This is a first-hand account by Margaretha Winda, a journalist based in Pulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan, on Indonesia’s wildfires, which has produced hazardous smoke that chokes its people and wildlife, and has spread to neighbouring countries Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, and the Philippines. There is something ironic about forest and land fires. A blaze may start on a single plot of land. But the resulting smoke and haze do not recognize boundaries of ownership. They move past fences, roads, villages. They enter homes, schools, and the lungs of people who never lit a match. Those who never started the fire are the ones who end up paying for it — and that is as true a few kilometers from the fire as it is a few hundred. What it’s like here I remember one morning this season waking up to a sky already overcast, the sun reduced to a faint, sickly yellow smear behind the haze. The smell hits before anything else — burning peat, sharp and distinctive, the kind that settles into your chest until it’s hard to take a full breath. And yet life around me didn’t stop: women were still washing clothes at the riverbank with no protection at all, no masks, no thought given to a health check. Children rode their bicycles to school through thick smoke, unmasked, because no notice had come telling schools to close. This year is worse than anything I remember from three years ago. Back then, fires happened too, but the smoke never got this thick, and it was brought under control quickly. This year’s fires spread everywhere, and the response never caught up. Where I live, in Pulang Pisau, 1,503 hotspots and 38 fires have burned 334 hectares this season. Jabiren Raya alone accounts for 1,303 hotspots and 257 hectares — including peat near the Tumbang Nusa bridge up to 40 meters deep, among the deepest burning in the regency. It smolders underground and resists rain rather than burning out quickly. A Forest and Land Fire Control Brigade worker tries to extinguish a fire in Pulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan province, on Aug 12, 2026. Photo: Reuters/Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana I am not writing this from a distance. I’m a journalist, and this season my job has put me at the fire sites themselves, working right up against the smoke. The one thing that’s changed for me is that I now have to wear a mask more carefully than ever, just to avoid getting sick myself — though for most people around me, that choice doesn’t even exist. Work doesn’t stop for haze. There is no version of survival here that includes staying home. It has reached my own family, too. I have two children, and both came down with acute respiratory infections during this haze season that simply wouldn’t clear — coughing, flu, and at one point diarrhea. They were not the only ones. Children and elderly people across my community have ended up in hospital, struggling to breathe. Other impacts I’ve seen Nationally, Indonesia’s health ministry recorded nearly 51,000 acute respiratory infection cases tied to the haze in July and August alone. Two volunteers fighting fires in Central Kalimantan died this month from breathing difficulties. An orangutan was found on a plantation in West Kalimantan and later died of suspected smoke inhalation; firefighters elsewhere have found snake and pangolin carcasses in burned areas. I’ve seen versions of this closer to home too. In Pulang Pisau, in the early morning and evening, visibility here drops to about one meter. The wildlife I’ve seen displaced is mostly snakes, turtles, and monkeys — animals whose habitat simply burned out from under them. A duck farm near one of the fire sites was directly hit as well, its surroundings caught up in the same blaze. On schooling: some areas of Pulang Pisau have shifted to distance learning, but others are still holding regular in-person classes in the middle of all this smoke — there’s no consistent rule, just whatever each school decides on its own. And the government’s presence has been strangely uneven. Even as fires grew large across the district, official attention stayed narrowly fixed on Desa Tumbang Nusa, while other areas burned with far less response. Smoke doesn’t stop at the borders I’ve lived through enough dry seasons here to recognize the warning signs: the sky dimming to a dull yellow-grey before the smoke rolls in for good. The wind carries the smoke north toward Palangka Raya. This year, it even crossed the Java Sea and kept going — and by the first week of September, four other countries were living inside it too. Singapore. On September 4, residents woke up to a smoggy sky as the air quality index crossed into unhealthy territory. By late afternoon, IQAir’s global rankings placed the city with the third-worst air on the planet. Malaysia. In Sarawak state, the capital Kuching had already been ranked the world’s most polluted city for over a week straight, with a hazardous reading of 311. On September 4, its Air Pollutant Index in the town of Serian surged past 500 — a level that can halt nonessential work and outdoor activity — prompting Malaysia’s king to consent to a state of emergency there. A Serian resident told reporters, ‘Even when I turn on the air conditioner, I can still smell the smoke in my house.’ Days earlier, the health ministry reported asthma cases up 259% and upper respiratory infections up 124% in a single week. The Philippines. Officials declared air quality ‘acutely unhealthy’ across Manila’s metro area, the Visayas, and Mindanao — three separate island groups, hundreds of kilometers apart, choking on the same haze. The health department was telling people to mask up.. Brunei. Hazy conditions have blanketed the sultanate since mid-August, with no clear end in sight as the fires behind it keep burning. The city center blanketed in thick haze in Kuching, Sarawak state, Malaysia, on Sept. 4, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Xpin Voon. We may live in very different places, but our fears are starting to sound the same. Families in Sarawak are now doing what mine has done all season — watching their children for coughs, keeping them inside, waiting for the air to clear. Those who contributed least to causing this crisis are so often the first, and the hardest, hit by it. An estimated 10.67 million people are affected by this haze here in Indonesia alone. Citizens have taken this to court before. In 2017, a group of Palangka Raya residents won a citizen lawsuit against the Indonesian government over its failure in handling forest and land fires and in preventing a haze disaster — a court found the state guilty of unlawful negligence, a ruling upheld on appeal and again by the Supreme Court in 2019, only to be dismissed again in a judicial review on 2022. But winning in court hasn’t meant winning in practice: judgments like this one have gone largely unenforced. So when people elsewhere start watching their children for coughs and keeping them indoors, waiting for the air to clear — I recognize that fear completely. It’s the one my family has lived inside all season, without the world watching. Why this keeps happening Landowners are responsible for safeguarding their land. Companies are responsible for ensuring their operations don’t create risk. Government is responsible for making sure all of this is actually enforced — not just showing up once a fire is already large. And I want to be precise about who is actually burning, because this gets misunderstood constantly, both inside and outside Indonesia. Dayak communities here largely stopped clearing land by fire a long time ago. The fires happening now are not, in my experience, a story about traditional farming practices gone wrong. Part of why these fires catch and spread so easily goes back decades, to how this land was managed. Much of Kalimantan’s peat has been drained for industrial agriculture, including oil palm, leaving it dry enough to burn like fuel instead of holding the water that once kept it from catching. Indonesian law requires companies operating on peatland to keep it wet, but those rules are widely ignored, and to make it worse the President dismantled the ad hoc government agency that tasked specifically for peat restoration last year, leaving accountability gap that no other institutions seem to prepared to fill. Burnt peatland in Central Kalimantan province, Indonesia, in August 2026. Photo: Krismes Santo Haloho/Mongabay Indonesia. What’s also changed is the climate in which we now live. Longer, hotter dry seasons — the kind scientists tie to the broader climate crisis – are setting the stage for fires to start faster and burn longer. Layered on top of this year’s own strong El Niño, fires can now burn underground indried-out peat for months. The way forward Communities here already practice gotong royong — mutual cooperation, neighbors carrying each other through hardship. I opened a volunteer relief post in the Kahayan Hilir subdistrict this season to supply logistics to Masyarakat Peduli Api — the volunteer firefighters actually on the ground putting these fires out. A lot of people have stepped up to donate food and drink for them. But those volunteers are still going out without basic equipment — hoses to fight the fire, fuel for the pumps that draw water. That gap shouldn’t be theirs to fill alone, and it shouldn’t have to substitute for a government or companies acting before the smoke crosses a border, rather than after. This haze disaster isn’t new, and it isn’t only this year’s story — it comes back every long dry season, and every year the response arrives just as unprepared as the last. My ask, to the government and to anyone reading this far: don’t let this become an opportunity for a handful of elites remain unaccountable while residents’ rice fields burn, while elderly people, children, and pregnant women are hospitalized, while the actual cost gets absorbed by people who had no hand in causing it. In the end, polluters are darkening our collective skies and must pay for the damage they’ve caused. From burning fossil fuels that heat up the planet to clearing forests for plantations, it’s the actions of big corporations, not small farmers, that are setting our forests on fire. These are the very forests and lands that have given life to our communities for generations that deserve better than to be reduced to smoke. Governments must step up and hold the polluters accountable, so that our forests, our country, and all of us who live here can finally breathe freely again. The post The Haze We All Breathe: A Letter from Kalimantan, Indonesia appeared first on 350.