Singapore can stop the haze with sustainable palm oil
In 2015, when Benjamin Tay came back to Singapore after his studies in Australia, he got smacked by the worse transboundary haze event in Southeast Asia.
“The haze was all around Indonesia, Malaysia, and way up to Philippines. It was quite bad.” He shared with me on a phone call.
The haze caused respiratory issues to a hundred of thousand people especially in Indonesia, flights were canceled, and schools in Singapore were closed due to high levels of air pollution. In the cities of Pontianak and Kuching located on the island of Borneo, air pollution was three times worse than in Singapore. In the state of Penang in the north of Malaysia, Perai Pulau was as affected as Singapore even though it is 700 km away from Merlion city.
Benjamin wanted to understand why air pollution could happen at such scale and intensity. The same year, he joined the People’s Movement to Stop Haze (PM Haze), an organization founded in response to the 2013 haze crisis, but dormant at…
