Malaysia has experienced several haze events since the 1980s as a consequence of the transboundary movement of air pollutants emitted from forest fires and open burning activities. Hazy episodes can result from local activities and be categorized as "localized haze". General probability distributions (i.e., gamma and log-normal) were chosen to analyze the PM(10) concentrations data at two different types of locations in Malaysia: industrial (Johor Bahru and Nilai) and residential (Kota Kinabalu and Kuantan). These areas were chosen based on their frequently high PM(10) concentration readings. The best models representing the areas were chosen based on their performance indicator values. The best distributions provided the probability of exceedances and the return period between the actual and predicted concentrations based on the threshold limit given by the Malaysian Ambient Air Quality Guidelines (24-h average of 150 μg/m(3)) for PM(10) concentrations. The short-term prediction for PM(10) exceedances in 14 days was obtained using the autoregressive model.
Matched MeSH terms: Fires/statistics & numerical data
We used the global fire detection record provided by the satellite-based Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to determine the number of fires detected inside 823 tropical and subtropical moist forest reserves and for contiguous buffer areas 5, 10, and 15 km wide. The ratio of fire detection densities (detections per square kilometer) inside reserves to their contiguous buffer areas provided an index of reserve effectiveness. Fire detection density was significantly lower inside reserves than in paired, contiguous buffer areas but varied by five orders of magnitude among reserves. The buffer: reserve detection ratio varied by up to four orders of magnitude among reserves within a single country, and median values varied by three orders of magnitude among countries. Reserves tended to be least effective at reducing fire frequency in many poorer countries and in countries beset by corruption. Countries with the most successful reserves include Costa Rica, Jamaica, Malaysia, and Taiwan and the Indonesian island of Java. Countries with the most problematic reserves include Cambodia, Guatemala, Paraguay, and Sierra Leone and the Indonesian portion of Borneo. We provide fire detection density for 3964 tropical and subtropical reserves and their buffer areas in the hope that these data will expedite further analyses that might lead to improved management of tropical reserves.
The 'seasonal haze' problem is one which afflicts large parts of Southeast Asia in years of drought. The major cause is forest, bush and field fires in the states of Kalimantan and Sumatra in Indonesia, and to a lesser extent in Sabah, Sarawak, and other parts of Malaysia. Almost all of these fires now seem preventable, since they are intentionally set to clear land for cultivation. Theoretically, the government authorities at central, provincial and local levels in these countries should be responsible for controlling activities in their territory. In practice, however, air pollution control through regulatory policies and practices is extraordinarily difficult to implement and maintain in a situation of this kind in developing countries, especially at a time of crippling economic setbacks. Moreover, the establishment of legal liability, through an international tribunal or otherwise, hardly seems a politically feasible course of action for the government of an affluent 'victim state' such as Singapore. Faith in the usual solutions--science, regulation, law and diplomacy--is weakened by one's sense of current realities. The purpose of this paper is to review the issues and suggested responses, the cost implications of each, the responsibilities as well as entitlements that might apply to the various stakeholders, and the special role of Singapore as an affluent 'victim state'. We also discuss the incentive mechanisms that would be needed to manage forest fires.
I assess the population health effects in Malaysia of air pollution from a widespread series of fires that occurred in Indonesia between April and November of 1997. I describe how the fires occurred and why the associated air pollution was so widespread and long lasting. The main objective is to uncover any mortality effects and to assess how large and important they were. I also investigate whether the mortality effects were persistent or whether they represented a short-term, mortality-harvesting effect. The results show that the smoke haze from the fires had a deleterious effect on the health of the population in Malaysia.
