South-East Asian haze increases risk of respiratory mortality

Research SEA: Since 1997, the massive burning of biomass in Sumatra and Kalimantan, Indonesia, has affected neighbouring countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Southern Thailand. The burning of biomass has generated a significant amount of haze that travels overseas, affecting the region’s economy and public health.

Haze resulting from forest fires is known to increase the concentration of toxic airborne particles that are smaller than ten microns in size, such as carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone. Previous studies have found that airborne particles can cause serious respiratory effects. In 1997, South-East Asian haze increased the number of asthma attacks by 10.7% in Malaysia alone.

Professor Mazrura Sahani, an environmental epidemiology expert at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, recently conducted a follow-up study on this issue focusing on Klang Valley, the most populated and most affected area on the west coast of peninsular Malaysia. She analysed the association between mortality rates from respiratory illness in Klang Valley and 88 days of recorded haze events from 2000 to 2007. Haze events typically last for seven days.

Professor Sahani collected respiratory mortality data from Malaysia’s Department of Statistics and obtained environmental data from six continuous air quality monitoring stations in Klang Valley. Her results showed that South-East Asian haze has increased the risk of respiratory mortality in Klang Valley as a result of increased exposure to toxic particles during the haze days. By the sixth day of a haze event, daily mortality rates were higher than normal....

Haze in Kuala Lumpur, shot by Krisjohn, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike  2.0 Generic license

Researchers link smoke from fires to tornado intensity

Gary Galluzo at Iowa Now: Can smoke from fires intensify tornadoes? “Yes,” say University of Iowa researchers, who examined the effects of smoke—resulting from spring agricultural land-clearing fires in Central America—transported across the Gulf of Mexico and encountering tornado conditions already in process in the United States.

The UI study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined the smoke impacts on a historic severe weather outbreak that occurred during the afternoon and evening of April 27, 2011. The weather event produced 122 tornadoes, resulted in 313 deaths across the southeastern United States, and is considered the most severe event of its kind since 1950.

The outbreak was caused mainly by environmental conditions leading to a large potential for tornado formation and conducive to supercells, a type of thunderstorm. However, smoke particles intensified these conditions, according to co-lead authors Gregory Carmichael, professor of chemical and biochemical engineering, and Pablo Saide, Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research (CGRER) postdoctoral fellow.

They say the smoke lowered the base of the clouds and increased wind shear, defined as wind speed variations with respect to altitude. Together, those two conditions increased the likelihood of more severe tornadoes. The effects of smoke on these conditions had not been previously described, and the study found a novel mechanism to explain these interactions.

“These results are of great importance, as it is the first study to show smoke influence on tornado severity in a real case scenario. Also, severe weather prediction centers do not include atmospheric particles and their effects in their models, and we show that they should at least consider it,” says Carmichael....

The satellite image for April 27, 2011 shows the southeastern United States, Central America and the Gulf of Mexico—along with tornado tracks (red solid lines, with the thickest indicating a magnitude 5 tornado, descending to magnitude 1 for the thinnest—for the period April 26-28, 2011. Yellow markers indicate fires, and an iridescent overlay shows particulate matter in the air, with red showing highest amount and purple the lowest. Imagery courtesy of Brad Pierce, NOAA Satellite and Information Service Center for Satellite Applications and Research.

Gas flaring and household stoves speed Arctic thaw

A press release from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: Gas flaring by the oil industry and smoke from residential burning contributes more black carbon pollution to Arctic than previously thought—potentially speeding the melting of Arctic sea ice and contributing to the fast rate of warming in the region.

The new study, published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics by researchers at IIASA and in Norway, Finland, and Russia, finds that gas flaring from oil extraction in the Arctic accounts for 42% of the black carbon concentrations in the Arctic, with even higher levels during certain times of the year. In the month of March for example, the study showed that flaring accounts for more than half of black carbon concentrations near the surface. Globally, in contrast, gas flaring accounts for only 3% of black carbon emissions.

The researchers also found that residential combustion emissions play a greater role in black carbon pollution than previously estimated, after they incorporated seasonal differences in emissions into the model.

To conduct the study, researchers used particle dispersion model FLEXPART driven by emissions estimated with the IIASA’s GAINS model, combined with measurements of black carbon in the Arctic, made during a research cruise in the Arctic Ocean and research stations located at 6 sites in Alaska, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Greenland.

