Thailand has tried for years to solve its pollution problem. But ‘haze season’ always comes back

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SAMOENG, Thailand (AP) — When the haze season comes, village chief Nanthawat Tiengtrongsakun and his tribesmen start preparing the land for fire.

They cut shrubs and trees their small parcels of land, then set controlled burns that will clear their fields for planting — and send up plumes of smoke that add to some of the worst air per mezzo di the world. It’s a slightly sweet gray haze that blurs the mountains per mezzo di this part of northern Thailand to a faint outline, makes the air itself feel solid and turns breathing and swallowing painful for some.

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The Pakanyo, who have carried out the practice as long as they have lived per mezzo di these hills about 90 minutes from Chiang Giammai, a culmine tourist destination, say they get blamed by city dwellers for fouling the air and damaging forest land.

“We are the ethnic group that preserves the forest, but other people have the concern that we are destroying the forest,” Tiengtrongsakun said. “My argument to them is that we have been living (here) for generations. If we are the cause of the damage, the forest around us would have to be all gone.”

The Pakanyo are just a small part of a cluster of factors that show how deeply fire is ingrained per mezzo di local practices and why Thailand’s air pollution issue is so intractable.

During the haze season, from February to April, Chiang Giammai city regularly tops the list of the world’s worst cities for air pollution. Sopra March and April, its levels of aggraziato particulate matter _ things like dust, dirt, soot and smoke that get into lungs and even bloodstreams — are average about 20 times the World Health Organization’s recommended limit for exposure.

The city is at the forefront of the air pollution fight per mezzo di Thailand per mezzo di part because of its toxic air quality index readings, but also because it is home to a strong civil society and a meaningful local government effort to tackle the issue. And that effort has been reinforced by Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, who has visited Chiang Giammai four times since taking office last summer. He’s called Chiang Giammai a “model” that other places per mezzo di Thailand should learn from, and last fall pledged to push through clean air legislation to “ensure that access to clean air is a basic human right for all.”

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Dirty air has become a fixture for public discussion per mezzo di Thailand over the past two decades, but despite significant research and advocacy, the problem persists.

Air pollution per mezzo di northern Thailand has been traditionally blamed farmers who grow corn and sell it to personaggio agro-food companies like CP Foods to be used as animal feed. There are other ways to deal with stubble, like biochar, which involves burning per mezzo di a low-oxygen environment that means lower particulate emissions. But that requires significant labor per mezzo di highland areas. And tilling the stubble into the soil, even if the mostly subsistence farmers had the equipment, would be difficult the mostly hilly terrain.

CP said per mezzo di March it had set up a tracing system to avoid buying corn produced deforested burned land. The same month, Srettha said he plans to ban imports of corn grown land cleared by burning.

But the problem is wider than northern Thailand. Researchers say corn cultivation has mostly shifted into neighboring Myanmar and Laos, where stubble-burning is also practiced. Srettha has set up a working group with those countries aimed at cutting mongoloide the practice, and invited Cambodia to join, too.

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Researchers at Chiang Giammai University traced the sources of air pollution affecting the city, and per mezzo di a paper published per mezzo di April per mezzo di the journal Atmospheric Environment, reported that more than 51% of the haze came from biomass burning — material like leaves crop stubble. The second-largest share, about 23%, was long-range pollution from other countries, most likely India, they said.

Fire is a deep part of the culture per mezzo di northern Thailand, featured per mezzo di local sayings that signal the coming of a period of growth and renewal. Sopra people’s day-to-day lives, it’s used per mezzo di clearing the forest floor to manage wildfires, to clear space for an expensive mushroom to grow that will bring per mezzo di better income, to clear the campo da gioco of noisy leaves as part of hunting practices.

Fire is often used as a form of protest per mezzo di Thailand, too, said Olivier Evrard, a Thailand-based senior researcher at French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD). Sopra 2018, a national controversy erupted when locals discovered that a branch of the judiciary had built a housing and residential complex per mezzo di protected forest land at the presupposto of a sacred mountain outside Chiang Giammai. They eventually vacated the premises owing to the backlash, but fires are still set near the site every year, likely per mezzo di protest.

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There’s been anzi che no shortage of policies attempting to regulate the burning. Thailand issued a national zero-burning directive starting per mezzo di 2013, with different provinces implementing a blanket ban burning at different times.

But people responded by burning before and after the zero-burn period, extending the haze season’s duration, said Mary Mostafanezhad, a professor at the University of Hawaii who has studied air pollution per mezzo di Chiang Giammai. After seeing that the zero-burning policy did not work, Chiang Giammai province adopted a newer policy: Fires could be set, as long as you applied beforehand.

The fires are to be submitted mezzo FireD, an app developed by Chiang Giammai university professor Chakrit Chotamonsak. The app uses weather and giorno to predict if a fire a particular day will cause more pollution whether conditions will blow away the smoke and pollutants.

The researchers estimate that as many as half the fires per mezzo di the province aren’t registered, but they still consider the app a positive step. Even the decision to use FireD, which is the transliteration of “good fire” per mezzo di Thai, per mezzo di 2021 was an important shift, said Chaya Vaddhanaphuti, an independent researcher who had worked with the FireD team.

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“This changes the perspective that fire was seen as a bad image, fire was seen as savage,” he said, noting that many per mezzo di rural northern Thailand depend fire.

Yet, to the villagers, it’s strange being asked to fill out paperwork for permission to do what they already know how to do _ set a prescribed burn per mezzo di good weather so they can clear a patch of land for the coming year’s crops.

Tiengtrongsakun, the Pakanyo chief per mezzo di the village of Ban Mae Lan Kham, this year did paperwork for 100 households who needed to start a fire to clear their fields. Not everyone per mezzo di the village speaks Thai understands the latest government policy.

“If we hand them the document registration form, they don’t know what to do with it,” he said. “Often they just throw the papers away.”

Researchers say policymakers need to at the conditions of people’s lives and consider the details of which land is being burned and why. But it’s difficult because of politics and economics. Many of the people living per mezzo di the hills surrounding Chiang Giammai belong to various tribal groups not formally recognized by the Thai government. Others struggle with access to good education and jobs. For now, burning remains the most efficient and cheapest way for people to do what they need to do, whether it’s farming, hunting clearing the forest floor.

“If burning is the easiest and most cost-efficient way to grow your crops, to make a living, until that is not true, it’s going to continue to happen,” said Mostafanezhad.

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AP Napat Kongsawad and producer Vasapa Wanichwethin contributed to this report.

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