This study was conducted on 506 firemen in Singapore. Interviews, pulmonary function tests and audiometry were conducted. With regard to pulmonary function, the results showed that forced vital capacity (FVC) increased up to the age of 25-30 years for both Chinese and Malays. Both FVC and forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1.0) increased with standing height over the whole age range studied. The mean values of FVC and FEV1.0 were higher in Chinese. It was also found that the FEV1 of the subjects in the study showed a greater decline in rate with age than other workers studied by the authors previously. The hearing threshold of 83 fire fighters showed a prominent upward shift of 6-8 KHz at ages 20-30. This upward shift was more pronounced in the right ear. The implications of the findings are discussed and a comparison with results of other similar studies in other countries is made.
Transboundary haze episodes caused by seasonal forest fires have become a recurrent phenomenon in Southeast Asia, with serious environmental, economic, and public health implications. Here we present a cross-sectional survey conducted among people in Kuala Lumpur and surrounds to assess the links between knowledge, attitudes, and practices in relation to the transboundary haze episodes. Of 305 respondents, 125 were amateur athletes participating in a duathlon event and the remainder were surveyed in an inner-city shopping mall. Across the whole sample, people who possessed more factual information about the haze phenomenon showed significantly higher levels of concern. Duathletes were more knowledgeable than non-duathletes and also more concerned about the negative effects of haze, especially on health. For all people who regularly practice outdoor sports (including people interviewed at the shopping mall), higher levels of knowledge and concerned attitudes translated into a greater likelihood of engaging in protective practices, such as cancelling their outdoor training sessions, while those with greater knowledge were more likely to check the relevant air pollution index on a daily basis. Our results indicate that the provision of accurate and timely information about air quality to residents will translate into beneficial practices, at least among particularly exposed individuals, such as amateur athletes who regularly practice outdoor sports.
In this study, an early fire detection algorithm has been proposed based on low cost array sensing system, utilising off- the shelf gas sensors, dust particles and ambient sensors such as temperature and humidity sensor. The odour or "smellprint" emanated from various fire sources and building construction materials at early stage are measured. For this purpose, odour profile data from five common fire sources and three common building construction materials were used to develop the classification model. Normalised feature extractions of the smell print data were performed before subjected to prediction classifier. These features represent the odour signals in the time domain. The obtained features undergo the proposed multi-stage feature selection technique and lastly, further reduced by Principal Component Analysis (PCA), a dimension reduction technique. The hybrid PCA-PNN based approach has been applied on different datasets from in-house developed system and the portable electronic nose unit. Experimental classification results show that the dimension reduction process performed by PCA has improved the classification accuracy and provided high reliability, regardless of ambient temperature and humidity variation, baseline sensor drift, the different gas concentration level and exposure towards different heating temperature range.
The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between the level of stress experienced by rescue workers after the collapse of a 13 story condominium in Kuala Lumpur, and other probable risk factors. Within a month of the incident, 123 firefighters filled up the Impact of Life Event score (Horowitz) and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). The results indicated that 7 (6%) firemen could be classified as possible 'cases' on the GHQ, and significantly 5 from this group also scored highly on the impact of events score. No other risk factors were identified in the firemen. On conclusion, the GHQ can be used to screen those with high impact scores to pick up possible cases early enough, so that intervention can be successful.
Palm oil is used in various valued commodities and is a large global industry worth over US$ 50 billion annually. Oil palms (OP) are grown commercially in Indonesia and Malaysia and other countries within Latin America and Africa. The large-scale land-use change has high ecological, economic, and social impacts. Tropical countries in particular are affected negatively by climate change (CC) which also has a detrimental impact on OP agronomy, whereas the cultivation of OP increases CC. Amelioration of both is required. The reduced ability to grow OP will reduce CC, which may allow more cultivation tending to increase CC, in a decreasing cycle. OP could be increasingly grown in more suitable regions occurring under CC. Enhancing the soil fauna may compensate for the effect of CC on OP agriculture to some extent. The effect of OP cultivation on CC may be reduced by employing reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation plans, for example, by avoiding illegal fire land clearing. Other ameliorating methods are reported herein. More research is required involving good management practices that can offset the increases in CC by OP plantations. Overall, OP-growing countries should support the Paris convention on reducing CC as the most feasible scheme for reducing CC.
