John O'Callaghan, Singapore – Southeast Asia will suffer more dry weather and smoke from fires in Indonesia before monsoon winds offer a reprieve in November, environmental officials in Singapore said on Tuesday.
Forest fires and slash-and-burn land clearing on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, compounded by low rainfall from the return of the El Nino weather phenomenon, have cast a haze across the region for more than a month. In 1997 and 1998, smoke from raging fires spread to neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia and cost regional economies $9 billion in damage to farming, transport and tourism.
Singapore's National Environment Agency said even though El Nino this year was relatively weak, haze could hang over the region until October as dry weather stokes more fires.
"We can expect some increased occurrence of forest fires," Wong Teo Suan, deputy director of services at the agency, told a news conference. "But it will not be like the 1997-98 condition." The agency said recent satellite photographs showed more than 800 hotspots on Borneo, a giant island shared by the Indonesian region of Kalimantan, the sultanate of Brunei and the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah.
"Although there were showers in some parts of Sumatra and Borneo over the last two days, the showers did not reduce the number of hotspots much," it said in a statement.
"Wetter weather conditions are expected in the region at least in the first half of this week. But less rainfall is predicted for southeast Kalimantan and southern Sumatra, so these areas are expected to have moderate to thick smoke haze." WIND AND RAIN The fires should ease when prevailing winds now blowing from the southwest shift to the northeast in November, said Loh Ah Tuan, the agency's director-general of environmental protection.
"The northeast monsoon period usually brings about a lot of rainfall, so it's less likely to have any fires," he said.
The two days of heavy rains in Borneo helped lift a shroud of smoke choking residents, but exhausted emergency crews continued to battle some of the hundreds of blazes.
An official from Merpati Nusantara airlines told Reuters on Tuesday the carrier had suspended service to the Kalimantan cities of Pontianak and Palangkaraya for a week due to the haze.
Merpati's flights are scheduled for the morning when smoke is thickest, which can mean delays and cancellations that tie up the airline's limited equipment. The environmental problems have also cut demand for seats, reports said.
While skies over Singapore generally have been clear and sunny, the pollution index has crept over the line between "good" and "moderate" several times this month.
Readings were expected to worsen slightly in September and October but still fall far short of the sustained "unhealthy" levels in 1997 when smoky clouds shrouded the city state.
Skies above Kuala Lumpur were hazy on Tuesday, although far clearer than in mid-August when haze enveloping parts of peninsular Malaysia cut visibility to as low as 1.5 km from the normal 10 km near the capital.
The dry season makes it easier for plantation fires to spread out of control. The region also has large deposits of peat that allow the fires to smoulder even after flames are doused.
Conservationists have long criticised Jakarta for failing to protect its natural resources but Indonesia has said the country's laws are too weak to deal with the problem.
[With reporting by Karima Anjani in Jakarta and Patrick Chalmers in Kuala Lumpur.]