Borneo burning: Life on the frontline of South East Asia’s toxic haze

When the sun hits the smog enveloping Indonesian Borneo, it turns everything the colour of rust. Cars, houses and streets appear and disappear out of a dim russet fog. There are few better words than “apocalyptic” to describe the way this looks.

But it’s at night, in the quiet darkness, that mother-of-three Dianyra Eka Nastiti grows most fearful.

“Sometimes at night my baby’s chest makes a rattling sound,” she says. “She was hospitalised for bronchopneumonia when she was just a month and a half old, and every single night I worry: Will my child cough tomorrow?

“Those thoughts haunt me every night.”

Nastiti lives in Palangkaraya, at the frontline of a months-long environmental catastrophe that has blanketed large parts of Southeast Asia in a toxic haze.

Wildfires have torched some 1.9 million hectares across Indonesia since the start of the year, according to open-access satellite platform Nusantara Atlas – an area roughly the size of the US state of New Jersey, or the entire landmass of Fiji. One million hectares are thought to have burned in September alone.

But the toxic fallout is larger still. Swathes of smouldering forest, swamp and peatlands have turned the air thick with microparticles and carbon monoxide, creating a noxious cloud that has swaddled Indonesia and drifted as far as Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.