Transboundary haze from forest and peatland fires in Indonesia’s Sumatra and Kalimantan remains a recurring environmental security challenge affecting Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore despite decades of ASEAN cooperation, driven by agricultural land clearance linked to global supply chains.

Effective solutions require collective action beyond national borders, including stronger corporate accountability, peatland restoration, enforcement, alternative livelihoods, and technology-enabled monitoring, as regional institutions alone cannot replace robust national implementation.

An ASEAN haze prevention scorecard is proposed to track tangible outcomes through indicators such as fire frequency, restoration progress, enforcement actions, corporate compliance, and air quality, enabling comparative annual reporting and time-bound action plans coordinated by the ASEAN secretariat.

Transboundary haze affecting Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore continues to be one of the persistent environmental and governance challenges of Southeast Asia today. The health, economic, and security impacts of haze generated by the forest and land fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan have become a transboundary disaster affecting not only Indonesia but also its two immediate neighbours in Southeast Asia. Despite decades of cooperation among countries in the region, the problem of transboundary haze has persistently continued to recur and defy solutions at the national level. An environmental security challenge of this nature is essentially a collective action problem involving environmental vulnerabilities, economic opportunities, and institutional failures that transcend national borders. While Indonesia remains the critical player in managing fires in its forests and peatlands, solutions to the problem will have to come from within Indonesia as well as from new approaches to corporate accountability, innovative technologies, and enhanced regional cooperation and........

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