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View all search resultsIndonesia generates smoke, ASEAN merely suffers
Southeast Asia has mastered moving capital across borders. Now it must stop letting corporate responsibility stall at customs while millions breathe transboundary haze.
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A man rides a bicycle past the Marina Barrage fountain in Singapore on Oct. 6, 2026, just three days before the Formula One Grand Prix, when the air quality in four of the island state’s five regions was unhealthy due to transboundary haze from Indonesia. (Reuters/Ore Huiying)
O
n Oct. 9, Singapore’s Marina Bay Street Circuit was preparing for another weekend of Formula 1 spectacle. Engines roared, spectators gathered and the city’s skyline offered a backdrop decidedly less glamorous than organizers might have wished: Haze drifting from Indonesian peat and forest fires had pushed air quality into the unhealthy range.
Bloomberg reported that F1 chief executive Stefano Domenicali remained confident the event would proceed, with at least 300,000 visitors expected over the race weekend. Organizers had prepared for blistering speeds, sophisticated engineering and peerless entertainment. The atmosphere, unfortunately, had other plans.
There was something distinctly Southeast Asian about the scene: One of the world’s most technologically advanced sporting spectacles unfolding beneath the fallout of one of the region’s most persistent failures of environmental governance.
The race cars had drivers, owners, sponsors and meticulously documented corporate structures. The smoke, by contrast, arrived without a passport.
Whenever transboundary haze blankets Singapore or Malaysia, the wind becomes an international celebrity. Meteorologists chart its trajectory, satellites track its path, and government officials point to where it blew from. Yet the wind possesses no shareholders, board members or corporate headquarters. It cannot retain counsel or incorporate offshore subsidiaries.
Companies can.
Singapore and Malaysia have every right to decry pollution originating across the Malacca Strait. Yet the familiar narrative, in which Indonesia generates the smoke while its neighbors merely suffer, overlooks an inconvenient feature of Southeast Asia’s political economy.