Fire is one of the major issues facing Southeast Asian peatlands causing socio-economic, human health and climate crises. Many of these fires in the region are associated with land clearing or management practices for oil palm plantations. Here we study the direct post-fire impacts of slash-and-burn oil palm agriculture on greenhouse gas emissions, peat physico-chemical properties and nutrient concentrations. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were measured using Los Gatos ultraportable greenhouse gas analyser one month after a fire in dry season and five months after the fire event, in wet season. Surface soil samples were collected from each individual GHG measurement points, along with 50 cm cores from both burnt and non-burnt control areas for lab analyses. As an immediate post-fire impact, carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions, pH, electrical conductivity, and all macronutrient concentrations except nitrogen (N) were increased multi-fold, while the redox potential, carbon (C) and N content were greatly reduced in the burnt region. While some of the properties such as CO2 emissions, and electrical conductivity reverted to normal after five months, other properties such as CH4 emissions, pH and nutrient concentrations remained high in the burnt region. This study also found very high loss of surface peat C content in the burnt region post fire, which is irreversible. The results also show that surface peat layers up to 20 cm depth were affected the most by slash-and-burn activity in oil palm agriculture, however the intensity of fire can vary widely between different oil palm management and needs further research to fully understand the long term and regional impacts of such slash-and-burn activity in tropical peatlands.
Transboundary emissions of smoke-haze from land and forest fires have recurred annually during the dry period (June to October, over the past few decades) in South East Asia. Hazardous air quality has been recorded in Malaysia during these episodes. Agricultural practices such as slash-and-burn of biomass and peat fires particularly in Sumatera and Kalimantan, Indonesia, have been implicated as the major causes of the haze. Past findings have shown that a diversity of microbes can thrive in air including in smoke-haze polluted air. In this study, metagenomic data were generated to reveal the diversity of microorganisms in air during days with and without haze. Air samples were collected during non-haze (2013A01) and two haze (2013A04 and 2013A05) periods in the month of June 2013. DNA was extracted from the samples, subjected to Multiple Displacement Amplification and whole genome sequencing (Next Generation Sequencing) using the HiSeq 2000 Platform. Extensive bio-informatic analyses of the raw sequence data then followed. Raw reads from these six air samples were deposited in the NCBI SRA databases under Bioproject PRJNA662021 with accession numbers SRX9087478, SRX9087479 and SRX9087480.
Readymade garments (RMG) industry of Bangladesh are lesser revealed to sustainable outlines that originating avoidance related with standard health and safety provisions, labor rights, women safety, child labor, pollution, waste disposal and ground water depletion. Recently there are also several safety hazards by way of fire incidents and building collapses which caused death and injury of thousand or garment workers at Bangladesh. Actually a suitable sustainable development scheme for this industry includes the insights of proper employee involvement based upon what is known (knowledge) and done (behavior). So the study aims to investigate the relationship between knowledge and behavior which reflects the complication between what is in fact known and what is done in case of sustainable issues. The study has used both questionnaire survey and interview procedures on 10 BGMEA registered factories of Chittagong to recognize the connection between knowledge and behavior. The target populace of the study has been limited only to the white collar employees. However, the study identified that employee knowledge and behavior of sustainable development contains a moderate, positive relationship (r=.315, n=150, p
The Southeast Asian (SEA) region is no stranger to forest fires - the region has been suffering from severe air pollution (known locally as 'haze') as a result of these fires, for decades. The fires in SEA region are caused by a combination of natural (the El Niño weather pattern) and manmade (slash-and-burn and land clearing for plantations) factors. These fires cause the emissions of toxic aerosols and pollutants that can affect millions of people in the region. Thus, this study aims to identify the impact of the SEA haze on the Southern region of the Malaysian Peninsula and Borneo region of East Malaysia using the entire air quality observation data at surface level in 2015. Overall, the concentration of PM10 was about two-fold higher during the haze period compared to non-haze period. The concentrations of CO, flux of CO and flux of BC were aligned with PM10 during the entire observation period. The wind field and cluster of trajectory indicated that the Southern Malaysian Peninsula and Borneo were influenced mainly from the wildfires and the combustion of peat soil in the Indonesian Borneo. This study finds that wildfires from Borneo impacted the Southern Malaysian Borneo more seriously than that from Sumatra region.
