On 4 November, Parliament debated changes to the haze law. The Bill raises the fines on companies whose fires send haze into Singapore, removes the defences that let them escape, and lets Ministers order banks, insurers and buyers to stop dealing with such a company. I supported it and asked five questions. I also argued that a lasting fix needs farmers in Kalimantan to earn more from keeping peat wet than from burning it, and that Singapore can help build that market.
My questions at a glance
Can a company be designated while it disputes the map that names it as concession holder or land manager, or will the dispute stall the process?
A judgment can still only be collected from assets in Singapore. Will the Government pursue reciprocal enforcement arrangements with regional partners?
The Agency cannot run a civil penalty action and a prosecution for the same act at once. What will guide its choice between the civil and the criminal route?
Will the Director-General ask the assessors appointed under the Bill to report the water table on the land they assess?
As we negotiate an implementation agreement on carbon credits with Indonesia, will we make wet-peat projects with measured water tables a priority category?
The speech, as delivered
Second Reading of the Transboundary Haze Pollution (Amendment) Bill, 4 November 2026.
What the Bill fixes
Deputy Speaker, I support this Bill. I thank the Government for a strong Bill that comes down firmly on the side of protecting Singaporeans.
For weeks this year, parents checked the PSI [Pollutant Standards Index] before letting their children out, and older residents with weak hearts and lungs were told to stay indoors. An economist's preliminary estimate is that this year's haze could cost Singapore more than the $1.83 billion of 2015, the costliest on record. Yet, in the twelve years since the 2014 Act came into force, not one company has been fined or sued under it.1
I think this Bill fixes many of the reasons why.
The cap for fines was $2 million, which was meaningless: less than 1% of the average earnings of the seven key agroforestry companies in 2014, and roughly what one 10,000-hectare clearing saves by burning instead of using machines.2 Now the fine is $1 million a day, capped at $20 million, and the court must also order the company to pay back the profit it gained or the loss it avoided.3
The evidence and the cooperation had to come from abroad. A notice could only be served by hand or by consent, and ignoring it cost $5,000. Four cases from 2015 stayed open for a decade.4 Now notices can go by email or website, or to an address anywhere. Assessors are appointed at the company's cost, can enter the land and owe their duty to the Director-General, and their reports count as evidence. Refusing them costs up to $20 million.
The defendant had to be in court. Now, there is trial in absentia.
The defences were wide. A company could escape by proving the haze came solely from a natural disaster, or that it had taken reasonable care. Both escapes are gone. A company that says a stranger lit the fire must now also prove it took all reasonable measures to prevent the fire and to put it out.5
And the only levers were a conviction or a lawsuit. Now Ministers can designate a company and order banks, insurers and buyers to stop dealing with it. This is the biggest change in the Bill. It reaches a company's money and trade without waiting years for court.
Clean air is a precondition for the quality of life of everyone in Singapore. The Friday night of the Singapore Grand Prix, when the 24-hour PSI reached 192, brought global attention to this problem, and renewed urgency which we should not squander.6
What the Bill leaves open
Sir, I have three clarifications.
First, contested maps. Professor Alan Tan of NUS [the National University of Singapore], writing on the 2014 Act, suggested making companies hand over the maps they themselves use.7 The Bill comes close: a document naming a company as concession holder or land manager makes it the presumed owner. But what happens when a company marks that map as contested? Can a company be designated while the dispute is live? Or would the dispute stall the process, the way four cases stalled for a decade?
Second, assets abroad. A judgment can still only be collected from assets in Singapore. Will the Government pursue reciprocal enforcement arrangements with regional partners?
Third, the new civil penalty. The Agency can now go to court for a civil penalty, where it only has to show that its case is more likely than not, instead of proving it beyond reasonable doubt. But a civil action must stop once a criminal charge is brought for the same act, and it cannot start after a conviction or an acquittal. So the Agency must choose which route to take first. What will guide the Agency's choice between the civil and criminal route, given it cannot run both at once?8
But it is entirely right that Singapore uses the full extent of its levers, legislative or otherwise, to enforce the duty of Singapore-linked companies to keep our air clean.
The ground, and what works
Yet, having said all of that, this Bill alone will not tackle the totality of the problem.
This Bill reaches companies with a stake in Singapore. But by one count, about half the land that burned in Indonesia from January to August lay outside any permit or concession, on community, state and abandoned land.9 Many of those fires are on smallholders' land. The Bill is necessary, but it is not sufficient. So I want to speak about the ground in Borneo and especially Kalimantan, because the incentives there are formidable.
