Religious authorities in the world's largest Muslim country have added their moral weight to efforts to curb the annual forest burning, which also blankets Indonesia's regional neighbours in choking haze.
The Indonesian Ulema Council, known as MUI, recently issued a fatwa or edict that says it is haram or forbidden in Islam to deliberately set fires in a forest to clear the land for growing crops, and to not act to prevent forest burning.
"The MUI issued the fatwa after a lengthy deliberation process, which involved research, hearings with forestry and environmental experts and field studies to collect inputs from local people to see the impact of forest fires," fatwa commission member Arwani Faisal told Asia Focus.
He acknowledged that while the request for an edict came from the Forestry and Environment Ministry following a thorough discussion, both parties agreed there was a need to declare burning the forest as a sin.
The ministry said it hoped the fatwa could provide an additional source of soft power in the government's efforts to curb forest burning that has been taking place annually since late 1990s. The worst outbreak so far was last year, when choking haze cloaked Singapore and parts of Malaysia and Thailand.
Data from the National Disaster Mitigation Agency showed that the fires cost the country 20 trillion rupiah (US$1.5 billion) in material losses, caused 24 deaths and led to millions of others suffering respiratory illnesses of varying severity.
"[The fatwa] would also be complementary to other structural efforts to curb forest burning, such as issuing regulations, legal instruments and enforcement and the use of technology," said Novrisal, a spokesman for the forestry ministry.
The ministry turned to the clerics for help after suffering a judicial blow when a South Sumatra district court last December threw out a government lawsuit seeking 7.8 trillion rupiah in compensation from a pulpwood company for clearing land by illegal burning in 2014.
Moreover, in January the police in Riau province decided to drop investigations into 15 of the 18 plantation companies allegedly responsible for the 2015 fires using slash-and-burn techniques to clear the land. South Sumatra and Riau were among the provinces worst hit by the fires.
The court ruling and the police reluctance to proceed drew public criticism and questions about whether Jakarta would ever enforce the law properly against perpetrators of environmental devastation.
The clerical body announced the fatwa at a news conference at the ministry on Sept 13. The head of the fatwa commission, Huzaimah Tohido Yanggo, read out the first of six points in the fatwa which said burning forests and land clearing that caused environmental devastation, losses to others, had a negative impact on health and other adverse impacts was a sin.
"Facilitating, allowing, ignoring or taking benefits from forest burning are also forbidden," she said, adding that it was obligatory for Muslims to take part in preventing and controlling forest burning.
Khusna Amal, an Islamic scholar at State Islamic Institute Jember in East Java, said that a fatwa carried considerable weight because it is issued by Islamic clerics or ulema and is related to moral law.
But whether that authority would be held in sufficiently high regard to prevent people from burning the forests would depend on the Muslim society's emotional attachment to the clerics.
"Traditionalist Muslims may not see the clerical body with close, emotional attachment since it is a government-funded body, so they may not take the fatwa seriously," Khusna told Asia Focus, adding that a fatwa would be more effective if it was issued by clerics who have cultural, personal and emotional attachments to people at the grassroots level.
"In addition, grassroots Muslims are very fragmented and they may have different levels of compliance and points of view about a fatwa," he said.
However, Khusna commended the MUI for drawing attention to a dire environmental issue that continues to plague the country.
"Basically every Muslim will know that it is a sin to destroy the environment but this fatwa could exert moral pressure to that view, with more substantive arguments about protecting the environment," he said.
Henri Subagio, an activist with the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law, also praised the MUI, saying that despite doubts about the fatwa's effectiveness, it signifies that Muslims in the country in general support the prevention of forest burning, and other religious groups could emulate this step.
"It would be good if the MUI would follow up with the next steps by launching a massive dissemination of the fatwa through various religious activities as well as encouraging Muslims to be on guard and alert to parties that have the potential to burn forests or show no interest in preventing it," Henri told Asia Focus.
He added that it would take at least two years to see whether the edict would work in preventing forest burning.
The MUI's Arwani said the clerical body planned to disseminate the fatwa at the grassroots level, especially in areas where most of the forest fires often originated.
"We hope the fatwa will be effective, complementary to the existing positive law. We want Muslims not to burn forests, despite whatever reasons they may have, and we want them also to actively take part in preventing the fires, not just in extinguishing them," Arwani said.
