Indonesia's Environment Minister Deals With Choking Smoke Problem By Denying It Exists
Indonesia’s environment minister risks undermining the country’s credibility if she continues denying, in the face of overwhelming data, that haze from Indonesian forest fires is affecting neighboring Malaysia and Singapore, an activist says. Siti Nurbaya Bakar, the minister of environment and forestry, said on Sept. 11 that she would write to her Malaysian counterpart, Yeo Bee Yin, via the Malaysian ambassador, to address the problem “objectively.”
“Because the fact is that the smoke entering Malaysia, into Kuala Lumpur, comes from Sarawak [in Malaysian Borneo] and also from the Malay Peninsula, and maybe also partly from West Kalimantan [in Indonesian Borneo],” she said as reported by Tempo.
Yeo, however, said the facts showed otherwise. “Let the data speak for itself,” she wrote in a Facebook post. She then went on to cite figures from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) Specialist Meteorological Centre, the ASMC, showing a massive disparity between the number of fire hotspots in Indonesia and Malaysia.
On Sept. 10, there were 474 fires in Indonesian Borneo, also known as Kalimantan, and 387 in Sumatra. That same day, there were only seven hotspots detected in Malaysia: four in Malaysian Borneo and three in Peninsular Malaysia. On Sept. 11, the number of hotspots had spiked to 1,188 in Kalimantan and 431 in Sumatra, and gone down to just five in Malaysia.
EDIT
https://news.mongabay.com/2019/09/indonesian-minister-draws-fire-for-denial-of-transboundary-haze-problem/