Southeast Asian haze is a semi-natural phenomenon that chokes the region each year during the dry monsoon season. Smoke-haze episodes caused by the vegetation and peat fires in Indonesia severely affected large parts of Malaysia during the 2015 El Niño phenomenon. This study aimed to evaluate the factors that influenced the concentrations of aerosol and trace gases during the 2015 haze and non-haze period on a semi-urban site in the southern part of Malaysian peninsula that facing Sumatra (Muar, Site A), and on an urban site near to Kuala Lumpur, influenced by the city centre (Cheras, Site B). Local land use data and the cluster of air mass weighted backward trajectory were used to identify the potential factors from local sources and the transboundary region, respectively. The annual median concentrations of PM10 for semi-urban and urban sites were 45.0μg/m3 and 47.0μg/m3, respectively for the study period (Jan-Dec 2015) from the hourly observation dataset. The highest PM10 concentrations during the haze were 358μg/m3 and 415μg/m3 for the two sites, respectively, representing absolutely unhealthy air. However, the trace gases were within the safe threshold. The average concentrations of PM10 and carbon monoxide were two fold higher during the haze than the non-haze episodes on both sites. Nitrogen dioxide was more influenced by haze compared with sulphur dioxide and ozone. The results of the land use change suggest that the local factor can also partially affect the air pollution on the urban area (Site B) but more visible in 2015. The results of the backward trajectory and the wildfire radiative power showed that the smoke-haze episodes that affected Malaysia in 2015 were mainly initiated in the Indonesian Sumatra and Kalimantan regions. This study provides a very useful information towards the impacted region during El Niño haze episode.
This study was undertaken to compare the chemical properties and yields of pineapple leaf residue (PLR) char produced by field burning (CF) with that produced by a partial combustion of air-dried PLR at 340 °C for 3 h in a furnace (CL). Higher total C, lignin content, and yield from CL as well as the presence of aromatic compounds in the Fourier Transform Infrared spectra of the char produced from CL suggest that the CL process was better in sequestering C than was the CF process. Although the C/N ratio of char produced from CL was low indicating a high N content of the char, the C in the char produced from CL was dominated by lignin suggesting that the decomposition of char produced from CL would be slow. To sequester C by char application, the PLR should be combusted in a controlled process rather than by burning in the field.
The reconstruction of fire history is essential to understand the palaeoclimate and human history. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) have been extensively used as a fire marker. In this work, the distribution of PAHs in Borneo peat archives was investigated to understand how PAHs reflect the palaeo-fire activity. In total, 52 peat samples were analysed from a Borneo peat core for the PAH analysis. Pyrogenic PAHs consist of 2-7 aromatic rings, some of which have methyl and ethyl groups. The results reveal that the concentration of pyrogenic PAHs fluctuated with the core depth. Compared to low-molecular-weight (LMW) PAHs, the high-molecular-weight (HMW) PAHs had a more similar depth variation to the charcoal abundance. This finding also suggests that the HMW PAHs were mainly formed at a local fire near the study area, while the LMW PAHs could be transported from remote locations.
