DESPITE record temperatures currently sweeping many parts of the region, the annual haze is not likely to happen this year, the chairman of the Academy of Science Malaysia (ASM) Haze Task Force said.

A. Bakar Jaafar said there are so far no indicators that the haze, which blankets large parts of Malaysia almost every year, would take place this year.

This is based on a predictive mechanism developed by regional and international climate scientists, he told a press conference at the end of a two-day workshop on haze and biomass burning in Kuching today.

Bakar said a Malaysian climatologist, Fredolin Tangang of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, had been involved in developing the predictive mechanism.

The mechanism could “reliably predict” whether or not the region would be hit by haze, Bakar said.

This mechanism had successfully predicted haze in 1997, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2015, said Bakar who is also with Universiti Teknologi Malaysia’s (UTM) Perdana Centre of Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Studies.

Bakar said since Malaysia experienced its first transboundary haze pollution, the interval of haze episodes has shortened from nine years to seven, then five, then three, until it is now an almost annual event during the months of August, September and October.

It used to be that the changing climate, particularly the effects of the El Nino phenomenon, could be used to predict the haze, but this was no longer the case, he said.

There are now human-induced factors that relate to the frequency and severity of the annual haze, such as whether damaged ecosystems could recover during wet periods.

Another factor was the use of fire in large-scale land clearing for plantations, he said.

According to the Academy of Science website, Indonesia’s losses in the 2015 fires and haze was roughly estimated to be around US$35 billion (RM1.45 trillion).

Singapore is estimated to have suffered losses amounting to US$500 million (RM2.07 billion).

While no figures were available for Malaysia’s losses in the 2015 haze, the country lost RM801 million in the 1997 haze that lasted for three months.

In the 2015 episode that lasted for more than two months from August to October, 7,646 schools were ordered closed due to health hazards caused by the poor air quality.

The closure impacted more than 4 million school children.

Hundreds of flights were also cancelled or rescheduled and thousands of travellers were stranded. – July 10, 2019.