Over 100 schools in Sarawak, Malaysia, closed on 12 August 2026 as haze from Indonesian forest fires worsened, with air quality in Serian district reaching 198 on the Malaysian Air Pollutant Index. The crisis has reignited calls for cross-border cooperation between West Kalimantan and Sarawak, as recurring fires and smoke continue to disrupt lives and education.
On 12 August 2026, Malaysia’s Sarawak state closed 108 schools in the Serian district after air quality deteriorated to “unhealthy” levels, with the Air Pollutant Index (API) hitting 198, according to state disaster management authorities. The haze, traced to forest and land fires in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan, has become a recurring seasonal crisis, disrupting education, health, and economic activity in both regions.
Indonesian officials have deployed cloud-seeding aircraft to induce rain, but the scale of the fires—over 28,680.47 hectares burned in West Kalimantan since January 2026—has overwhelmed containment efforts. Meanwhile, Sarawak’s media reported 22 fire hotspots and 100 hectares of land burned locally, though these figures pale compared to Indonesia’s 1,483 hotspots recorded on 10 August 2026.
Local Responses and Health Impact
West Kalimantan and Sarawak Can Solve the Haze Crisis
The Malaysian Health Ministry advised residents in affected areas to limit outdoor activities and seek medical care for respiratory issues, as the API exceeded 100 in seven districts. In Serian, schools shifted to online learning, a measure also taken in West Kalimantan earlier in August. If feeding schoolchildren is urgent, why not prioritize preventing their illness from haze? questioned a local journalist, echoing broader frustrations over recurring annual crises.
Health impacts are severe: prolonged coughing, shortness of breath, and school closures have disrupted millions of students. In West Kalimantan, the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) faces budget constraints, with an annual disaster mitigation fund of only 17-19 billion, complicating long-term fire prevention strategies.
ASEAN’s Role and Historical Context
ASEAN’s 2002 transboundary haze treaty, which mandates cooperation on fire prevention and monitoring, has failed to prevent recurring crises. Despite the treaty, states often treat haze as a domestic issue, citing non-interference principles.
Malaysia's Sarawak shuts 108 schools as haze worsens, state
Looking Ahead: Cooperation or Division?
Regional leaders face pressure to strengthen cross-border efforts.
By mid-August 2026, BNPB had to grapple not only with forest and land fires and haze but also with three major earthquakes in NTT, North Sumatra, and Central Sulawesi. The Pontianak Post daily published three opinion pieces on forest and land fires and haze in August 2026. The first, published on 3 August 2026 and entitled Karhutla: Bencana Tahunan yang Tak Pernah Tuntas (Forest and Land Fires: The Annual Disaster That Never Ends), invited readers to contemplate the disaster from a religious perspective. Two weeks later, on 12 and 13 August 2026, two more articles addressed the same problem from different perspectives. Merdeka dari Asap (Freedom from Haze) examined how education has been affected by recurring haze, while Kita Belum Belajar dari Api (We Have Not Yet Learnt from Fire) captured the author’s anxiety over fires on peatland that should have been anticipated and learnt from.
The relationship between these two serumpun (kindred) countries and regions should not deteriorate because of haze. In late July 2026, the West Kalimantan Provincial Government had just successfully hosted the Malaysia-Indonesia Socio-Economic Cooperation Forum (Sosek Malindo) in Pontianak. A trace of haze was already visible at the time, but who could have imagined that, several weeks after the series of meetings, the land fires and their smoke would spread further? Several media outlets, politicians, and officials in Sarawak and Malaysia blamed poor air quality in their areas on haze exported from Indonesia. Yet local Sarawak media reports must also be considered: fire hotspots and land fires were present there as well.
ASEAN member states have agreed to a treaty on transboundary haze, although in practice ASEAN repeatedly runs up against the principle of non-interference because the issue is often treated as a state’s domestic matter. Other member states cannot intervene in the internal affairs of another ASEAN member state. Yet again, the haze shows that it knows no national borders and cares nothing for niceties about state sovereignty. Haze moves with the wind. This also means that states need to reconsider the concept of borders in dealing with haze. Encouraging stronger cross-border cooperation would certainly be far more effective than closing themselves off and becoming defensive.
