Last week, the annual Haze Outlook 2021 was launched, a report on the recurring haze event in Southeast Asia authored by the Singapore Institute of International Affairs (SIIA) and Segi Enam Advisors. Part of the report reviewed the haze conditions—or lack thereof—in 2020.
While initial fears was that Southeast Asia would be battling both the Covid-19 pandemic and the annual transboundary haze simultaneously, no severe haze incident was recorded for in 2020. This was partly due to weather conditions within the region, i.e. a strong La Niña and a muted India Ocean Dipole phenomena resulted in one of the wettest year for Indonesia in the past decade, thereby dampening fire occurrences.
Consequently, much fewer hotspots were recorded in 2020 compared to 2019. The Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry (KLHK) reported that some 297,000 hectares of land were burned in 2020 compared to the 1.6 million hectares in 2019.
Data: Hotspot imagery from NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management Systems (FIRMS, https://earthdata.nasa.gov/firms), peatlands from Jiren et al. (2019), and Khor Reports estimates. Source: Segi Enam Advisors (2021).
Nonetheless, the outbreak of the coronavirus has had some effect on the Indonesian fire prevention landscape. For one, the pandemic appeared to have somewhat hindered replanting activities in the agricultural sector, although businesses and experts have indicated that this was more apparent in rural areas compared to urban centres. On the other hand, Covid-19 has adversely impacted Indonesia’s fire fighting and prevention capabilities: initiatives such as outreach programmes with fire-prone villages and corporate fire management efforts were scaled back and government resources had to be redirected to manage the pandemic.
Read the full report here: SIIA Haze Report 2021