We investigated the cardiorespiratory health effects of smoke exposure from the 1997 Southeast Asian Forest Fires among persons who were hospitalized in the region of Kuching, Malaysia. We selected admissions to seven hospitals in the Kuching region from a database of all hospital admissions in the state of Sarawak during January 1, 1995 and December 31, 1998. For several cardiorespiratory disease classifications we used Holt-Winters time-series analyses to determine whether the total number of monthly hospitalizations during the forest fire period (August 1 to October 31, 1997), or post-fire period (November 1, 1997 to December 31, 1997) exceeded forecasted estimates established from a historical baseline period of January 1, 1995 to July 31, 1997. We also identified age-specific cohorts of persons whose members were admitted for specific cardiorespiratory problems during January 1 to July 31 of each year (1995--1997). We compared Kaplan-Meier survival curves of time to first readmission for the 1997 cohorts (exposed to the forest fire smoke) with the survival curves for the 1995 and 1996 cohorts (not exposed, pre-fire cohorts). The time-series analyses indicated that statistically significant fire-related increases were observed in respiratory hospitalizations, specifically those for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma. The survival analyses indicated that persons over age 65 years with previous hospital admissions for any cause (chi2(1df) = 5.98, p = 0.015), any cardiorespiratory disease (chi2(1df) = 5.3, p = 0.02), any respiratory disease (chi2(1df) = 7.8, p = 0.005), or COPD (chi2(1df) = 3.9, p = 0.047), were significantly more likely to be rehospitalized during the follow-up period in 1997 than during the follow-up periods in the pre-fire years of 1995 or 1996. The survival functions of the exposed cohorts resumed similar trajectories to unexposed cohorts during the post-fire period of November 1, 1997 to December 31, 1998. Communities exposed to forest fire smoke during the Southeast Asian forest fires of 1997 experienced short-term increases in cardiorespiratory hospitalizations. When an air quality emergency is anticipated, persons over age 65 with histories of respiratory hospitalizations should be preidentified from existing hospitalization records and given priority access to interventions.
In this study, we assess the intense pollution episode of June 2013, in Riau province, Indonesia from land clearing. We relied on satellite retrievals of aerosols and Carbon monoxide (CO) due to lack of ground measurements. We used both the yearly and daily data for aerosol optical depth (AOD), fine mode fraction (FMF), aerosol absorption optical depth (AAOD) and UV aerosol index (UVAI) for characterizing variations. We found significant enhancement in aerosols and CO during the pollution episode. Compared to mean (2008-2012) June AOD of 0.40, FMF-0.39, AAOD-0.45, UVAI-1.77 and CO of 200 ppbv, June 2013 values reached 0.8, 0.573, 0.672, 1.77 and 978 ppbv respectively. Correlations of fire counts with AAOD and UVAI were stronger compared to AOD and FMF. Results from a trajectory model suggested transport of air masses from Indonesia towards Malaysia, Singapore and southern Thailand. Our results highlight satellite-based mapping and monitoring of pollution episodes in Southeast Asia.
Atmospheric pollution and global warming issues are increasingly becoming major environmental concerns. Fire is one of the significant sources of pollutant gases released into the atmosphere; and tropical biomass fires, which are of particular interest in this study, contribute greatly to the global budget of CO and CO2. This pioneer research simulates the natural biomass burning strategy in Malaysia using an experimental burning facility. The investigation was conducted on the emissions (CO2, CO, and Benzene, Toluene, Ethylbenzene, Xylenes (BTEX)) from ten tropical biomass species. The selected species represent the major tropical forests that are frequently subjected to dry forest fire incidents. An experimental burning facility equipped with an on-line gas analyzer was employed to determine the burning emissions. The major emission factors were found to vary among the species, and the specific results were as follows. The moisture content of a particular biomass greatly influenced its emission pattern. The smoke analysis results revealed the existence of BTEX, which were sampled from a combustion chamber by enrichment traps aided with a universal gas sampler. The BTEX were determined by organic solvent extraction followed by GC/MS quantification, the results of which suggested that the biomass burning emission factor contributed significant amounts of benzene, toluene, and m,p-xylene. The modified combustion efficiency (MCE) changed in response to changes in the sample moisture content. Therefore, this study concluded that the emission of some pollutants mainly depends on the burning phase and sample moisture content of the biomass.