I have started checking an air quality app the way other people check their stock portfolio. Several times a day. With real emotional investment. In full knowledge that nothing I learn will change a single thing I do next.
Here are some recent Air Pollution Index (API) numbers for anyone who has been indoors with the windows shut: Johan Setia, Klang, hit 192. Shah Alam was at 181 at some point. Melaka City, 178. Putrajaya, 176. Pasir Gudang went all the way to very unhealthy, 207. (Anything over 100 is unhealthy, over 200 is very unhealthy.)
Flights are getting cancelled and schools are closing, subjecting parents to the problem of dealing with their children all day long. Which, as a parent, I can say, is harrowing.
The cause of the haze is the same as it always has been. Fires in Indonesia, mostly across Borneo and Sumatra, burning through forest and peatland in a dry season that runs from about April to October. The rain usually turns up at the end of October and early November to ease the situation.
Peatland is the real problem, because peat fires burn underground with no visible flame and smoulder for weeks or months; and Greenpeace found that while peat fires make up less than a third of Indonesia’s fires, they produce the bulk of the toxic haze. And this is the worst season since 2015, as anyone with a memory can attest.
So that is the situation. Everyone has read about it. Everyone has an opinion. And here is the thing that actually interests me: The fires didn’t start this year. Or in 2015. They have been happening for decades but we didn’t really notice what the cause was. You woke up, the sky was grey, somebody said it was a hazy day, and that was the end of the conversation. It was weather. Mildly annoying weather.
You went to work, you did not think about your lungs once, and you certainly did not know your personal exposure to fine particulate matter down to the hour, colour-coded, with a little cartoon face getting progressively more unwell.
Now I know everything. And I am not at all sure I feel better for it.
So let me try to put it in proportion, because proportion is the one thing the app does not give you. Berkeley Earth – an NGO in California that analyses global surface temperatures and air pollution data – has a rough rule of thumb: breathing air at 22 micrograms per cubic metre of PM2.5 (particulate matter that measures less than 2.5 micrometres) for a full day does roughly the same damage as smoking one cigarette.
By that measure, living in Delhi year-round is about five cigarettes a day, forever. Beijing is around four. A properly bad haze day in Malaysia lands you in that neighbourhood – a handful of cigarettes you did not ask for and did not enjoy.
That is genuinely not great. But now compare it with the thing nobody puts on an app.
The World Health Organisation estimates that 3.2 million people die prematurely every year from household air pollution – which mostly means smoke from cooking indoors over wood, charcoal, and kerosene. In a badly ventilated kitchen, fine particle levels can run a hundred times above what is considered acceptable.
One Berkeley Earth professor described having an open cooking fire in your kitchen as roughly equivalent to burning 400 cigarettes an hour. That is not a two-month seasonal event. That is every meal, every day, for a lifetime, and it is overwhelmingly women and small children breathing in the toxic air.
Your weekend barbecue is in the same family. Standing over charcoal for three hours while insisting the chicken needs five more minutes will spike your personal exposure well past anything the ambient air is doing. I have never seen anyone check an app before lighting up a barbecue.
None of which makes the haze fine. It is not fine. It is a cross-border health problem produced by land clearing that somebody profits from and nobody owns up to, and if you have asthma or are a small child or have a set of lungs over 70 years old, this past week was measurably worse for you than the last one.
But it does help to remember who is actually in trouble here. Parts of Borneo and Sumatra are registering readings above 1,000. Anything over 300 is officially hazardous. Four people have died fighting these fires. Protests are spreading across Indonesia because people there are furious, and they are furious from inside the smoke, not downwind of it.
What we are getting is their catastrophe, thinned out by a few hundred kilometres of land and sea and improved considerably by distance.
That said. Nobody wants to live inside a haze cloud. Every day I wake up, look to the sky, and feel like there’s a blanket over us. From space we must currently look like fish in a tank nobody has got round to cleaning, drifting about, mouths opening and closing, waiting for someone to notice.
Those November rains can’t come soon enough.