Anyone who has set foot in rural Borneo has felt the power of its geography: the rugged interior, and a jungle that reclaims fallow land in months. Its vast magnificence is unforgiving.
Why do the people resort to burning? Part of it is economics.
Small oil-palm farmers without a company contract often borrow cash or fertiliser from the middleman who buys their fruit. They repay him at harvest, when he deducts the loan from the fruit they sell him, and they are paid 20% to 30% below the benchmark price.10 Their dilemma is simple: "If I can't clear this land now, next year I'm bankrupt."
Machinery and fertiliser cost money they don't have, and roads into the interior are poor. Clearing by machine costs about US$150 a hectare. Fire costs about US$7 a hectare, and the ash from burning acts as fertiliser.11 Leave a plot alone for six months and the jungle reclaims it.
In Kubu Raya, West Kalimantan, in 2016, about 30 farmers blocked a joint team of police, soldiers and firefighters from putting out the land they had burned. They said the ash would feed the soil before planting. Then they asked two questions: why was burning banned, and what would the government offer instead? The second question deserves an answer built on incentives, and not only on bans.
In Berau, East Kalimantan, this August, a man was named as a suspect for burning about 12 hectares for oil palm. In Ketapang, West Kalimantan, in September, officials found oil palm being planted on land where the smoke had only just cleared.12 In Kobar, Central Kalimantan, this September, crews were refused access near some buildings, and the local disaster agency warned that obstructing firefighters can be prosecuted. The burned land was thought to have been cleared for farming.13
Part of it is tradition. Burning to farm is centuries old in Borneo. Hill rice has long been grown in burned forest clearings. In the Kelabit Highlands, rice cultivation may go back between 1,200 and 2,800 years.14 For rural leaders, ending burning outright has long been politically impossible, and the law in both Indonesia and Malaysia makes room for it. Indonesia's environmental law lets a household burn up to two hectares, planted with local crops and ringed by a firebreak.15 Sarawak, in deference to these cultural and economic realities, has staggered its farmers' burning by schedule since 2003, and revoked permits when the haze came this July.16 At our equator there is no winter, so farming seasons can be spread out. Both sides of Borneo share the idea of a small, controlled burn.
But the yearly haze is man-made, and recent. We need to decouple haze from burning. Airport visibility records going back to 1960 show Indonesian Borneo turning from fire-resistant to fire-prone sometime between the droughts of 1972 and 1982.17 The farmers did not change; the land did. From 1967, new laws opened Kalimantan's forests to logging companies. Population grew, and small subsistence farms gave way to industrial plantations. When the drought of 1982 to 1983 came, about 3.5 million hectares of East Kalimantan burned, four-fifths of it logged-over forest.18 Over the decades, canals were dug through Kalimantan's peat to drain it for timber, plantations and farms.19
West Kalimantan's rules are instructive. On top of the two-hectare allowance, household burning must be on mineral soil, never on peat.20 Timing and place are the foundation of a controlled burn.
That points at the problem. In October, the head of Indonesia's disaster agency said about 90% of the active fires in Central Kalimantan were on peat.21 On peat, a controlled burn is very difficult. Peat is half-rotted plant matter, soaked through like a sponge. While it is wet, air cannot get in, so it cannot burn. Dig canals to drain it for crops, and the top dries into fuel. Once it catches fire, it smoulders underground like a giant mosquito coil: hard to see, hard to put out, and full of thick smoke. In a long El Niño drought like this year's, more of it dries out.22
So the physical culprits are two: drained peat, which is the fuel, and El Niño, which sets how dry the year gets. We cannot change the weather. We cannot, from Singapore, change the tradition of burning or where it happens. But perhaps we can change the economics, so that keeping peat wet pays off.
On mineral soil, Indonesia and Malaysia can and should lead on timing controlled burns. Singapore can support them with meteorological forecasting and scientific modelling.23
On peat, the control that works is water. Indonesia's own law already draws a line: the water table on peat must stay within 40 centimetres of the surface.24 The science bears it out: one assessment found peat burned only where the water table had fallen below 60 centimetres, with fire danger high mostly below 40.25
The evidence suggests the crop can live with it. Oil palm has no taproot; on peat, most of its roots sit in the top 30 centimetres. On a plantation in Sarawak, photosynthesis peaked with the water 30 to 40 centimetres down. And on 41 smallholder farms in Jambi, the water level made no detectable difference to yield.26
The realistic theory of change for smallholder behaviour is not to go from burning to not burning. It is going from uncontrolled burning on dry peat to controlled clearing on wet peat.
