We have the technology, the agreements and more than 30 years of experience. So why are Malaysians still looking at the sky and checking the API?

By: Zuflin Nazli

There was an uncomfortable irony on the morning of Malaysia Day, 16 September 2026. While Malaysians were celebrating the formation of our country, many of us could hardly see the blue sky above it.

By 9am, 41 locations in Peninsular Malaysia were recording unhealthy Air Pollutant Index (API) readings.  Johan Setia recorded 187, Cheras 179 and Putrajaya 176. Penang, Perak, Negeri Sembilan, Melaka, Pahang, Johor, Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu were also affected. Sarawak, which had suffered much worse conditions only weeks earlier, was finally getting some relief as changing winds shifted the haze towards the peninsula.

There are some visitors whom we welcome every year: Hari Raya visitors, old friends and relatives we have not seen for years. Haze is not one of them. Nobody invites it, nobody misses it when it leaves, yet somehow it keeps finding its way back to our doorstep.

We close our windows, reduce outdoor activities, check the API, buy masks and wait for rain. Then the sky clears and life returns to normal – until the next episode. After more than three decades, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether this is still an environmental emergency or whether we have quietly accepted it as part of the regional calendar.

A crisis more than three decades old

Malaysia has been here before, many times. The Department of Environment records significant haze episodes going back to 1991 and 1994, when forest fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan were identified as major external contributors.

The 1997 episode was far worse. Sarawak was placed under a haze emergency after API readings exceeded 500. In August 2005, emergencies were declared in Port Klang and Kuala Selangor when readings there also crossed 500. Other serious episodes followed. In 2019 alone, around 2,500 Malaysian schools were reportedly closed during the haze.

So this is certainly not something we discovered yesterday.

To be fair, not every dirty Malaysian sky can simply be blamed on our neighbour. Malaysia has its own sources of air pollution – vehicles, industries, open burning and local fires among them.

Weather also matters. El Nino and prolonged dry periods can turn an ordinary fire into a major disaster. The responsible position is to acknowledge all of this. But weather does not light a match. A dry peatland does not decide to clear itself for agriculture. When hundreds or thousands of hotspots appear and satellite monitoring shows smoke plumes moving across national borders, it becomes increasingly difficult to describe everything as simply an act of nature.

And 2026 has become a serious year.

On 26 August, the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre activated Alert Level 3 for the southern ASEAN region. It reported widespread moderate-to-dense smoke haze from hotspot clusters in Kalimantan, with transboundary haze moving northwards from West Kalimantan, while significant smoke was also observed over Sumatra. El Nino conditions and prolonged dryness were expected to increase the risk further.

The scale of Indonesia’s own suffering should not be overlooked either. This matters because the discussion in Malaysia can sometimes sound as though someone across the Straits is happily burning a forest while only we suffer. That is simply not true.

Indonesia is also paying a very heavy price. By early September, more than 113,000 respiratory illness cases had been reported in areas affected by the fires, according to Indonesian health authorities, while millions of people across Sumatra and Borneo had been exposed to smoke. Schools have been disrupted and firefighting operations have become enormous.

These are our neighbours breathing the same bad air.

Indonesia has acted

Its meteorological agency, BMKG, has conducted repeated weather-modification operations to create rainfall and wet vulnerable peatlands. These operations have covered areas including Riau, South Sumatra and several provinces across Kalimantan. In West Kalimantan, BMKG reported in early September that weather-modification operations had successfully produced rain over some vulnerable areas, helping to wet peatlands and suppress fires.

Aerial firefighting has also been extensive. Millions of litres of water have been dropped across priority provinces, while personnel from national and regional agencies, the military, police and specialist fire teams have been deployed. Indonesia has also accepted international assistance, including aircraft and firefighting support, as the crisis intensified.

More importantly, enforcement appears to have become more serious.

By 7 September, Indonesian police reported that 138 people had been named as suspects across 200 wildfire-related police reports. The cases included alleged deliberate burning and negligence, while eight corporations were under investigation.

Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry separately reported on 15 September that it was handling 31 forest-fire cases across ten provinces, with cases at different stages of investigation and prosecution.

Six forestry companies had also received administrative sanctions following fires within concession areas covering more than 1,500 hectares; one company had its business licence suspended.

President Prabowo Subianto has publicly ordered stronger action against deliberate forest and land burning and specifically demanded further investigation into possible corporate involvement.

Those are not small actions. As a Malaysian neighbour, I think we should acknowledge them.

The real test is prevention

But we must also be allowed to ask a difficult question: is it enough?

Perhaps the fair answer today is this: it is enough to demonstrate effort, but not yet enough to demonstrate success. There is an important difference.

If every dry season requires thousands of firefighters, aircraft, water bombing, cloud seeding, emergency health responses and international assistance, we may be becoming very good at fighting fires without becoming equally good at preventing them.

