Wan Junaidi: Indonesia misjudged strength of El Nino

KUCHING: South-East Asia’s haze crisis this year was partly due to the Indonesian authorities under-estimating the strength of the El Nino drought.

Not since 1997 and 1998 had the dry season been this severe, Natural Resources and Environment Minister Datuk Seri Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said yesterday when asked about Indonesia’s pledge to end the annual haze occurrence by 2018.

“The Indonesian authorities have given me an assurance that next year and in 2017, open burning on such a large scale would not occur anymore; certainly not like what we have gone through this year,” he said.

“Among the reasons, they said, were weaknesses in their forecasts related to El Nino. Their forecast for El Nino in 2015 and 2016 was that it would not be as serious as 1997 and 1998.

“But what is happening now is that El Nino is as severe as in 1997,” Wan Junaidi told reporters after opening the state-level Envi­ronment Week.

In the years since 1998, when El Nino did not occur, the haze never got as bad, he said.

Only “natural intervention” could end the open burning in Indo­nesia, he said, adding that 1.7 million hectares of land was affected.

Junaidi said Indonesia would adopt Malaysia’s peat soil management, which included micro dams to ensure the presence of surface water, deep wells of over 100m as a water source and simple measures such as building more watch towers.

Satellites detected 53 hotspots in Sumatra yesterday. In Borneo, only one hotspot was detected.

Junaidi said stiffer penalties for Malaysian polluters, from those who burnt rubbish in their backyards to pollutants from factories, was being studied.