In an ominous coincidence, the Bonn talks were followed by smoky, hazardous haze engulfing Singapore and parts of Malaysia because of forest fires in Indonesia on concessions operated shamelessly by some of the largest pulp and paper companies in the world.
As deliberately started fires continue to burn out of control in Indonesian forests and peatlands — and send a hazardous haze across the region — scientists and environmental activists say the Indonesian government needs to tackle the fires' underlying causes instead of treating them as one-off disasters.
Yet it has also helped to give its source country the dubious distinction of being the world's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the US – as well as a leading source of hazardous smoke haze.
In January 2013, a hazardous dense haze covered 1.4 million square kilometers of China and affected more than 800 million people [23].
For a disaster to occur, the root factors or background conditions, dynamic pressures, and unsafe conditions must coincide in space and time with an ongoing hazardous condition such as flooding, landslide, forest fires, or haze.
On the hazard side, recent increase in intensity, frequency, and unpredictability of anomalous rainfall events linked to monsoon climatic changes along with other natural and human-induced hazards have generally been understood to induce hazardous floods and landslides; and extreme dry conditions also may be related to the change in monsoon intensity favor forest fires and haze in Brunei.
It can be "extremely hazardous for your health," said a London-based researcher who took measurements of the haze in Kalimantan last year.
Nearly 50,000 people in Sumatra were suffering from respiratory illness from the worsening smoke, or haze, a spokesman for Indonesia's National Disaster Management Agency was quoted as saying this week, with pollution reaching extremely hazardous levels in several districts of Riau province opposite Singapore and Malaysia.
Aside from the dispersion of volcanic ash, HYSPLIT is used in several other atmospheric transport applications, including the dispersion of hazardous materials (e.g. nuclear material after the Fukushima reactor accident), air quality modelling (e.g. ozone, visibility, haze, and dioxin), dust storms, smoke, and the transport of biological material (e.g. pollen and mould spores) (Stein et al., 2015).