Incentives shape behaviour. And what a financial centre can help catalyse is a market in a type of carbon credit for Indonesia that pays smallholders to keep peat wet.
This is not new in spirit. Singapore has signed carbon credit implementation agreements with 12 countries, from Papua New Guinea, Ghana and Peru to Bhutan, Thailand, Vietnam and, in September, Laos. Last year, the Government chose about 2.2 million tonnes of credits from projects in Peru, Paraguay and Ghana. In July, we exchanged memoranda on carbon credits with Indonesia, but there is not yet an implementation agreement.27 And this year, Indonesia cleared its forestry projects to sell credits again after a three-year freeze.28
A credit pays for emissions avoided, so it must be checked. Buyers would pay the way a trader pays for cargo: on delivery, after inspection. If the peat is dry, there is no payment. I believe the world will pay, once it can see the water table.
The part Singapore can really help capitalise is the part every buyer needs: the readings. A water logger is a small sensor lowered into a pipe in the peat. It records the water level at set intervals and sends the readings by mobile or satellite link, so no one has to walk out to read it. Singapore can help raise funding for a network of loggers, placed where Indonesia chooses, with readings the world can trust and buy against. Then the money reaches the people who keep the peat wet, on time.29
It needs three things. First, accurate concession and land maps, so the payment goes to whoever is keeping the peat wet. Second, a proper trial of how each centimetre of water table trades crop yield against fire risk, so the price is right. Third, coverage and upkeep.30 The loggers run seven to ten years on batteries, so any physical network must come with a maintenance fund and local crews paid to keep the stations working.
Nor is the hardware too costly. At about US$2,000 a logger, maybe less now, equipping all 21,000-odd points that Indonesia estimates it needs would cost roughly what three maximum fines under this Bill come to.31
There have been earlier attempts. Norway has paid Indonesia for verified cuts in deforestation emissions, and the World Bank pays East Kalimantan for verified emission reductions.32 As a financial centre, Singapore can supply the readings and help catalyse such a carbon credit market, while Indonesia and its people earn from genuine wet-peat credits. It is in our interest to open new channels of investment into Indonesia, in support of President Prabowo's aim that growth reach ordinary Indonesians.33
For company land, the Bill already gives the Director-General a way to bring the readings in. An assessor must report on any matter that the Director-General specifies. My fourth question: will the Director-General ask assessors to report the water table on the land they assess?34 A company that says it took all reasonable measures should be able to show it kept its peat as wet as Indonesia's own law requires.
And my fifth question to the Government: as we negotiate an implementation agreement on carbon credits with Indonesia, will we make wet-peat projects with measured water tables a priority category?
As a good neighbour, we want Indonesia, and the five Kalimantan provinces and their people, to come out of this stronger.
In conclusion
Sir, in conclusion, this Bill makes burning expensive for companies with a stake in Singapore. A lasting solution will likely also need controlled clearing on wet peat to be worth more to the farmers who live on it than uncontrolled burning on drained dry peat is.
This year's haze has brought a new seriousness. Let us use it to spare the next generation. I support the Bill. Thank you.
The 2015 haze cost Singapore $1.83 billion, the highest on record; a preliminary assessment by economist Euston Quah puts 2026 above it. No fine, conviction or civil judgment under the Act is on the public record since it came into force in 2014 (Eco-Business, 16 Oct 2026). Notices under the Act were served in 2015 (note 4) and again in October 2026, to ten Singapore-based companies under s 10, whose senior representatives met Senior Minister K Shanmugam, Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong and Minister Grace Fu on 28 October 2026 (Mothership, 28 Oct 2026).
The 2014 Act's fine was up to $100,000 a day of haze, capped at $2 million and reached after 20 days (s 5(2), (5)), with no recovery of profit. Published estimates of what fire saves over machine clearing run from about US$143 a hectare (Jakarta Post via MPOB, 14 Sep 2015) to as much as US$250 a hectare (CIFOR), so a 10,000-hectare clearing saves about S$1.8 million to S$3.3 million: roughly the whole cap. In 2014 the Singapore Institute of International Affairs calculated that S$2 million was less than 1 per cent of the average earnings of seven key agroforestry companies (SIIA, 11 Jul 2014).
New s 5(2), (4) and (5); new s 16A, under which the court "shall" order payment of any profit gained or loss avoided that "can be assessed", in addition to the fine. The $20 million cap is a fixed sum for each offence; the s 16A sum rises with the gain from the offence.
