Nothing to see here: Southeast Asia dismiss haze death study

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Students walk along a street as they are released from school to return home earlier due to the haze in Jambi, Indonesia's Jambi province on September 29. Photo: Reuters

Published: 8:50pm, 21 Sep 2016Updated: 10:40pm, 21 Sep 2016

Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean authorities have dismissed research that smoky haze from catastrophic forest fires in Indonesia last year caused 100,000 deaths.

Some even contend the haze caused no serious health problems, but experts said those assertions contradict well-established science.

Last year’s fires in Sumatra and the Indonesian part of Borneo were the worst since 1997, burning about 261,000 hectares of forests and peatland and sending haze across the region for weeks. Many were deliberately set by companies to clear land for palm oil and pulpwood plantations.

The study in the journal Environmental Research Letters by Harvard and Columbia researchers estimated the amount of health-threatening fine particles, often referred to as PM2.5, released by the fires that burned from July to October and tracked their spread across Southeast Asia using satellite observations.

A MI-17 helicopter run by the Indonesian National Disaster Mitigation Agency conducting water-bombs on a fire in South Sumatra last year. Photo: AFP

In Indonesia, a spokesman for the country’s disaster mitigation agency said the research “could be baseless or they have the wrong information”. Indonesia officially counted 24 deaths from the haze including people killed fighting the fires.