Malaysian youth activist Aidil Iman Aidid recalled struggling to explain the dangers of haze to his six-year-old niece, after unhealthy smog forced her elementary school to suspend classes for several days in early October.
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The Kuala Lumpur-based founder of biodiversity literacy and climate justice organisations Jejak Liar and Kolektif Iklim shared this during an impact circle discussion at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil’s (RSPO) annual conference in Jakarta on 3 and 4 November. The global nonprofit brings together stakeholders across the palm oil supply chain to develop and implement voluntary sustainability standards.
“We struggled, because how do you explain to a six-year-old child about forest fires and transboundary haze pollution?” Aidil asked.
He then recounted an incident in Pontian, Johor, Malaysia, where three siblings, aged eight, 11 and 18, were killed in a collision between their motorcycle and a lorry on 8 October. The younger children had reportedly insisted on checking whether their school was closed because of the haze. Aidil suggested poor visibility may have contributed to the accident.
“They simply wanted to go to school,” Aidil said.
The tragedy came amid widespread school closures across Malaysia as thick haze from Indonesia’s raging wildfires blanketed parts of the country. In Johor alone, more than 1,000 schools serving some 600,000 pupils suspended face-to-face classes for at least 10 days.
Palm oil workers face growing health risks from recurring haze, even as the industry faces scrutiny over its sustainability commitments. Image: Icaro Cooke Vieira / CIFOR, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Flickr.
“When haze returns, people do not experience it as a sustainability debate. They live the experience. Workers breathe unhealthy air. Children remain indoors,” Mohd Haris Mohd Arshad, President and Group Chief Executive of Malaysian agribusiness firm and palm oil producer SD Guthrie, underscored in his opening remarks at the same conference.
The crisis has brought renewed scrutiny of the palm oil industry and companies potentially linked to Indonesia’s wildfires. On 4 November, Singapore passed amendments strengthening its 2014 Transboundary Haze Pollution Act, raising the maximum fine for its main offence to S$20 million (US$15.6 million). Malaysia is considering similar legislation.
The city-state’s National Environment Agency (NEA) had sought information from 10 Singapore-registered companies and issued preventive measures notices to another 10 companies in Indonesia, including several involved in palm oil production.
RSPO Chief Executive Joseph D’Cruz welcomed the inquiries by Singapore’s NEA, saying they could help establish whether these companies deliberately started fires.
“The fact that the NEA has put a process in place to say, ‘let’s get investigators to thoroughly talk to these companies, get a thorough brief on what actually happened,’ and be able to use that as a basis for action. I think [this] is a good thing,” he told Eco-Business on the sidelines of the RSPO conference.
“The best thing you want is to have credible actors like government come in and ask questions in a reasoned way,” he added.
Mapping fires, tracing responsibility
Satellite analysis by geospatial company TheTreeMap’s Nusantara Atlas found 1.9 million hectares of land affected by fire across Indonesia between January and September 2026 – an area more than three times the size of Bali. More than half of the affected area was detected in September alone. The nine-month total was 38 per cent higher than during the same period in 2019, the worst fire year in its monitoring record.
Kalimantan accounted for 684,000 hectares, or 36 per cent of the total, while South Papua recorded the largest affected area among provinces, at 319,000 hectares.
Map of burned areas (red) in Indonesia between January and September 2026. Smoke from Indonesia’s wildfires has spread across Southeast Asia, disrupting schools and exposing communities to hazardous air pollution. Map: Nusantara Atlas
The mapped total may rise as additional satellite imagery becomes available. During a press conference at the Jakarta convention, David Gaveau, Founder of TheTreeMap and Nusantara Atlas, warned that dense smoke and cloud cover had obstructed satellite monitoring in October, potentially delaying the detection of additional fire-affected areas.
Of the 1.9 million hectares, approximately 202,000 hectares, or 10.6 per cent, fell within oil palm concession boundaries. These included some 19,000 hectares of natural forest, highlighting how concessions can encompass forests, wetlands and undeveloped land beyond planted oil palm.
Some 14,500 hectares, or less than 0.8 per cent of the nationwide total, fell within RSPO-certified concessions, a finding D’Cruz cited to challenge criticism of certified palm oil producers.
The findings also raise questions about the companies being investigated by Singapore. Gaveau confirmed that Nusantara Atlas had detected burning in concessions belonging to some of those under scrutiny, although he cautioned against interpreting the satellite evidence as proof of responsibility.
“Regarding those ten companies [that] are being investigated in Singapore, we detected burned areas in some of the concessions that these companies own. However, a burned area doesn’t say who is responsible for that fire,” he explained.
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Responsible palm oil is palm oil that’s produced in a way that respects not just the environment, but the social conditions, the incomes, and the dignity of the people producing and the people using it.
Joseph D’Cruz, Chief Executive Officer, Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)
Fires can originate outside concession boundaries before spreading onto company land, while accidental burning and overlapping land claims can further complicate efforts to establish responsibility, Gaveau underscored.
