Smoke from Indonesia's fires shut nearly 600 schools in Malaysia

On Friday, 591 schools in the Malaysian state of Sarawak stayed shut because the air outside was too dirty to send children into. The South China Morning Post reports that the state education department shut 509 primary schools and 82 secondary schools, keeping close to 200,000 students at home. Sarawak sits on the same island as Indonesian Kalimantan, and the smoke drifting over it comes from forest and peatland fires burning on the Indonesian side of that border.

Malaysia measures the air with an air pollution index, or API, a single number that turns several pollutants into one reading: 0 to 50 is good, 51 to 100 moderate, 101 to 200 unhealthy, 201 to 300 very unhealthy, and anything above 300 is hazardous. Serian, a district close to the Kalimantan border, read 239 at eight in the morning. Sri Aman, Kuching and Samarahan passed 180, Sarikei reached 172, and Sibu and Bintulu went above 150. That is most of a state living in air that its own government calls unhealthy.

Where the smoke comes from is not a mystery. The Post traces the fires to land cleared for farming and plantations, much of it on peatland, ground made of thick, wet, dead plant matter. Drain peat so crops can grow on it and it burns easily. This happens in dry years, and the smoke crosses the border every time. A climate expert told the Post that ASEAN decides by consensus, which limits what the region can do, because no member can be pushed into action it has not agreed to.

Why it matters

The people closest to these fires are in Kalimantan, and they breathe the smoke before it ever reaches Sarawak, so treat a school closure across the border as a reading on your own air. For Indonesia the second cost is diplomatic: this smoke arrives on the neighbours every dry season, and the region's consensus rules mean they have no way to make it stop. Watch whether Jakarta moves against the land clearing that starts the fires, because that is the part of this a government can actually change.