ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution

The ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution was adopted at Kuala Lumpur in 2002 and entered into force on 25 November 2003. It did not appear from a single negotiation. It was the endpoint of more than a decade of escalating regional response: a 1990 call by ASEAN environment ministers for harmonised practice on transboundary pollution, the 1995 ASEAN Cooperation Plan on Transboundary Pollution, and the 1997 Regional Haze Action Plan. Each was a step toward binding law taken because the softer measure before it had proved insufficient. An earlier and broader instrument, the 1985 ASEAN Agreement on the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, had first named transboundary air pollution as a regional concern, but in practice it is largely superseded by this more specific text.

Unlike the broad framework conventions held elsewhere in this bank, the Agreement is written for one named recurring harm. Its subject is haze pollution from land and forest fires, largely linked to agricultural and plantation land clearing, which repeatedly affects several Southeast Asian countries at the same time. Naming the harm that precisely is what allows the treaty to place obligations on the activity that produces it rather than on the pollution as an abstraction.

The order of duties in the Agreement is deliberate. Its stated objective is to prevent and monitor transboundary haze pollution from land and forest fires, mitigated through concerted national effort intensified by regional and international cooperation. Prevention and monitoring are the primary duty; emergency response is the backstop that applies when prevention has already failed.

The Agreement also carries its own limitation in plain sight, in its ratification record. Indonesia, the country whose land-clearing fires are the largest recurring source of the region's haze, did not ratify until 2015, more than a decade after the Agreement entered into force for other parties. A regional treaty that binds everyone except the state most central to the problem shows exactly how hard the binding step is, and the Agreement's own history says so rather than hiding it.

It remains the first regional treaty anywhere aimed specifically at haze pollution, and it is now ratified by all ten ASEAN member states. The complete text is published by ASEAN itself.