Cough cough
Sorry.
Just came in from outside.
At the worst point this week, the 24-hour PSI in western Singapore hit 212: very unhealthy. The one-hour PM2.5 reading went even higher. Outdoor facilities are closed, and haze shelters are open. Vulnerable residents are given free N95.
And then came the familiar conversation. Is it safe to exercise? Should I buy masks? Is the F1 still on? Should we just leave Singapore for the weekend?
All reasonable questions, but none of them explains why we are still having this conversation.
On October 10, the head of Indonesia’s government communications agency said: “When there’s no haze, we send oxygen.”
It was a new version of an old line. In 2015, Indonesia’s then vice-president, Jusuf Kalla, said Singapore had enjoyed clean air from Indonesia for 11 months and (we) never said thank you.
That is the haze problem in one sentence: the smoke arrives, everyone gets angry, someone says something provocative, the rain comes, and the story disappears until the next dry season.
Then we do it all again.
This is not bad luck. It is a schedule.
The fires are not mysterious.
Land is cleared for plantations. Using machines costs money. A match costs almost nothing.
Much of the land involved is peatland - which is centuries of dead vegetation packed into wet ground. Drain it, dry it out, and it can burn underground for weeks or months. NASA says peat fires produce roughly three times the fine particles of ordinary forest fires.
Then the calendar does the rest.
From around June to September, Sumatra and Kalimantan are dry. The winds blow from the south and southeast. Straight at Singapore.
Later in the year, the northeast monsoon arrives. The rain soaks the peat. The wind flips and we finally breathe again.
That is why haze is always a Q3 or Q4 story. It is not a surprise. It is an annual appointment that nobody wants to put in their calendar.
The worst years line up with El Niño: 1997, 2015, and now 2026. If haze were an employee, its performance review would say: “Highly predictable. Recurring issue. But also meaningful improvement.”
Singapore has a haze law. It just has not bitten.
After the 2013 haze crisis in which the three-hour PSI reached 401, Singapore passed the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act.
It was bold. A company that causes haze in Singapore could be fined up to $100,000 a day, capped at $2 million. Even if the fire was in another country.
So how many companies have paid a fine under that law?
As far as the public record shows: zero.
In 2015, NEA sent legal notices to six Indonesian companies. Two cases were closed after responses were received. The remaining cases were still open at the last parliamentary update. No company has been found liable.
The fault does not lie with NEA. The law simply becomes difficult when the evidence is on land in another country, under another government’s control.
It is like the neighbour whose second-hand cigarette smoke flew into your flat. You can complain about it. You can even pass a law about it.
But it is still not your flat.
The people choking are not always the people with power.
It is tempting to turn this into a simple story: Singapore suffers, Indonesia should fix it.
That is too easy.
Indonesians breathe the smoke first, and often worse. Indonesia has deployed tens of thousands of people to fight fires. It has restored peatland. Researchers found fewer hotspots where restoration worked.
But the incentives remain upside down.
Palm oil and pulpwood are major industries. Permits are issued locally. The people living with the smoke are often far from Jakarta. Even when Indonesian courts order fire-linked companies to pay, the money does not necessarily arrive. Some companies simply declare bankruptcy.
The science is not the hard part.
Keep peat wet. Make burning more expensive than not burning. Enforce the rule in the quiet years, when the sky is blue, and nobody is posting PSI screenshots.
The hard part is maintaining that effort when there is no immediate crisis.
A boycott is a New Year’s resolution
There is another temptation in haze season: tell consumers to boycott brands linked to the fires.
It sounds satisfying, and sometimes it works briefly.
In 2015, FairPrice pulled Asia Pulp and Paper tissue brands after its green label was suspended. Other retailers followed. Thirty-eight firms signed a haze-free pledge.
Can you name one of them?
I could not. And I work in marketing.
That is the problem with pledges. They generate a press release on day one and silence on day 300.
In marketing, we call this stated preference versus revealed preference.
Stated preference is what you tell a survey. “Yes, I will pay more for sustainable products.”
Revealed preference is what you do at FairPrice in December, when the sky is blue, and the house brand is two dollars cheaper.
A boycott is like a New Year’s resolution: powerful in January, gone by March. Sometimes February.
A buying rule is more like a direct debit. It keeps running.
The people with the real leverage are not individual shoppers squinting at every “vegetable oil” label. They are supermarket chains, hotel groups, food manufacturers and large buyers who purchase by the container, not by the packet.
Haze is also a workplace test
For some Singaporeans, haze season means working from home, turning on the air purifier and complaining about the view.
For others, it means going outside anyway.
I’m talking about Construction workers, Security guards, Cleaners and Delivery riders.
The people with the least choice about where they work.
Employers have haze guidelines. They have duties under workplace safety law. They can provide masks, cut prolonged outdoor work and adjust duties for vulnerable staff.
The question is not whether the law has teeth. The question is how often it bites.
A haze week is a stress test for an employer. Staff will not remember the free snacks. They will remember whether the company sent masks, adjusted shifts and looked after the people who could not simply open a laptop at home.
And they will remember the company that said business as usual.
Just not in the way it wants.
At some point, the pattern is the story
It is possible to fix smoke. London did it after the Great Smog. Beijing cut fine-particle pollution dramatically after declaring a war on pollution.
But in both cases, the people breathing the pollution and the people responsible for it answered to the same government.
Our problem crosses a border. That makes it harder, but not impossible.
If 2026 is going to be different, three things would show it.
First, a haze case that actually ends in a fine.
Second, buying rules from large companies that last longer than the smoke.
Third, a real haze plan for outdoor workers.
Until then, we will keep treating haze as weather: an unpleasant thing that arrives, inconveniences us, and eventually passes.
But peat does not drain itself for a plantation.
Twenty-nine years of the same headlines is not just a run of bad luck.
It is a pattern.
And at some point, the pattern is the story.
