ASEAN’s regional clout dims amid rising rivalries, China’s shadow

SINGAPORE, 24 SEPTEMBER 2026 —

ASEAN’s Haze Crisis: How Regional Cooperation Fails to Stop a Decades-Old Blight

The return of severe transboundary haze across Southeast Asia this month has laid bare a stark truth: despite nearly three decades of policies, legal frameworks, and regional cooperation, the problem remains unresolved.

With Indonesia’s forest and peatland fires sending thick smoke as far as the southern Philippines, visibility at key airports plunging to near-zero levels, and Singapore issuing daily haze advisories, the annual crisis has once again exposed the limits of ASEAN’s ability to enforce collective action—even when the pollution originates and spreads entirely within its own member states.

The latest haze episode shows a fundamental contradiction at the heart of ASEAN’s environmental governance. While the bloc has established mechanisms—including the 1997 Regional Haze Action Plan and the 2002 ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution (AATHP)—their effectiveness hinges on national compliance, something that has repeatedly faltered. This year alone, the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre (ASMC) activated its highest alert level, Level 3, in August after detecting hundreds of hotspots across Sumatra and Kalimantan.

Malaysia’s request to conduct cloud seeding over Indonesian territory—a rare instance of cross-border intervention—highlighted the desperation of affected nations, while Singapore’s daily haze advisories reflected the immediate health and economic disruptions faced by urban populations.

The persistence of haze, despite ASEAN’s institutional efforts, stems from two critical weaknesses: the bloc’s reliance on the principle of non-interference and its inability to attribute legal responsibility for fires. Unlike transboundary issues such as the Mekong River—where external actors like China play a decisive role—haze is an almost entirely intra-ASEAN problem.

Indonesia, the primary source of the fires due to land-use practices, plantation licensing, and weak forest management, bears the brunt of both the environmental damage and the diplomatic fallout. Yet ASEAN’s consensus-based approach, rooted in non-interference, prevents the bloc from compelling Jakarta—or any other member—to adopt stricter enforcement measures. The result is a cycle of crisis response rather than prevention, with ASEAN serving as a forum for information-sharing rather than a mechanism for accountability.

The legal challenges are equally daunting. While ASEAN’s monitoring systems, such as the ASMC, can track hotspots and smoke dispersion with precision, translating this data into actionable enforcement remains elusive. Determining liability—whether for state actors, corporate plantations, or smallholders—requires access to land concession records, forensic investigations, and judicial processes that lie squarely within national jurisdictions.

Singapore’s Transboundary Haze Pollution Act offers a partial solution by allowing legal action against entities whose activities contribute to haze, as demonstrated during the 2015 crisis when the National Environment Agency issued notices to regional agribusiness firms. However, the law’s effectiveness depends on cooperation from the source country, something that has proven inconsistent. Without uniform standards for concession transparency, fire attribution, and corporate accountability, ASEAN’s legal tools remain fragmented and reactive rather than preventive.

Corporate accountability further complicates the issue. Large agribusiness and pulp-and-paper companies operate across vast tracts of forest and peatland, but fires within or near their concessions do not automatically implicate them in legal liability. Proving negligence or intent requires land registries, real-time fire monitoring linked to specific parcels, and investigative agencies capable of tracing responsibility to corporate actors rather than individual farmers.

These functions are beyond ASEAN’s purview, resting instead with national land offices, police, and courts—institutions that often lack the resources or political will to act decisively. The result is a gap between ASEAN’s technical capacity and its ability to hold anyone accountable, leaving the bloc’s frameworks as aspirational rather than operational.

The human and economic costs of this failure are acute. In Malaysia, haze has historically triggered public health emergencies, school closures, and travel disruptions, while Indonesia’s agricultural sector—despite being a major contributor to the problem—faces reputational damage and trade restrictions. Singapore, though geographically small, bears disproportionate economic losses from haze, with estimates suggesting the 2015 crisis cost the city-state up to S$10 billion in lost productivity, tourism, and healthcare expenses.

The 2023 haze episode, though less severe, still prompted Malaysia to deploy hazemeters in schools and Singapore to activate its highest pollution alert since 2019, illustrating the recurring financial and social toll.

Climate change exacerbates the problem by prolonging dry seasons and increasing fire risks, but it is not the sole driver. Human activities—particularly the expansion of oil palm and acacia plantations into peatlands, coupled with weak law enforcement—remain the primary catalysts. ASEAN’s inability to address these root causes reflects deeper institutional weaknesses: a lack of standardized response protocols, incompatible data systems between member states, and insufficient pre-crisis coordination among disaster-management agencies.

While ASEAN has conducted joint exercises in the past, these have often been ad-hoc and poorly funded, leaving gaps in cross-border response capabilities.

The question now is whether ASEAN can evolve from a reactive to a proactive approach. Melinda Martinus, a Fellow at the ASEAN Studies Centre at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, argues that the bloc must move beyond its current model of cooperation. This could involve developing common operational protocols for haze emergencies, ensuring interoperable communication and data-sharing systems, and pre-positioning resources—such as firefighting aircraft, hazemeters, and medical supplies—across member states.

Such measures would require political will, however, particularly from Indonesia, which must balance economic interests with environmental obligations. Without stronger national enforcement and regional solidarity, the haze crisis will continue to test ASEAN’s credibility as a cohesive bloc capable of addressing shared challenges.

For Malaysian businesses and policymakers, the stakes are high. The country’s palm oil and timber industries—key economic drivers—are increasingly scrutinized for their role in deforestation and fire risks. While Malaysia has taken steps to improve sustainability certifications and monitor hotspots, its ability to influence Indonesia’s practices remains limited. The recurring haze episodes also pose long-term risks to Malaysia’s reputation as a responsible regional player, particularly as global investors and consumers demand stricter environmental compliance.

For Singapore, the economic and health impacts of haze reinforce the need for both domestic resilience measures and regional pressure on Indonesia to tighten controls.

The latest haze crisis has arrived at a moment for ASEAN. With the bloc’s 50th anniversary in 2027 approaching, member states will face growing expectations to demonstrate tangible progress on environmental governance. The failure to resolve the haze issue—not despite ASEAN’s frameworks, but because of their inherent limitations—threatens to undermine the region’s collective standing on climate action and sustainability.

The next few months will determine whether ASEAN can turn its decades of cooperation into concrete results, or whether the haze will remain a recurring indictment of the bloc’s ability to act decisively when it matters most.

Related: Melinda Martinus