stronger conservation measures with improvements after earlier crises.

But all was forgotten again!

The present episode suggests something more troubling: institutional attention relaxed, peat remained degraded, responsibility became fragmented after BRGM (Badan Restorasi Gambut dan Mangrove — the Peatland and Mangrove Restoration Agency of Indonesia) disappeared, and prevention was inadequate before this year's drought arrived. Prabowo is now throwing resources at the fires, but aircraft cannot repair the underlying hydrology.

In other words, El Niño lit the fuse, but Indonesia had allowed the gunpowder to remain there.

Misplaced Arrogance and Concept of Accountability

On 10 October 2026, Syahganda Nainggolan, the head of Indonesia’s Government Communication Agency (Bakom), said, “We don’t just send smoke; when there is no smoke, we send oxygen.” He added that the oxygen in Singapore and Malaysia also came from Indonesia’s forests. He was responding to criticism over the current transboundary haze.

He seemed to describe the present fires as essentially a natural phenomenon “beyond human error”. And this is not new. In 2015, then Vice-President Jusuf Kalla famously complained that Malaysia and Singapore enjoyed clean air from Indonesia for eleven months without thanking Indonesia, yet became upset over one month of haze.

An Indonesian minister also said something to that effect in 2013!

To me, that is revealing because it is not merely an unfortunate joke. It reflects a recurring defensive mentality in parts of the Indonesian establishment: when criticised over haze, the response sometimes shifts from “How do we stop this?” to “You benefit from us too, so don't complain.”

That attitude is almost the opposite of accountability.

What can we do if we have a neighbour like that?

Lack of Community Education

Indonesian research on peat-fire prevention identifies not only deliberate burning because it is cheap, but also seemingly casual behaviour such as uncontrolled rubbish burning, campfires and discarded cigarettes. The fact that researchers continue to call for basic community education, village fire groups and behavioural change tells us that this is not merely a problem of Jakarta policy or large plantation companies.

There are communities in Riau and Kalimantan that understand the danger extremely well and actively patrol against fires; indeed, some are now suing their own government over the haze.

In many places, the immediate local calculation can be very different from that of somebody breathing the haze in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. Burning is cheap and familiar; the smoke may be regarded as seasonal inconvenience; the serious health consequences are delayed or poorly understood; and the eventual haze hundreds of kilometres away feels disconnected from the person who starts a small fire.

That creates a particularly difficult governance problem: weak enforcement from above combined with insufficient social inhibition against burning from below. If setting a fire were regarded locally with the same seriousness as contaminating a village's drinking water, Indonesia's haze problem would already be much smaller.

And this helps explain something otherwise puzzling: Indonesia has been suffering catastrophic haze episodes since at least 1997–98. After nearly thirty years, the country certainly cannot claim ignorance of the phenomenon. What is missing in parts of the countryside is not information that haze exists, but a sufficiently strong culture of prevention and personal responsibility for causing it.

That distinction — knowing about haze versus feeling responsible for preventing it — may actually be the more important point.

Having lived and observed rural and semi-rural communities firsthand, I find the lack of awareness of the health and environmental consequences of open burning widespread enough to be a major cause of the haze problem.

A farmer or villager who regards burning rubbish, clearing undergrowth, or setting a small patch alight as perfectly normal behaviour may not connect his individual fire with the enormous haze cloud eventually hanging over Sumatra, Java, Malaysia or Singapore.

And after decades of recurrent haze, that widespread indifference becomes a governance failure as well. If people still do not appreciate the danger, then public education, enforcement and local leadership have plainly failed.

So I would now add a fifth fundamental cause to my earlier analysis: a deeply inadequate grassroots awareness of — and sense of responsibility for — the consequences of open burning. That is much closer to the point you were making.

Indonesia needs a Lee Kuan Yew

Indonesia’s problem is not a shortage of laws; it is a shortage of consistent enforcement, administrative discipline and consequences.

What I am invoking in Lee Kuan Yew is less the man himself than a governing style: clear rules, competent bureaucracy, relentless follow-through, little tolerance for excuses, and the willingness to impose unpopular measures when public order or long-term national interests are at stake.

On haze, that would mean stopping illegal burning before the dry season, holding local officials personally accountable, prosecuting concession holders regardless of connections, and sustaining public education until behaviour actually changes.

