Blanket of pollution choking Asias cities
Blanket of pollution choking Asias cities
26 March 2014
published by www.taipeitimes.com
South East Asia — High above the vast Indonesian island of Sumatra, satellites identify hundreds of plumes of smoke drifting over the oil palm plantations and rainforests. They look harmless as the monsoon winds sweep them north and east toward Singapore, Malaysia and deep into Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Yet at ground level, Southeast Asian cities have been choking for weeks, wreathed in an acrid, stinking blanket of half-burned vegetation, mixed with industrial pollution, car exhaust fumes and ash.
From Indonesias Palangkarya on Borneo to Kuala Lumpur, the air has been thick, the sun a dull glow and face masks obligatory. Schools, airports and roads have been closed, and visibility at times has been down to just a few meters. Communities have had to be evacuated and people advised to remain indoors, transport has been disrupted and more than 50,000 people have had to be treated for asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses in Sumatra alone. Last week, more than 200 Malaysian schools were forced to close, and pollution twice reached officially hazardous levels.
The Asian haze, which comes and goes with the wind and droughts, is back with a vengeance just eight months after an embarrassed Indonesian government promised it would never happen again and was forced to apologize to neighboring countries for the pollution that blanketed the region in June last year.
Mixed with the dense photo-chemical smogs that regularly hang over most large traffic-choked Asian cities, Southeast Asias air pollution has become not just a major public health hazard, but is said to be now threatening food production, tourism and economic expansion. In addition, scientists say it may now be exacerbating climate change.
According to NASA satellite maps, more than 3,000 separate fires have been recorded across Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia since the middle of January, more than in June last year when the pollution spiked to dangerous levels and became a regional diplomatic crisis. This time the monsoon winds mostly spared Singapore, but sent the thick smog from burning peat soils and vegetation over much of the region. About 10 million people and an area the size of Britain and France have been affected.
Just as last year, most of this years fires appear to have been started in Riau Province, northern Sumatra, the center of the rampant Indonesian palm oil and pulp-paper industries. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said 70 percent of these fires were lit by landowners wanting to clear ground for more plantations. Yet while Indonesia is widely blamed for the air pollution, the latest satellite images show fires burning and haze spreading across Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos and as far away as the Philippines and Papua Province.
What has surprised observers is the timing: The burning season, when farmers clear land, does not usually start for many months. Monitoring groups such as Walhi, the World Resources Institute and Greenpeace say the fires are linked to the worst drought seen in years and corruption and inaction at government level. The Riau government said that so far only a handful of suspects have been held for setting the fires.
FOREST CLEARERS
Nearly half are burning on land managed by large pulpwood, palm oil and logging companies which have turned the rainforest into a giant fire-prone region by clearing millions of acres for plantations, said Nigel Sizer of the Washington-based World Resources Institute, which uses satellite data to pinpoint hot spots. The corporations have denied involvement, saying the latest fires were illegally set.
The fires are starting outside our forest concessions, but with the heavy, circular winds theyre jumping everywhere, pulp and paper manufacturer April Indonesia president director Kusnan Rahmin said.
Sizer said: Even if they did not start the fires, they are responsible for massive and dramatic clearing of forests in the regions that have been burning, and to some extent for the conflicts with local communities that may be starting fires to stake their claim to land awarded in concessions to the companies.
Once ignited, peat fires are extremely difficult to extinguish and generate massive air pollution that contributes to the choking haze now blanketing much of Sumatra, said Rhett Butler, editor of the international forest conservation Web site Mongabay.
Scientists now fear that the Asian haze will intensify and become an annual event as the population of the region rises to an estimated 5 billion people and climate change bites over the next 30 years. Next weeks Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the expected impacts of climate change is expected to warn of cities becoming unliveable for millions as temperatures rise. Droughts are expected to become longer and more intense and the number of extremely hot days to grow.
Still unclear is how far the haze from burning forests feeds into Asias rapidly worsening urban air pollution to form a semi-permanent toxic cloud, which is said to be thick enough to disrupt monsoons and weather patterns across the world and reduce sunlight and crop yields.
