Health data overlooked
It is of no surprise that health officials in the three Southeast Asian countries reacted angrily.
First, the research does not consider the extensive empirical data available on emergency attendances and hospital admissions in Singapore and Malaysia. Both have quite reliable hospital and public health data. Most of this is published regularly or is accessible to the public. Yet none of this was sourced for the study.
The available data was previously utilised for at least two public health studies on hospital admissions in the Klang Valley (Malaysia) and in Singapore. The Malaysian study examined hospital admissions between 2000 and 2007, based on particulate data. Neither of these studies appears in the research citations of the Harvard-Columbia study.
Second, the Harvard-Columbia study cites the haze events of 1997 and 2006 as baselines. It appears to ignore the possibility that public health measures – such as warning systems and public service announcements – have improved significantly over two decades, particularly in Singapore and Malaysia.
Therefore, awareness of potential risks has likely lessened the impact of the haze. This can be verified with empirical data from national health systems.
There is one possible reason why much health data was overlooked or left out: the Harvard-Columbia study is not about health – it is really about environmental dogma.
The analysis and data collection on actual health impacts is quite small. The bulk of the study is about improving land tenure in Indonesia. The lead authors are overwhelmingly from environmental schools; there is only one pure health academic among the 12 authors.
The underlying question, then, must be: why was it necessary to highlight ‘100,000 premature deaths’ in the headline of a report on the study? This was posted on the website of the Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: ‘Smoke from 2015 Indonesian fires may have caused 100,000 premature deaths’.
The answer is simple: opportunism. This narrative the researchers alighted upon was public health, linking the shocking headline to the (environmental) haze event. This is despite the study conceding that fire hotspots in oil palm concessions have actually fallen:
‘Although oil palm concessions have previously been implicated as a major driver of peat burning in Indonesia (Koh et al, 2011), we find that burning in oil palm concessions in 2006 accounted for only 11% of total FRP [i.e. hotspots] in Sumatra and 32% in Kalimantan. In 2015, these contributions declined to just 5% and 20%, respectively.’
The Harvard and Columbia researchers would have been well aware that NGOs would jump on this figure and use it as a stick with which to beat the palm oil industry. In this context, it is not surprising that the paper’s lead researcher had undertaken joint research with Greenpeace in the past.
It is also vital to consider who paid for the study. It was backed by nearly US$4 million in grants from the US-based Rockefeller Foundation, which has a history of supporting groups that are against palm oil.