Some argue that Indonesia is vastly harder to govern than Singapore: more than 17,000 islands, hundreds of millions of people, powerful provincial and district elites, deeply decentralised authority, and enormous rural areas where Jakarta’s instructions can become progressively weaker as they travel downward.

I beg to differ. 

A determined leader changes how that machinery behaves. He makes an issue a national priority, appoints people who can execute, removes those who cannot, and makes governors, bupatis, plantation owners and enforcement agencies understand that failure has consequences.

There is actually a useful Indonesian comparison. After the catastrophic 2015 fires, Jokowi personally elevated peatland restoration and fire prevention, created new institutional mechanisms and imposed much stronger political attention on the problem. The World Bank describes the post-2015 period as bringing a new urgency under Jokowi’s leadership.

Prabowo, by contrast, called slash-and-burn clearing “ecological terrorism” on 17 September 2026, but by 13 October, with the haze already affecting neighbouring countries badly, he was still ordering additional resources to fight fires that had been raging for weeks.

LKY did not wait for Singaporeans spontaneously to acquire civic consciousness. He forced behavioural change through leadership, education, enforcement and persistence, until much of it eventually became social habit.

Applied to Indonesia, a sufficiently determined president could say: No more burning. Then make every governor and bupati responsible for hotspots in his jurisdiction; punish officials who look the other way; prosecute politically connected concessionaires; educate villagers relentlessly; provide practical alternatives to burning; and repeat the exercise every dry season until attitudes change.

Indonesia's enormous size makes that harder than Singapore. It does not make it impossible.

And perhaps the most important point from your experience there is this: when widespread public attitudes themselves are part of the problem, strong leadership becomes more important, not less. Institutions don't suddenly acquire determination. Somebody at the top has to supply it.

I always joke with friends about sending recalcitrant officials to firing squads, just like what they do in China.

But literally, no: China does not quite send people to a firing squad nowadays. But it certainly has a reputation for making people fear the consequences of breaking rules. Serious environmental offences can attract heavy fines and long prison terms.

When Beijing decides that something must stop, local officials know that failure can damage careers and offenders know punishment is real.

That changes behaviour very quickly.

And that is precisely what Indonesia lacks on haze: not laws, but fear of the law and fear of accountability. A bupati, plantation manager or villager must believe that if he permits or starts illegal burning, somebody will actually come after him. Without that, annual appeals to “please don’t burn” become almost meaningless.

Indonesia does not need more regulations on haze; it needs a government that makes people afraid to ignore the regulations already there.

What good are speeches, slogans, television appearances, grand announcements if an elected leader cannot produce durable results.

A leader may appear to project decisiveness, yet Indonesia is again struggling with a preventable haze disaster, and he is now mobilising additional resources after the fires have become severe. Communication has increasingly been mistaken for governing. Social media, 24-hour news and personality politics reward the leader who looks decisive immediately. Actual leadership is much more boring: choosing competent people, forcing bureaucracies to perform, accepting responsibility when things fail, pursuing policies for years rather than weeks, and being prepared to lose popularity to get necessary things done.

That brings us back to Lee Kuan Yew. Whether one admires or dislikes his methods, nobody could seriously accuse him of mistaking announcements for outcomes. If Singapore was dirty, he wanted it cleaned. If corruption was the problem, officials were investigated and punished. If public behaviour had to change, the government pursued it year after year until it changed. The test was not what had been announced but what Singapore looked like afterwards.

A politician wants people to believe he is strong. A leader makes the state work.

At a deeper level, leadership is about character, moral courage, historical imagination, legitimacy, judgment under uncertainty, and the ability to shape a people’s sense of direction. A country can be efficiently administered and still be badly led.

The Real Lesson of the Haze

So let us stop blaming El Niño. El Niño explains why 2026 is extraordinarily dry. It explains why vegetation burns more easily and why peat fires become so difficult to extinguish. But El Niño did not drain the peatlands. It did not light the fires. It did not allow decades of casual burning to become culturally tolerated.

Those were human failures. And ultimately, human failures of this scale become failures of leadership. A good leader cannot make the rain fall. But he can prepare for the drought.

He can make sure the peat remains wet. He can make local officials accountable. He can educate his people. He can enforce the law. And, above all, he can create a culture in which starting an illegal fire is no longer regarded as an inconsequential act.

Indonesia has had almost thirty years since the great haze of 1997–98 to learn this lesson. How many more years does it need?

End