...“We are seeing more and more oil being extracted further and further north. And the proximity of emissions from gas flaring matters,” says Klimont. Black carbon, or soot, contributes to warming in the Arctic by darkening the surface of snow or ice and causing it to melt faster, or absorbing more heat in the air...

This map shows the surface concentrations of black carbon, from all emission sources, as simulated by the new study. The study shows that residential combustion emissions and gas flaring emissions are higher than previous studies had estimated. Map from the IIASA website

Indonesian farmers take legal action against president over haze

Terra Daily via AFP: Indonesian farmers in a province at the centre of Southeast Asia's worst smog outbreak for years have filed a lawsuit against the president in response to the haze crisis, activists said Wednesday. Environmental groups Tuesday filed the class-action lawsuit at the Jakarta High Court on behalf of farmers from five villages in Riau province on Sumatra island.

They argue President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has not done enough to curb activities, such as slash-and-burn land clearance and logging, that lead to climate change, and their lives are being deeply affected. In June, raging fires set to clear land in Riau cloaked the province and neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore in smog, with the haze hitting the worst levels for more than a decade.

Riau is at the centre of Indonesia's booming palm oil industry, and illegal slash-and-burn clearance is common, as it is the quickest and cheapest method for land to be converted for use as plantations. A coalition of green groups filed the lawsuit, including forest protection group Jikalahari, which said the severe haze this year had prompted the action and had "deeply affected the communities"...

NASA image of smoke over Sumatra

New insights on wildfire smoke could improve climate change models

Michigan Tech News: Where there’s wildfire, there’s smoke—a lot of it. And those vast, carbon-laden clouds released by burning biomass can play a significant role in climate change. However, not much is known about the different types of particles in wildfire smoke and how they affect climate. Now two Michigan Technological University researchers have uncovered some of their secrets. In particular, they studied an important component of smoke that has so far been absent from most models of climate change.

A team including Claudio Mazzoleni, an associate professor of physics, PhD student Swarup China and Michigan Tech physics alumnus Kyle Gorkowski of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, along with other LANL scientists, looked at two types of particles captured during the 2011 Las Conchas fire in New Mexico: soot, not unlike that found in diesel exhaust; and tar balls, tiny round blobs that are abundant in biomass smoke and composed largely of carbon and oxygen. Tar balls made up 80 percent of the particles from the Las Conchas fire, but they have not yet been integrated into most climate-change models.

China and Mazzoleni observed the soot and tar balls using a field emission scanning electron microscope at low voltage, which enhanced the contrast between the different particles. Tar balls, they discovered, come in two main types in the electron microscope images: “dark” and “bright.” The dark tar balls are more oxidized, and the two types likely absorb and scatter light differently.

Soot particles are even more diverse. China and Mazzoleni identified four categories of soot, from bare to heavily coated, each with different optical properties. The team also heated tar balls and soot in a special chamber, which baked off their coatings and provided additional insights into their composition and properties.

...So, do tar balls warm or cool the Earth? “We don’t have an answer to that,” Mazzoleni said. “The particles might be warming in and of themselves, but if they don’t let solar radiation come down through the atmosphere, they could cool the surface. They may have strong effects, but at this point, it’s not wise to say what. However, our study does provide modelers new insights on the smoke particle properties, and accounting for these properties in models might provide an answer to that question.”

“The big thing we learned is that we should not forget about tar balls in climate models,” China said, “especially since those models are predicting more and more wildfires.”...

Field emission scanning electron microscopy image of tar balls with an aggregation of soot particles from the Las Conchas fire. Swarup China image

Home cooking, traffic are sources of key air pollutants from China

American Chemical Society News: Almost 80 percent of air pollution involving soot that spreads from China over large areas of East Asia — impacting human health and fostering global warming — comes from city traffic and other forms of fossil-fuel combustion, such as home cooking with coal briquettes. That’s the conclusion of a study in ACS’ journal Environmental Science & Technology, which resolves long-standing questions about sources of air pollution responsible for Asia’s infamous atmospheric brown clouds.

Örjan Gustafsson and colleagues from China, South Korea and the United States point out in their study that nobody has been certain about the exact sources of soot, or “black carbon,” air pollution from the People’s Republic of China. People can inhale these tiny particles deep into the lungs, and estimates implicate soot with 500,000 premature deaths annually in China alone. Black carbon in the atmosphere also absorbs sunlight, and scientists think it is second only to carbon dioxide as a factor in global warming. Gustafsson and his team set out to identify the exact sources of black carbon in China.

