How to Solve Southeast Asia’s Air Pollution Problem

On September 16, a court in Jakarta issued a groundbreaking ruling in a citizens’ lawsuit, which was a last-ditch attempt to force the authorities to take action against the severe air pollution that plagues Jakarta and its surrounding areas.

The judges ruled that President Joko Widodo and six other top Indonesian officials had neglected citizens’ rights to clean air and ordered them to improve the poor air quality in the capital.

The citizen lawsuit was filed by 32 plaintiffs in 2019 against the president; the ministers of health, environment, and home affairs; as well as the governors of Jakarta, Banten, and West Java provinces. Last year, the Jakarta municipal administration showed more than 5.5 million cases of diseases related to air pollution in the city.

Presiding Judge Saifuddin Zuhri ordered the seven officials to tighten national air quality standards so they are “sufficient to protect human health, the environment and ecosystems, including the health of sensitive populations, based on science and technology.” Duta Baskara, a member of the panel, added that the officials had been “negligent in fulfilling the rights of citizens to a good and healthy environment.”

The court also ordered the defendants to take other measures, including an analysis of cross-border emissions, and for older vehicles to be periodically tested for emissions.

Although the Indonesian Ministry of Environment plans to appeal the verdict, the court ruling stands as a symbolic victory for the millions of Southeast Asians who, due to a perfect-storm combination of regulatory failure, unaccountable corporate power, and regional atmospheric quirks, are forced to breathe borderline toxic air.

In recent years, air quality across Southeast Asia has been getting steadily worse – the flipside of the region’s breakneck economic advance over the past half-century. According to a report published last year by the air quality monitor IQAir, Jakarta is Southeast Asia's most polluted city, and the ninth most polluted capital city in the world, in terms of its levels of PM.2.5, a fine particulate matter that is hazardous to human health. Many of Southeast Asia’s other fast-growing metropolises are not far behind, enduring annual seasons of particulate-rich “haze” that made N95 respirator masks an urban necessity long before COVID-19.

This isn’t just an issue in the cities. Every year, from January to May, large swathes of rural mainland Southeast Asia are veiled in an eye-burning toxic haze generated by agricultural burn-off – something that I experienced first-hand during the two years I lived in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand.

While the long-term effects of prolonged air pollution are hard to gauge, researchers are beginning to quantify the economic cost and premature deaths linked to bad air – and the results are disconcerting. According to analysis of IQAir data by the environmental group Greenpeace, in 2020 PM2.5 air pollution was responsible for the loss of an estimated 160,000 lives in the world’s five most populous cities and a combined economic cost in these cities of $85 billion.

According to the Greenpeace analysis, in Jakarta PM2.5 air pollution was responsible for an estimated 9,800 avoidable deaths since the start of 2021, in addition to $2.5 billion in economic losses. The corresponding figure for Bangkok was 6,500 premature deaths and $2.5 billion in air pollution-related economic losses. This data is all the more striking when one considers the widespread lockdowns that have been introduced this year to get a hold on the spread of COVID-19.

The World Health Organization puts the total human cost much higher, estimating that 2.4 million people die prematurely each year in Southeast Asia due to air pollution.

What explains the region’s abysmal air quality? Part of the problem is local, stemming from the region’s rapid urbanization and industrial growth clustered around fast-growing cities. In Jakarta, for instance, air pollution stems mostly from vehicle emissions, factories, and coal-fired power plants located in the neighboring provinces of Banten and West Java.

But these localized pollutants are also compounded by the widespread burning of biomass, including of forest, peatland, and spent agricultural plantations. (For instance, the burn-off from sugar plantations in the Isan region of Thailand is responsible for much of the annual cool season pollution in Bangkok.) Indeed, according to a series of recent studies, burning biomass contributed an estimated 40-60 percent of haze events in the major cities of Southeast Asia between 2003 and 2014.

While the Indonesian court verdict is an important win for the citizenry of Southeast Asia and its long fight for breathable air, there are a lot of obstacles in the way of a swift resolution of the problem. The first challenge is whether governments have the ability or the political will to engineer the difficult energy and transport transitions that are necessary to begin tackling haze, especially for leaders like Indonesia’s Jokowi that have invested their political capital in bringing economic growth.

The second question is whether they are willing to confront the corporate interests that benefit from the status quo. In Thailand, for instance, a large contributor to air pollution has been the consolidation of agricultural land in the hands of a handful of large corporations. These conglomerates pay their contract farmers so little that they have no choice but to use fire to clear their land at the end of the annual harvest.

As a result, while the Thai government has responded to the mounting public anger and economic costs with repeated claims that it is taking the issue seriously, things have gotten steadily worse for two decades.

The third major issue is the transboundary nature of the challenge. “Air pollution is not only a local issue,” Moekti H. Soejachmoen wrote in a recent article. “Because air has no border, air pollution problems can only be solved either by regional co-operation or global environmental laws, which do not yet exist.” This is a particular problem in northern Thailand and Laos, which are affected by burn-off in areas of Myanmar that are not under the effective control of the central government.

Southeast Asian governments can’t do anything about the atmospheric dynamics that compound the problems of air pollution, but they can work more closely together to address the problem. Efforts by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to tackle transboundary haze are yet to amount to much, and in any event rarely figure in the upper reaches of the bloc’s summit agendas. But if ever here was an issue that was tailor-made for ASEAN, and that would bolster its claim to being a “people-centered” organization, it is this one.