‘Premature death’ estimates touch off heated debate
The Indonesian forest fires that choked parts of Southeast Asia for weeks last year may have caused more than 100,000 premature deaths, according to new research that will add to pressure on the Jakarta government to tackle the annual crisis.
The alarming statistic has touched off a heated debate, with Singapore's Health Ministry saying the estimated 2,200 premature deaths in Singapore attributed to the haze crisis last year were "not reflective of the actual situation".
The modelling studies, it said, were based on "various assumptions" and the accuracy of the estimates was influenced by the validity of the assumptions.
"We note that the modelling study does not take into consideration the mitigating measures that were implemented by countries affected by the haze," Channel News Asia quoted a ministry spokesperson as saying.
In any case, the study by scientists from Harvard and Columbia universities in the US, to be published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, is being welcomed by other researchers and Indonesia's medical profession as an advance in quantifying the suspected serious public health effects of the fires.
The number of deaths is an estimate derived from a complex analysis that has not yet been validated by analysis of official data on mortality.
The research has implications for land-use practices and Indonesia's vast pulp and paper industry. The researchers showed that peatlands within timber concessions, and peatlands overall, accounted for a much bigger proportion of the fires observed by satellite than in 2006, which was another particularly bad year for haze. The researchers surmise that draining of the peatlands to prepare them for pulpwood plantations and other uses made them more vulnerable to fires.
The estimate of premature deaths linked to respiratory illness that covers Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia dwarfs Indonesia's official toll of 19 that included deaths from illness and the deaths of firefighters
However, the possible scale of serious heath consequences was indicated by a statement from the country's disaster management agency in October that said more than 43 million Indonesians were exposed to smoke from the fires and half a million suffered acute respiratory infections.
The study considered only the health impact on adults and restricted itself to the effects of health-threatening fine particulate matter, often referred to as PM2.5, rather than all toxins that would be in the smoke from burning peatlands and forests. The bulk of the estimated deaths are in Indonesia.
The fires from July to October last year in southern Sumatra and the Indonesian part of Borneo were the worst since 1997 and exacerbated by El Nino dry conditions. About 261,000 hectares of land were burned. Some of the fires started accidently but many were deliberately set by companies and villagers to clear land for plantations and agriculture.
Rajasekhar Bala, an environmental engineering expert at the National University of Singapore, one of five experts who reviewed the paper for The Associated Press and were not involved in the research, cautioned that the study was preliminary and involved a "very challenging" task of analysing the sources and spread of fine particulate matter over several countries and a lengthy time frame.
Even with caveats, it should serve as a "wake-up call" for firm action to curb peatland and forest fires and for regional cooperation to deal with the fallout on public health, he said.
"Air pollution, especially that caused by atmospheric fine particles, has grave implications for human health," he said.
Frank Murray, an associate professor of environment science at Australia's Murdoch University, said the death estimates were not "precise health outcomes" but their overall scale should trigger intensified efforts to deal with the crisis.
The study found a high statistical probability that premature deaths ranged between 26,300 and 174,300. Its main estimate of 100,300 deaths is the average of those two figures. It predicts 91,600 deaths in Indonesia, another 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore.
The researchers say the model they developed can be combined with satellite observations to analyse the haze in close to real time. That gives it the potential to be used to direct fire-fighting efforts in a way that reduces the amount of illness caused, they say.
"Particles penetrate indoors, and housing in Indonesia is very well ventilated, so I don't think there is any avertive behaviour that people there could have taken that would have been effective." said Joel Schwartz, an air pollution epidemiologist at Harvard who co-authored the study. "In Singapore, if you close all the windows and turn on the air conditioning you get some protection, which may have happened."
The Indonesian Medical Association said the country was facing an overall decline in the health of future generations with social and economic consequences if the situation is not tackled.
"We are the doctors who care for the vulnerable groups exposed to toxic smoke," said Nursyam Ibrahim, deputy head of the West Kalimantan chapter of the association. "And we know how awful it is to see the disease symptoms experienced by babies and children in our care."
The Singapore Health Ministry, in its rebuttal, said short-term exposure to haze over the span of a few days would not cause any major health issues other than irritation of the eyes, nose and throat, in healthy individuals.
However, those with chronic heart or lung disease were at higher risk of facing complications.
The age-standardised death rate in Singapore, the ministry added, was not higher in 2015, compared with the years 2010 to 2014.