They describe using a powerful carbon-14 identification method to trace fully four-fifths of the black carbon emitted in China to incomplete combustion of fossil fuel such as coal briquettes used in home cookstoves and automobile and truck exhaust. “To mitigate near-term climate effects and improve air quality in East Asia, activities such as residential coal combustion and city traffic should be targeted,” they conclude...

Smog in Beijing, shot by 螺钉, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Discontent rises with Singapore haze

Kirsten Han in the Diplomat: Although a bustling, densely populated city-state, Singapore has nonetheless managed to maintain a reputation for having relatively clean air. Once a year, though, the island is engulfed in smog and haze, a result of forest fires caused by slash-and-burn tactics employed by plantations in Indonesia. For more than a decade now Singaporeans have endured the consequences of unethical plantations choosing the easy way out in clearing their land. Still, usually people just cough and scratch their noses, grumble a little and continue on their way.

Not this year, though, as the Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) climbs higher than ever before. At one point it hit 401, classified by the National Environment Agency (NEA) as “very hazardous”. It’s all anyone can talk about. The Twitter hashtag “#SGHaze” is constantly trending in Singapore, and social media feeds are clogged with screencaps, comments and postings from those obsessively monitoring the PSI figures. The severity of this year’s haze problem has brought to the surface a plethora of worries and criticism of the government.

With the smog hitting record levels, people have been advised not to remain outdoors for long periods of time. Several companies and employers have asked their employees to work from home, or stop working completely. McDonald’s temporarily ceased its delivery service, citing health concerns for its workers. Despite this, the government has yet to issue an official “stop work” order, and many construction workers – most of them low-paid migrant workers from Bangladesh, India or China – are still toiling away in hazardous conditions.

Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), an NGO focused on migrant workers’ rights, wrote in a statement published on that website that it “is gravely concerned that current bad haze conditions will affect the health of workers in many trades, e.g. construction, marine, sanitation, landscaping.”...

Singapore haze at night, shot by mqnr, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Indonesia names Sinar Mas, APRIL, among eight firms behind Singapore haze

Jessica Cheam in Eco-Business: Indonesia has blamed eight companies, including Singapore-based Sinar Mas and Asia Pacific Resources International (APRIL) for the fires raging across its land of Sumatra that has blanketed parts of Malaysia and parts of Singapore in its most severe haze in history.

Senior presidential aide Kuntoro Mangkusubroto was reported by news wires on Friday saying: “The majority of hotspots in Riau (province) are inside APRIL and Sinar Mas concessions,” The environment minister said not all eight companies were Singapore based, but declined to name the rest of them. He added that investigations are still ongoing and he was not able to elaborate further where these companies are from, although Indonesia is expected to name the companies in the next few days.

Indonesian Environment Minister Balthasar Kambuaya met his counterpart from Singapore, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan in Jakarta on Friday, who handed a letter from Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to the Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Dr Balakrishnan had earlier in the week called on Indonesia to name and shame the companies so that commercial pressure can be applied on them to prevent and address the haze.

Some of the world’s major largest palm oil companies such as Singapore-based Wilmar International and Malaysia-based Sime Darby have denied involvement in the burning, although Wilmar has been reported to say it cannot control local practices of slash-and-burn for agricultural and other purposes...

Singapore haze on June 17, 2013, shot by Brian Jeffery Beggerly, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Shipping firms warn of haze danger in Malacca Strait

Terra Daily via AFP: Shipping companies warned Friday that the haze emanating from forest fires in Indonesia could lead to accidents in the busy Malacca and Singapore straits, risking a potentially devastating oil spill.

The Singapore Shipping Association (SSA) said more than 140 ships, including oil tankers and passenger ferries, navigate the narrow waterways on any given day and reduced visibility due to the smog has made conditions dangerous.

"The SSA is gravely concerned with the effects of the worsening hazy conditions on the safe navigation of ships through the Straits of Malacca and Singapore," it said. Daniel Tan, the trade body's executive director, said the Malacca and Singapore straits are among the busiest and narrowest shipping lanes in the world...

