Analysis: ASEAN urged to enact laws for clearer skies, as member-states bicker again over transboundary haze

WHAT MORE CAN BE DONE?

Sustainable development lawyer and climate change activist Kiu Jia Yaw told CNA that ASEAN needed to build on the 2002 Transboundary Haze Pollution Agreement which is a framework for cooperation and sharing resources in relation to the haze.

Like Greenpeace, he suggested that ASEAN member states hold their own businesses to account for their operation overseas and hoped for Malaysia to enact its own law and for this to be then reciprocated by other countries. 

He pointed out that Indonesia for example recently revealed 203 companies have received warnings, and 20 companies have been ordered to shut due to their involvement in the fires, including subsidiaries of Malaysian companies.

“If any of those subsidiaries are indeed related to Malaysian companies, the Malaysian government could summon them to explain about allegations of fires on their concession lands,” he said. 

He stressed that any such law should only deal with Malaysian companies, unlike Singapore’s law which purports to have authority over entities outside of the Republic.      

“Each country will regulate their own companies so that they don’t meddle with another country’s companies and avoid any issues of sovereignty,” he said, pointing out that Indonesia had taken offence with Singapore’s Transboundary Haze Pollution Act and did not cooperate with the Republic in 2015.

Singapore had then investigated four Indonesian companies in relation to causing or condoning fires that resulted in unhealthy levels of haze in the city-state.

Mr Kiu said that ultimately in the longer term, more stringent business practices would make agricultural commodities from ASEAN more competitive in the global markets because they would perform better in the area of business and human rights.

“They would have less issues exporting into other markets because they would have a higher environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. From a financing and investors perspective, they would be able to meet more and more ESG due diligence processes,” he said.     

Dr Helena Varkkey, an Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at the Department of International and Strategic Studies, told CNA that ASEAN has its framework in regard to the haze in place, but the challenge was to operationalise all the things stated in the framework.  

She said a priority would be having a coordinating centre to deal with the haze and for uniformity in the data that is used to solve the problem such as the data on air quality.   

“You have a situation where there are different readings for the Air Pollution Index (API) in Johor and the Pollution Standards Index (PSI) in Singapore. All these things need to be worked out,” she said.