UN: 10 MILLION KIDS AT RISK
Toxic air threatens their health and forces them to miss school, resulting in lifelong physical and cognitive damage
FOREST fires are putting nearly 10 million children at risk from air pollution, the United Nations warned yesterday as scientists said the blazes were releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases.
The fires have been spewing toxic haze over Southeast Asia in recent weeks, closing schools and airports, with people rushing to buy face masks and seek treatment for respiratory ailments.
Almost 10 million people under 18 — about a quarter below 5 — live in the areas worst affected by fires in Sumatra and Borneo, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said.
Small children are especially vulnerable due to undeveloped immune systems, while babies born to mothers exposed to pollution during pregnancy may have low birth weights and be delivered early, they said.
“Poor air quality is a severe and growing challenge for Indonesia Every year, millions of children are breathing toxic air that threatens their health and causes them to miss school — resulting in lifelong physical and cognitive damage,” said Debora Comini from Unicef.
Air quality had, however, improved in Malaysia and Singapore yesterday.
The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, part of the European Union’s Earth observation programme, said this year’s Indonesian fires were releasing almost as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as blazes in 2015, the worst for two decades.
From the start of August to Sept 18, the fires emitted about 360 megatonnes of the greenhouse gas, compared with 400 megatonnes over the same period four years ago, the service said.
One megatonne is equivalent to one million tonnes.
At the peak of the 2015 crisis, the fires were emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each day than all US economic activity, according to environmental watchdog the World Resources Institute.
While smoke from forest fires often simply obscures visibility, parts of Sumatra recently witnessed blood red skies due to the interaction of sunlight on particles from smoke in the air.
Yunita, a resident who filmed the crimson sky on Saturday, said there had been “strong winds, and the smog was thick. The event lasted from noon until evening, breathing was quite hard on that day”.
The event quickly went viral on social media, with one video notching up over 600,000 views on Instagram in three days.
For a red sky to occur, aerosols must be present in the air, said A. R. Ravishankara, a scientist cited in an article on the Scientific American website.
Aerosols are solid or liquid particles suspended in air that can originate from natural processes and human activity. The natural form can come from forest fires, dust kicked up by sandstorms, sea spray or volcanic eruptions.
Indonesia’s meteorology agency said the sky had turned red due to the “scattering of sunlight by particles floating in the air, also known as Mie scattering”.
The agency said there had been thick smoke in Muaro Jambi last weekend, with satellite analysis revealing many hotspots.
“The satellite showed some areas appeared brown but Jambi appeared white, indicating the smoke to be very thick,” the agency said, noting the fires were likely from highly flammable peat.
For some Indonesians, it was as mysterious as it was concerning.
“This is the Earth, not Mars. This is Jambi, not outer space. We are humans who need to breathe clean air, not smoke,” said one Twitter user @zunishofiyn.