Stuart Grudgings in Reuters: Southeast Asian nations agreed on Wednesday to adopt a new system to improve monitoring of smog caused by fires, an attempt to make plantation companies more accountable following the region's worst air pollution crisis in 16 years.Thick haze, mostly from land-clearing fires in Indonesia, blanketed Singapore and swathes of neighboring Malaysia earlier this year, stoking diplomatic tensions as air pollution climbed to the most hazardous levels since a similar crisis in 1997.
The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which began a two-day regional summit in Brunei on Wednesday, has been criticized in the past for not taking stronger action to prevent the chronic pollution problem.
Even with improved monitoring, critics say the region lacks the legal mechanisms or strong institutions to enforce compliance.
"ASEAN leaders have approved the Haze Monitoring System. We hope the respective ministries will upload the digitized concession maps as soon as possible," Singapore's environment minister, Vivian Balakrishnan, wrote on his official Facebook page...
Haze in Kuala Lumpur, shot by Krisjohn, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
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