From being more or less accepted as the inevitable price of industrial development and poverty reduction just a few years ago, air pollution has risen dramatically up the regions political agenda as the costs are counted. Asia is now the center of global air pollution, which, along with obesity, is the worlds fastest growing cause of death.
A recent Lancet report said that every year more than 2.1 million people in Asia die prematurely from air pollution, mostly from the minute particles of diesel soot and gases emitted by cars and trucks, as well as half-burned vegetation from forest burning. Of these deaths, 1.2 million were in East Asia and China, and 712,000 in South Asia, including India.
According to the Lancet report, by a consortium of universities working in conjunction with the UN, Asia loses more than 50 million years of healthy life from fine particle air pollution per year. Air pollution also contributes to higher rates of cognitive decline, strokes and heart attacks, it said. In a separate report last month, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences claimed that Asian air pollution was now affecting climate around the world and making cities like Beijing uninhabitable and suggestive of what a nuclear winter might be like.
Pollution originating from Asia clearly has an impact on the upper atmosphere and it appears to make such storms or cyclones even stronger, said Renyi Zhang, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University and a coauthor of the study with NASA scientists.
This pollution affects cloud formations, precipitation, storm intensity and other factors and eventually impacts climate. Most likely, pollution from Asia can have important consequences on the weather pattern here over North America, Zhang said.
BROWN CLOUD
The study backs UN research that suggests a layer of air pollution, the brown cloud, regularly covers the upper atmosphere over Asia between January and March and could precipitate an environmental disaster that could affect billions of people.
Scientists say it is the result of forest fires, the burning of agricultural wastes, dramatic increases in the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles, industries and power stations, and emissions from millions of inefficient cookers burning wood and cow dung.
The effects of the Asian brown cloud have been linked to the retreat, over the last half a century, of glaciers in the Himalayas that supply water to major rivers, including the Yangtze, the Ganges and the Indus, coauthor Harshal Pandve said.
Asian leaders have been slow to understand and act on air pollution, but are now aware of peoples anger. China, embarrassed by air pollution before the 2008 Olympics, says it is now costing its economy US$400 billion a year, or 6 percent of its GDP. Beijing last month pledged US$1.6 billion to reward cities for tackling it and said it planned to close 300 factories.
Meanwhile, Singapore has proposed a law which would allow it to fine foreign companies for causing cross-border air pollution.
Observers say passing new laws is not enough. In the Philippines, where car numbers are predicted to quadruple within 20 years, a brown cloud hangs over the mega-city Metro Manila most days, despite higher standards for vehicles and draconian laws.
Most Asian governments are still concerned with economic development to the detriment of everything else, Manilas Clean Air partnership Vicky Segovia said. We are not impressed by any of them.
A world problem
India
Air pollution in 180 Indian cities is more than six times higher than WHO standards and is the countrys fifth-biggest killer. Improvements in car and fuel technology since 2000 have been nullified by the rise in car numbers and the poor quality of the fuel used.
Africa
African cities are increasingly choked in smog from the burning of poor-quality diesel engines and firewood. In Lagos, Nigeria, tens of thousands of inefficient generators and more than 2 million old cars are in use. The main teaching hospital says one in five of all admissions are now linked to respiratory diseases.
US
Air pollution causes about 200,000 early deaths a year across the US, with emissions from cars and trucks causing 53,000 and power generation 52,000, says Massachusetts Institute of Technologys environment laboratory. California suffers most from air pollution (21,000 early deaths).
Europe
EU environment commissioner Janez Potocnik says poor air quality is the top environmental cause of premature deaths in the EU, causing more than 100,000 premature deaths a year and costing from ￡300 billion to ￡800 billion (US$495 billion to US$1.3 trillion) a year in extra health costs. Air pollution causes 29,000 early deaths a year in the UK and similar numbers in France and Germany. This month Paris curbed car use on one day to cut pollution.
