Indonesia May Take Up to a Decade to Curb Annual Land Fires
- Laws created at the local level needed to tackle issue
- Widodo cuts short U.S. visit as haze engulfs Indonesia
A villager tries to extinguish a peatland fire on the outskirts of Palangkaraya in central Kalimantan.
Photographer: Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty ImagesThis article is for subscribers only.
Indonesia may take as long as a decade to permanently curb the plantation land-burning that sends choking smog across swathes of Southeast Asia each year, according to a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University.
Although Indonesia has ratified a regional agreement committing it to act to reduce the smoke “haze” caused by the land fires, the law has yet to be enacted locally in its districts, said Jonatan Anderias Lassa, a research fellow at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies at the Singapore university.