A man takes selfie with the background Petronas tower covered by haze in Kuala Lumpur city, Malaysia. Malaysia hit by haze from forest fires came from Indonesia Borneo island and Sumatra. Photo courtesy of Joshua Paul/Greenpeace.
Indonesia is battling huge forest and land fires. According to official data, around 202,010 hectares of forest and land burned across Indonesia between January and July 2026.
In particular, massive fires have occurred in Kalimantan and Sumatra, severely affecting neighbouring countries, including Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore.
The air quality has worsened due to excessive smoke, especially in Singapore and western Malaysia. Recently, both Malaysia and Brunei announced plans to use ASEAN channels to address the transboundary haze issue. The Malaysian government even said it would submit an official letter to the ASEAN Secretariat and engage its Indonesian counterpart.
The recurring transboundary haze problem raises the question of why regional cooperation has so badly failed to prevent the same crisis from recurring.
Regional framework on haze
Indonesia’s regional engagement on transboundary haze management frameworks deepens every time the pressure rises.
Following forest fires in the late 1990s, Indonesia signed the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution (AATHP) in 2002. It then ratified the treaty in 2014, the same year Singapore legislated the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act to prevent entities from conducting activities contributing to transboundary haze.
Earlier this year, Indonesia agreed to establish the new ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Transboundary Haze Pollution control (ACC THPC) in Jakarta.
In July this year, the Sub-Regional Ministerial Steering Committee held its 27th meeting in Bali. Ironically, this was chaired by Indonesia (as the rotation rules require), taking place just weeks before the worsening fires enveloped Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore in a massive haze.
What AATHP was built to do
It may come as a surprise, but Indonesia’s signing of the AATHP will not pressure it to do more to prevent future fire crises choking its neighbours.
This is because rather than restricting the states that signed up to it, the AATHP was designed to be acceptable to them. Under this agreement, national governments have considerable control over how problems are reported, how emergencies are defined, and when outside help is requested. This is for three reasons.
First, the agreement affirms each member’s sovereign right to exploit its own resources according to its own development policies, although it does nominally impose a responsibility not to harm others.
Second, when haze originates in a member’s territory, that member must respond quickly to a request for information or consultations by other member states. This obligation is triggered when a neighbouring country asks, however it ends when the source state provides an answer.
Third, the Coordinating Centre operates on the basis that national authorities act first. It will assist only when the national authority declares an emergency and asks for help. In other words, the ASEAN Coordinating centre cannot determine when emergency exists, that is entirely up to the state where the fires are burning.
In short, these provisions in the agreement make the regime entirely dependent on the willingness of signatories to act and cooperate.
Why enforcement remains difficult
Affected countries Singapore and Malaysia, have their own domestic legislation to address the limitations of the regional approach.
Singapore’s 2014 Transboundary Haze Pollution Act (THPA) covers conduct outside the country and holds companies liable for fires on land they manage. Singapore used the law to investigate suspected offenders, but no prosecution appears to have been pursued to date.
Malaysia considered a comparable law but never passed it. In fact, in 2023, the Malaysian government cancelled plans to do so due to difficulties in obtaining the necessary information to support prosecutions.
Accountability depends on information located outside their territory. Identifying responsible parties require reliable information about where fires originated and who was responsible for the activities. However, verifying information depends on cooperation from Indonesia.
In 2016, when Singapore served notice on six Indonesia-based companies under the THPA, Jakarta objected and opposed detention of the perpetrators. The result was a diplomatic spat.
While officially defending its THPA haze law, Singapore eventually backed down, saying simply that it remained committed to working with Indonesia ‘in the spirit of cooperation and mutual respect.’
These incidents show the limitations of enforcement. Singapore and Malaysia need Indonesian cooperation to address individual cases and to manage the broader haze issue. This means the regional mechanism is ineffective because states affected by the haze depend on cooperation from the state where it originates.
Domestic pressures matter
From the Indonesian perspective, demonstrating efforts at the regional level is easier than addressing the domestic conditions that sustain haze.
While the former can be shown by increased participation, the latter requires authorities to enforce restrictions on land clearing and confronts powerful plantation and agricultural business interests. Taking these domestic actions are more costly – economically and politically – than participating in regional collaboration.
So, the regional mechanism works (or doesn’t) exactly as designed. It provides assessments based on what members report. Its chairmanship rotates evenly among the members, regardless of where the haze comes from. This allows Indonesia to participate in the regional process without being subject to independent evaluation of its domestic response. Within the AATHP framework, none of this is – officially – a failure of implementation, and, formally, Indonesia has done nothing wrong in taking the chair in a year its fires once again smothered Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei.
Indonesia’s regional engagement means very little: the agreement asks for cooperation without giving ASEAN a strong mechanism to evaluate domestic implementation. That may explain why regional engagement deepens while the domestic conditions that cause haze persist.
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