Indonesia's 2026 fire season has become the worst in more than a decade, burning across Sumatra, Borneo, and Papua for weeks and pushing transboundary haze into Malaysia and Singapore. More than 170,000 cases of acute respiratory infection were recorded in haze-affected areas between August and mid-September, including over 40,000 involving young children. More than 1.4 million Indonesian students were pushed into remote learning, and hundreds of Malaysian schools closed. The parallels to 2015 are structural, not coincidental. That year's fires burned roughly 2.6 million hectares and cost Indonesia an estimated $16 billion in economic losses, according to the World Bank. The same underlying formula — El Niño plus drained peatland plus slash-and-burn agriculture plus global commodity demand — produced both crises. The 2026 dry season, coupled with what meteorologists flagged as a "Super El Niño" earlier this year, made the recurrence predictable. The institutional response since 2015 has been real but insufficient. Indonesia established a Peatland Restoration Agency in 2016, imposed a permanent moratorium on new concessions in primary forests and peatlands, and pursued companies in court — including a ruling ordering palm oil company PT Banyu Kahuripan Indonesia to pay around €14 million over fires covering 3,300 hectares. At the regional level, ASEAN adopted a new Peatland Management Strategy, a second Haze-Free Roadmap for 2023-2030, and finally opened the ASEAN Coordinating Center for Transboundary Haze Pollution Control in Jakarta in April — more than two decades after the 2002 haze agreement. But the Peatland and Mangrove Restoration Agency ceased operating at the end of 2024, with responsibilities scattered back across government ministries. There is open disagreement over how much peatland restoration Indonesia has actually achieved. Extensive areas remain drained, degraded, or sitting idle as cleared-but-unused land — highly combustible during prolonged drought. The institutional architecture grew while the physical substrate beneath it continued to deteriorate. ASEAN's mechanisms remain toothless by design. The 2002 haze agreement is legally binding, but implementation depends entirely on national governments acting on targets the bloc has no power to enforce. Helena Varkkey of Universiti Malaya noted that joint emergency response mechanisms should have been operationalized before the season started, since meteorological reports made the Super El Niño foreseeable months in advance. Capacity pooling across the bloc has not materialized. The core extraction loop is global, not regional. David Mark Taylor of the National University of Singapore identified the ultimate driver as "global demand for cheap, plantation-grown commodities, such as palm oil and pulp and paper, which most of us are responsible for." As long as that demand persists, the pressure to convert peatlands and forests to plantations persists. The cost — respiratory disease, school closures, ecological degradation — is borne locally by Indonesian, Malaysian, and Singaporean populations, while the commodity value flows to multinational supply chains and end consumers worldwide. Paruedee Nguitragool of Chiang Mai University warned that haze, once mainly a maritime Southeast Asian problem, now threatens most countries in the region and will worsen as climate conditions deteriorate. The pattern is clear: institutional responses grow linearly while the physical and economic drivers compound. Without restructuring the economics of land clearance — alternative methods, real incentives, consumer accountability — the next crisis is not a question of if but of when the next El Niño arrives.