That is like celebrating how quickly the fire brigade reaches our house every year while ignoring the person repeatedly playing with matches in the house.

Excellent emergency response is necessary. Successful prevention means the fire does not start.

The real test, therefore, is not how many people are arrested in September 2026. It is whether the same land is still burning in 2027, 2028 and 2029. It is whether companies and landowners believe that illegal burning will cost more than whatever economic advantage they gain from doing it. It is whether damaged peatlands can be kept wet, whether small farmers have realistic and affordable alternatives to burning land, and whether corporations are held accountable consistently – not only during the weeks when satellite images become embarrassing internationally.

ASEAN agreements and the implementation gap

The ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution was signed in Kuala Lumpur in June 2002, following the disastrous fires of the late 1990s. It entered into force in 2003. Indonesia ratified it in 2014 and deposited its instrument of ratification in January 2015, making all ASEAN members parties to the agreement.

ASEAN now also has the Second ASEAN Haze-Free Roadmap 2023-2030, with the ambitious vision of achieving a transboundary haze-free ASEAN by 2030. It contains strategies covering peatland management, sustainable agriculture, stronger laws, information sharing, technology and institutional capacity.

Again, everything looks impressive on paper.

We have satellites.
We have hotspot monitoring.
We have regional agreements and weather models.
We have environmental ministries, committees and roadmaps.
We even have a roadmap for a haze-free ASEAN.

What we apparently still do not have is a reliable guarantee that Malaysians will not need to check the API before allowing their children to play outside during the next dry season.

What Malaysia and its neighbours can do

It is easy to stand on this side of the border and complain. It is harder to ask what we can contribute.

Malaysia and Indonesia have already shown that practical cooperation is possible. In August, both governments coordinated haze-control efforts, including weather-modification operations around border areas, and Indonesia gave clearance for Malaysian cloud-seeding operations involving its airspace. This is exactly the kind of cooperation that should be strengthened, but much earlier in the cycle.

Instead of waiting until the API reaches 150 or 200, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Brunei could establish stronger joint prevention operations during the months before the dry season peaks. Satellite hotspots, peat-water levels, rainfall deficits and wind patterns are already available. The intervention trigger should therefore be the risk of a major fire, not merely the arrival of smoke in another country’s airspace.

Malaysia can also contribute technical capability in forecasting, firefighting, peatland management and emergency response. ASEAN noted this year that Malaysia had deployed additional automated weather stations in peatland reserves and launched MyCMAQ, a high-resolution operational air-quality forecasting system covering Malaysia and the wider Southeast Asian region. Data like this becomes more valuable when regional agencies are looking at the same information and acting before an emergency develops.

There is also an economic dimension. ASEAN’s current framework recognises that sustainable land management and haze-free agriculture need investment. Smallholders cannot simply be told, “Do not burn,” if the cleaner alternative costs several times more and nobody helps them make the transition. Regional financing, machinery-sharing programmes, community firefighting teams and incentives for zero-burning agriculture may achieve more in the long term than another fleet of helicopters flying over a burning peatland.

Corporate accountability should also cross borders. If any Malaysian-linked, Singaporean-linked, Indonesian or multinational company benefits from plantations and commodity supply chains in fire-prone areas, nationality should not become a shield. Transparency over concession boundaries, fire locations, ownership and supply chains must improve.

The atmosphere does not check a company’s passport before carrying its smoke across the Straits.

Perhaps ASEAN also needs to move from polite seasonal diplomacy towards permanent operational cooperation. The proposed ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Transboundary Haze Pollution Control, to be based in Indonesia, should become fully operational and meaningful, not another institution whose greatest achievement is producing meeting minutes. ASEAN ministers were still discussing the steps required for its full operationalisation in 2026.

Malaysia has helped before. During the catastrophic 1997 episode, Malaysian firefighters were deployed to assist Indonesia under Operation Haze. There is no reason why that neighbourly spirit cannot continue today, using better technology, better forecasting and three decades of additional experience.

A problem neighbours must solve together

This issue should not become Malaysia versus Indonesia. Geography has already decided that we are neighbours. We cannot relocate Sumatra, move Kalimantan or install one giant industrial fan somewhere in Johor and blow everything south towards Australia. Although, after several decades of haze, I suspect somebody has probably considered it.

The real answer is less entertaining but far more difficult. We need prevention before suppression, enforcement before excuses, cooperation before crisis and accountability long after the headlines disappear.

Indonesia has taken significant steps this year, and Malaysians should recognise that. But Indonesia itself is suffering badly enough to know that the present situation cannot become the new normal.

As neighbours, Malaysia should not simply point across the border and say, “It is your problem.” Neither should we accept the smoke arriving every few years and say, “Never mind lah, this is ASEAN, kan?”

Good neighbours help each other. Good neighbours also tell each other when something is wrong.

Let us finally fix this together – before the next wind decides whose turn it is to breathe the smoke.