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Malaysia lifted a haze emergency in Sarawak state on Borneo island on Monday, though it warned that very unhealthy levels of air pollution persist due to forest fires burning in neighboring Indonesia.
Kuala Lumpur on Friday activated the emergency after obtaining royal consent when pollution levels reached critical levels in Serian, about 65 kilometers (40 miles) south of the Sarawak capital, Kuching.
"King Sultan Ibrahim today approved the termination of the declaration of emergency," the prime minister's office said Monday. "The haze situation in Sarawak has not yet fully recovered, and the API (Air Pollution Index) reading in several areas ... is still at very unhealthy levels," it said in a statement.
API figures in Serian passed the critical threshold of 500 on Friday, peaking at 519 with the town cloaked in a thick cloud of smoke.
Under Malaysian guidelines, API levels above 300 are classified as hazardous, while readings beyond 500 constitute the threshold for declaring a local emergency.
Rain in Serian on Friday night and Saturday morning—believed to be the result of cloud seeding, a process where chemicals are dispersed into clouds to induce rainfall—brought some respite, with API levels dropping to the low 200s on Monday, according to Sarawak's Natural Resources and Environment Board.
Toxic haze has shrouded parts of Indonesia and Malaysia for weeks as Jakarta struggles to contain fires that have scorched large tracts of Borneo and Sumatra, with the smoke drifting into neighboring Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei.
The haze crisis is not new to the region. Seasonal fires in Indonesia, often linked to land clearing for agriculture, have triggered cross-border pollution episodes for decades, prompting Southeast Asian nations to sign the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution in 2002 in an effort to coordinate monitoring and firefighting response.
Despite the agreement, outbreaks continue to strain relations between Indonesia and its neighbors nearly every dry season, with officials in Malaysia and Singapore periodically renewing calls for Jakarta to take stronger action against illegal burning.
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