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PUBLIC ACTIONS

 

Traditional Methods

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      Burning to clear and manage land is a regional traditional and cultural habit. In the past (pre-90s), the village council would manage fire prevention with annual clearing of fire breaks, rotation of cattle to reduce grassy fuel and prescribed burning made to avoid spreading and damage to communal and private properties.

     Agricultural burning required pruning and physical cleaning of fields with a decision to burn depending on meteorological factors and a semi-strict procedure for burning. In highlands, Swidden agriculture practiced by hilltribes was done with proper management and used partly as a preventive measure against larger wildfires.

     Political changes associated with the end of the cold war has considerably modified land rights with extensive expropriation of people living on forest margins. In the 90s, the state claimed authority on all natural public resources such as forests and promoted the installation of a weak community leadership. These measures put an end to the traditional management of biomass burning and a complete loss of responsibility of local communities towards wildfire management. Although more appropriately managed by authorities, a similar loss of traditional managment has also occured since the 80s for water resources (see flooding causes)

 

Prescribed burning

     It was done traditionally and still is today with or sometimes without approved administrative oversight. Its application at a larger scale is still limited as it can only be executed by the Department of Forestry, mostly during the cooler months of the year. While prescribed burning is often practiced in some countries to avoid the accumulation of litter over several years or decades and create unmanageable wildfires, it is not as primordial in Thailand since fuel accumulation reaches balance after a few years.

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Burning bans

     Burning bans exist since 2013 but are only seriously enforced since the end of 2016. Although some published data show a dramatic impact of the burning ban, all available sutides (as of 2024) are biased (no external comparison) and mostly due to meteorological factors. For years when the ban appears to be ineffective (ex: 2019, 2023), the blame is set on transborder pollution by some officials and researchers. Detailed analyses of emission makes it however relatively clear that when conditions are optimal for wildfires, the zero-burning policy has little impact on the abundance of local forest fires. However, its application to agricultural open-burning is more respected with some positive results and alternative available, possibly improving significantly the air quality in January and February (pending serious dataset).

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Legal Enforcement

     With the change in land rights applied in the 90s, the state owns and manages forests but these areas remain openly accessible to anyone. With a manpower of one official per ~100 km2, it is largely insufficient for the state to monitor and control all areas subject to fire, creating numerous, mostly uncontrolled wildfires. The yearly governmental attempt to impose to local people a duty of care towards forests to try to infuse guilt into rural folks is technically illegal since local people have legally no right to manage forested areas.

     The burning ban applied to forested areas has limited success, and while there is some fear of legal consequences, there is little understanding of health & environmental impact of forest fires and haze by rural people. The increased accessibility to forested areas makes it now easy to start a fire that is quickly unattended and while in the past, rural communities had some knowledge of the actions of outsiders and villagers within their local environment, they have now little control in identifying culprits. The zero-burning ban is also seen negatively by farmers as a way of government control over their behaviour rather than solving haze problems.

     In remote areas, there is also an issue of compliance of local officials who fear to lose their popularity in the local community, display some empathy towards offenders or have close relationships with them. The amount of extra work required to enforce the burning ban or fire management activities during the burning season come with no additional pay, which creates low motivation in the implementation of regulations.

     Alternative to open-burning of crops and rice paddies is applied locally or in other areas of Thailand. The valorization of biomass through biorefinery into energy products has been suggested to be economically profitable but for many remote areas, it would require considerable government support to actually create an incentive. Other agricultural practices such as triple cropping, cattle farming for straw management and leaving straws to improve soil characteristics are occasionally applied but varies between regions.

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Systemic issues

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     Thailand has a very centralized approach to governance. The National Environmental Quality Act of 1992 was the first legislative instrument to deal with air pollution and fires and allowed some devolved management functions to provincial governments. In 1997, following the catastrophic Indonesian fires, a new national action plan was designed but aimed at the Southern Thailand haze issue and was broadly inapplicable in Northern Thailand.

     In the 2000 decade, the central government started to impose pre-haze burning controls, patrolling and extinguishing fires but budget allocation, monitoring, post-disaster management and pre-haze management were never serious political actions. Following the 2007 burning season, more centralized policies appeared with some devolved governance to the provincial level but restricted to data collection capacity rather than an active role in tackling the haze problem. Open-burning control, forest fires and public information was all decided in Bangkok with little relevance for local communities in Northern Thailand.

     In 2010, another particularly bad burning season, the parliament passed an approval for urgent solving of haze episodes in Northern Thailand, producing strict fire prevention measures. But the highly regulatory policy regime failed to take into account local conditions, sources of haze and causes of burning, traditional practices and motivation of local people to burn fields and forest. In the government minds, their Bangkok-based policies should cascade down unaltered to provincial, district, sub-district and village authorities and somehow be applicable to local conditions  but such vertical transfer of authority never occurred.

     Since 2007, regular meetings are held at provincial levels to tackle the haze problem but in practice, these meetings are systematically attended by minor representatives of various ministries and government institutions with no effective power to commit to anything. These meetings are essentially sessions of information sharing between different ministries in a pre-defined plan and no coherent management of the haze problem. Even the provincial governor authority is under the direction of the Ministry of the Interior and provincial decisions are limited within that constitutional framework.

     In 2016, the first technically effective burning ban was put in place with significant penalties for illegal burning but the top-down approach failed to initiate any true grass-root participatory action. To this date, all decisions regarding land management that include air pollution and forests rarely take local opinion into account and villagers are more coerced into agreeing with authorities decisions than discussing and solving problems.

     As the present time (2023), all top-down government regulations on burning and haze management haven't accomplished most of their objectives. The absence of pre-critical management, an ineffective early warning system, completely inappropriate budget allocation, a one-way communication between locals, academics, private and civil stakeholders and government contribute to the lack of significant progress in reducing the severity of the haze season.

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International Actions

     ASEAN members have produced some initiatives since the early 80s when transboundary pollution was acknowledged as a problematic issue. The fundamental flaw with ASEAN agreements is the lack of liability or compensation scheme to hold responsibility between member states. It is a direct result of the non-intervention aspect of the ASEAN treaty and all agreements are diplomatic, based on consensus building and each member state has the opportunity to frame the haze problem depending on national issues rather than international collaboration.

     Therefore, in practice, ASEAN policies are hardly workable in some regions and tend to try to solve the consequences of haze pollution but never address the underlying causes as it could be seen as interference in domestic policies. The only improvement that ASEAN has brought so far is the regional monitoring of air pollution in the whole continental South-East Asia.