Yen Hun Sung, RSPO’s Director of Standards and Sustainability, acknowledged that the burning within certified concessions still warranted scrutiny, despite representing a relatively small share of the national total.
He stressed that satellite evidence alone was insufficient to establish the causes of individual fires.
“We need to do further investigation and verification. It needs to also be audited on the ground to ascertain the cause of fire,” Sung explained.
D’Cruz said approximately 45 per cent of the fire-affected area within certified concessions was concentrated in two concessions, one already subject to an RSPO complaint. He maintained that the organisation had received no evidence of certified members deliberately starting fires.
Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the affected area was significant, particularly as changing climate conditions threaten to intensify future fire seasons.
“We all need to do better,” said the RSPO chief. “We need to be able to address this issue more seriously because with climate change and the increasing severity of El Niño, unfortunately, we are likely to see these kinds of [fire season] patterns occur again in the future.”
Although palm oil-driven deforestation has slowed, the environmental legacy of plantation expansion continues to complicate wildfire prevention. Image: Ricky Martin / CIFOR, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Flickr.
Slower deforestation, lingering fire risks
The severity of this year’s fires has been compounded by prolonged drought, with parts of Kalimantan enduring between 100 and 120 days without rain. D’Cruz described rivers drying up in areas normally accustomed to abundant rainfall.
Yet the crisis comes amid a marked decline in deforestation linked to oil palm expansion.
A global study involving Gaveau, not yet peer-reviewed, found that annual conversion of old-growth rainforest fell from an average of 343,000 hectares between 2001 and 2015 to 80,000 hectares in 2016 to 2024. The study suggests corporate zero-deforestation commitments may have contributed to the decline, alongside government policies, land constraints and the growing need to replant ageing plantations.
But slowing deforestation has not eliminated the legacy of past expansion. Peat-swamp forests cleared and drained for agriculture in Sumatra and Kalimantan remain highly vulnerable to fire.
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When haze returns, people do not experience it as a sustainability debate. They live the experience. Workers breathe unhealthy air. Children remain indoors.
Mohd Haris Mohd Arshad, President and Group Chief Executive, SD Guthrie
Dried peat can smoulder underground for weeks or months, releasing dense smoke and greenhouse gases.
Nusantara Atlas found that between 17 and 23 per cent of fire-affected land in the first nine months of 2026 overlapped with mapped peatlands.
RSPO has prohibited new oil palm planting on peat since 2018 and requires water-management practices on existing plantations. D’Cruz suggested these measures may have helped limit burning within certified concessions, although he acknowledged that the organisation lacked empirical evidence establishing their effectiveness during the current crisis.
Fire have also reached forests within Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, threatening important orangutan habitat.
D’Cruz conceded that governments, businesses and communities had fallen short on preparedness.
“We knew the El Niño was going to be severe. I think collectively, across government, industry, communities, external supporters like us, we could have and should have done more to prepare on the ground.”
Fire prevention increasingly depends on cooperation between plantation operators, local communities and smallholders as blazes spread across property boundaries. Image: Achmad Ibrahim / CIFOR, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Flickr.
Cooperation and accountability
The fires have underscored the need to support communities and smallholders battling blazes alongside larger plantation operators, D’Cruz said.
In one instance, he said, a group of independent smallholders needed to traverse 25 kilometres to help extinguish a blaze before it could spread closer to their farms.
Guntur Prabowo, RSPO’s Head of Smallholders, said organised farmers could respond quickly because their livelihoods and land were at stake but needed equipment, training and support from larger producers.
For D’Cruz, strengthening preparedness must go hand in hand with holding producers accountable.
“A big part of what we need to do is not just figure out who to blame and be able to penalise them, but also figure out what we collectively need to learn from this experience so we can all do better later.”
RSPO’s complaints mechanism received 257 complaints between 2009 and 31 October 2026, covering various breaches, not just fires and haze, according to Pravin Rajandran, its Head of Grievance.
Sanctions range from corrective action to suspension or termination of membership, but RSPO cannot prosecute companies, enforce environmental laws, or sanction non-members.
“We are not a replacement for legal mechanisms in force,” Rajandran said.
D’Cruz argued that certification and regulation should complement each other but acknowledged that misconduct by individual producers could undermine confidence in the wider system.
“As an industry, we still have a real trust and credibility gap,” he noted in his keynote speech.
He urged RSPO members and downstream businesses to disclose their fire-prevention efforts and respond publicly to allegations, arguing that silence had fuelled speculation and obscured companies’ work to prevent and combat fires.
“Why have we not earned the trust that we believe we have, and what do we need to do better to be able to address that?” he asked.
“Responsible palm oil is palm oil that’s produced in a way that respects not just the environment, but the social conditions, the incomes, and the dignity of the people producing and the people using it,” D’Cruz told Eco-Business.
