United Nations Must Act As Countries Choke on Haze Vinod Thomas

The United Nations General Assembly must take the strongest stand in its power to help avert an irreversible climate catastrophe when it holds its annual gathering in New York in the US.

Top of that agenda must be to use its influential voice to stop the wholesale burning of the world’s tropical forests that is going on now. These blazes are not just a country issue: they inflict enormous transboundary and global repercussions.

The UN should consider it a crime against humanity, name the perpetrators, demand action from the country leaders and financially support measures to combat these fires.

The man-made fires in the remaining forests in Indonesia’s Kalimantan and Sumatra islands and in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and the blazes in Siberia and Alaska are extreme in scale.

In a vicious cycle, these fires aggravate global warming, which makes the fires more rampant.

Unfortunately, the vital signs for the planet and the Southeast Asia region are headed in the wrong direction.

Carbon dioxide emissions in the air have risen to the dangerous level of 415 parts per million (ppm) globally. Temperatures are hitting new records in Malaysia, Southeast Asia and everywhere.

A recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report says: “One of the most vulnerable regions to climate change (Southeast Asia) is witnessing the world’s biggest jump in greenhouse gas emissions.

Another ominous feature of this year’s fires is that the culprits that set the fires in Brazil were getting a nod from the so-called deregulation policy of the new president Jair Bolsonaro, although previous periods of rampant deforestation in the country never coincided with high economic growth.

Brazil’s anti-environmental stance on various initiatives had in turn the backing of US president Donald Trump.

In the name of economic growth, the US too, is pursuing anti-environmental policies — among them, withdrawing from the Paris agreement on climate change, reversing carbon emission controls on power plants, and lowering emission and efficiency standards for cars.

These policies will worsen climate change and lower the chances of achieving long-term growth. Destroying the environment is not a viable growth strategy anywhere.

The other big message from these fires concerns doing no harm to one’s neighbours.

The fires in the Amazon cannot be viewed as purely a country matter — as Brazil’s president preposterously claims.

The health and wellbeing of neighbouring countries are endangered, as is happening in the forest fires raging in Indonesia.

The fires in Indonesia have been a yearly event for the past quarter century, as large tracts of forest are burned to make way for oil palm and paper and pulp plantations.

What is different now about these fires is the way that they are being worsened by the haze aggravating climate change.

It is no coincidence that Indonesia’s forests have suffered their worst losses in recorded history over the past three years.

And the damage is transboundary, causing health problems and disrupting classes in neighbouring Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore. As in Brazil, rampant corruption in Indonesia stokes destructive agricultural practices.

Neighbours too are complicit when their agri-business companies and loggers aggravate the forest fires either through slash- and-burn agriculture or systematic destruction.

The accountability for these crimes must also be placed on these corrupt businesses whether they are national or transnational. When fires set within Indonesia’s borders hurt the health of its neighbours, the responsibility in the first instance rests with the Indonesian government.

And when the fires from the Brazilian Amazon hurt people in Bolivia, Colombia or Venezuela, it is a Brazilian crime.

The Asean Specialised Meteorological Centre says that the principal source of the current haze is Indonesia.

The government of President Joko Widodo had promised to prosecute those who were responsible and it should make good on that promise.

Malaysia and Singapore have tolerated the annual haze from Indonesia for years, even as the hardest hit are children, the elderly, motorcyclists, street vendors and the poorer segments.

Singapore and Malaysia on the one side, and Bolivia and Colombia on the other should expose at the UN General Assembly the catastrophic fallout and repercussions.

The neighbours should also reveal complicity of corrupt companies that are wreaking havoc and indicate what they are doing to stop these practices.

As the architect of the Paris agreement on climate change, and with its unique expertise in forestry, the UN must, as the climate crisis deepens, produce an actionable resolution.

Yes, it’s hard to imagine the UN coming out with guns blazing, but that is what it must do.

There also needs to be international financial support for putting out these fires.

Together with multilateral development banks, including the IMF and World Bank, the UN should extend vast compensatory financing to countries protecting their forests.