Smoke from Indonesian fires, view by NASA on June 19, 2013

Indonesian fires worsen, Singapore smog sets record

Kanupriya Kapoor in Reuters: Military planes water-bombed Indonesian forest fires that worsened on Friday and blanketed neighboring Singapore in record levels of hazardous smog for a third straight day in one of Southeast Asia's worst air-pollution crises.

As Singaporeans donned face masks and pulled children from playgrounds and Malaysia closed schools in the south, the deliberately-lit fires grew bigger in some areas. Whipped up by winds, the blazes added to fears over health problems and diplomatic tension in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, three of Southeast Asia's biggest economies.

...Indonesia's Environment Minister, Balthasar Kambuaya, said the government had identified five companies behind the fires, but refused to name them, according to The Jakarta Post newspaper.

Singapore's government has warned the haze could last weeks. Illegal burning of forests and other land on Indonesia's Sumatra island typically take place in the June to September dry season to clear space for palm oil plantations. But this year's fires are unusually widespread and the hazy smog is the worst in Singapore's history.

"Since the fires are happening mostly on plantation lands, we believe there are plantation companies involved. The president has already put together a team to investigate who owns the plantations," said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for Indonesia's National Disaster Management Agency....

Fires on Sumatra in 2006, via NASA

Singapore pollution soars as haze from Indonesia hits air quality

Guardian (UK) via AP: Singaporeans reduced military training exercises, kept cough-stricken children indoors and wore protective masks to work after a smoky haze triggered by forest fires in neighbouring Indonesia caused air pollution to hit its worst level in nearly 16 years.

Singapore's main measurement of air quality has hovered at the unhealthy classification as smoke from blazes on Sumatra island drifted across the sea and cast a grey pall over the city-state's skyscrapers.

The readings on the pollutant standards index were mostly between 104 and 123 on Tuesday, within the unhealthy range of between 101 and 200. A peak reading of 155 on Monday night was the highest since late 1997, when officials reported a 226 reading.

Smoke haze is an annual problem for Singapore and its northern neighbour, Malaysia, often beginning midyear, when farmers in Indonesia seek to clear land cheaply by starting fires. It sometimes causes diplomatic strains as Malaysia and Singapore urge Indonesia to do more to prevent illegal burning.

Malaysia has been only lightly affected so far this year, with pollution readings in Kuala Lumpur, its largest city, not breaching the unhealthy mark. Indonesia has said part of the current problem is caused by peat blazes that firefighters are struggling to extinguish during hot, dry weather...

Haze in Singapore, October 2006, shot by Sengkang, public domain

Wood smoke from cooking fires linked to pneumonia, cognitive impacts

Sarah Yang in the University California at Berkeley News Center: Two new studies led by University of California, Berkeley, researchers spotlight the human health effects of exposure to smoke from open fires and dirty cookstoves, the primary source of cooking and heating for 43 percent, or some 3 billion members, of the world’s population. Women and young children in poverty are particularly vulnerable.

In the first study, the researchers found a dramatic one-third reduction in severe pneumonia diagnoses among children in homes with smoke-reducing chimneys on their cookstoves. The second study uncovered a surprising link between prenatal maternal exposure to woodsmoke and poorer performance in markers for IQ among school-aged children.

The findings on pneumonia, the chief cause of death for children five and under, will be published in the journal The Lancet on Thursday, Nov. 10, two days before World Pneumonia Day. While previous research has linked exposure to household cooking smoke to respiratory infections, the latest results come from the first-ever randomized controlled trial – the gold standard of scientific experiments – on air pollution.

“This study is critically important because it provides compelling evidence that reducing household woodsmoke exposure is a public health intervention that is likely on a par with vaccinations and nutrition supplements for reducing severe pneumonia, and is worth investing in,” said Kirk Smith, professor of global environmental health at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and principal investigator of the RESPIRE (Randomized Exposure Study of Pollution Indoors and Respiratory Effects) study.

“There is a huge burden of disease and death due to child pneumonia, and there aren’t a lot of good interventions out there,” added Dr. Arthur Reingold, a UC Berkeley professor of epidemiology and an internationally recognized expert on infectious diseases, who was not part of the RESPIRE trial. “Randomized controlled trials are frequently demanded by funding agencies and decision makers before they are willing to make substantial investments in new technologies or strategies, and this study provides the needed evidence of an intervention that works.”...

Cooking over an open fire in Khyrgyzstan, shot by Firespeaker, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.