This week, windblown smoke from land fires in Sumatra, western Indonesia, has again clouded the skies of neighboring Singapore. And according to a new study, episodes like this one are bound to happen more frequently.
The air pollution in Singapore this week has yet to match the record levels seen in June 2013, when the haze made international headlines and caused a diplomatic spat. That crisis spurred action, ranging from a multi-stakeholder workshop to a Singapore law criminalizing land fires in Indonesia, to the recent news that Indonesia will ratify a regional agreement on transboundary haze, 12 years after the country signed it.
The crisis also spurred research, including a new paper from scientists at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) that sought to examine the circumstances of the fires. The study, published in August in Scientific Reports, used remote sensing, rainfall records and other data to show that the fires – deliberately set by people to clear land for agriculture – occurred mostly on dried and degraded peatlands, not forests as originally thought, and that they were enabled by a short dry period.