In 2015 NEA sent preventive measures notices to six companies and a s 10 notice to one Singapore-based group (Hansard, 28 Jan 2016). Four cases remained open in 2020, 2021 and 2026 (4 Mar 2020; 13 Sep 2021; 12 Feb 2026). No prosecution under the Act is on the public record.
Old s 7(1) gave a defence where the haze was caused solely by "a grave natural disaster or phenomenon" or "an act of war"; the Bill deletes it. New s 5(4A) disapplies Penal Code s 26H(4), the general defence of reasonable care for strict-liability offences. New s 7(1) leaves one defence: the fire was caused by an unrelated person acting without the company's knowledge or consent, and the company took "all measures as are reasonable" to prevent that conduct and to extinguish or prevent the spread of the fire, all proved on a balance of probabilities.
The 2026 Singapore Grand Prix ran from 9 to 11 October. On Friday 9 October the 24-hour PSI peaked at 192 in the central region between 5pm and 8pm, the highest of the year to that date (The Star/ANN, 13 Oct 2026); 186 had been reported earlier that day (The Star, 9 Oct 2026). On Saturday 10 October it peaked at 183 in the central region (The Straits Times via Yahoo, 10 Oct 2026), and on race day it was 154 in the central region at 6am (GPFans): all in the unhealthy band of 101 to 200. The FIA said on 8 October the race was not at risk (The Star, 8 Oct 2026); it ran normally, with 301,294 attending (Tabla). The PSI first entered the very unhealthy band on 14 October (Asia News Network).
Alan Tan Khee Jin, "The 'Haze' Crisis in Southeast Asia: Assessing Singapore's Transboundary Haze Pollution Act 2014", NUS Centre for Asian Legal Studies Working Paper 15/02, February 2015. The Bill's presumption is new s 8(5). Money can be collected only from assets in Singapore, though designation (Part 2B) reaches a company's dealings here.
Bill clause 10, new Part 2D. New s 8K(1): the Agency may, "with the consent of the Public Prosecutor", bring a court action for a civil penalty. New s 8K(2) and (3): the court decides on "a balance of probabilities" and may order up to $10 million, with a minimum of $100,000 for an entity and $50,000 for an individual; the Agency may also settle, with or without an admission (s 8K(4), (5)). New s 8L(3): a civil action "must be stayed" once criminal proceedings begin for the same contravention, and may continue only if the charge is withdrawn or the person is discharged without an acquittal. New s 8L(2): no civil action may start after a conviction or an acquittal for the same contravention. The Bill as introduced has no provision barring a prosecution after a civil penalty has been ordered. New s 8L(1): no civil action may start more than six years after the Agency becomes aware of the contravention, so the contraventions of 2015 fall outside it.
From 1 January to 20 August 2026, 667,130 hectares burned in Indonesia: 338,459 hectares (50.7%) inside permits or concessions and 328,675 hectares (49.3%) outside, by the count of Madani Berkelanjutan, an Indonesian environmental foundation (Databoks / Katadata). Other counts differ: "nearly a quarter" of the area burned from January to July lay inside business concessions by Nusantara Atlas's count (Jakarta Post, 4 Sep 2026), while WALHI (the Indonesian Forum for the Environment) put 74% of Kalimantan's hotspots in licensed areas (Changemakr Asia). None measures who lit a fire; farmers also occupy land inside concessions (CIFOR).
A study of independent smallholders' supply chains in Riau, Jambi and Central Kalimantan found that middlemen often lend cash or fertiliser "long before the harvest" and deduct it from the fruit delivered (SPOS Indonesia / KEHATI, January 2019); the smallholders' union has put the usual price gap at 20% to 30% below the provincial benchmark (Kompas TV, 2022).
A scientist at CIFOR (the Center for International Forestry Research) put mechanical clearing at about US$150 a hectare against about US$7 for fire (Jakarta Post via MPOB, 14 Sep 2015); CIFOR says fire cuts land-preparation costs by as much as US$250 a hectare (CIFOR). In August 2025 Indonesia's Forestry Minister said the President had ordered heavy equipment for communities so that land could be cleared without burning (Kontan, 12 Aug 2025).
Kubu Raya: on 26 March 2016, about 30 residents blocked a joint team of 52 (28 police, 13 army, 7 from Manggala Agni, the forestry ministry's fire brigade, 4 community fire volunteers) from extinguishing land they had burned to fertilise it before planting. The West Kalimantan police chief said it began with a rumour that the team was coming to arrest burners; after hard negotiation the team put out the fire together with the residents. The farmers said they had burned less than two hectares, asked why burning was banned and what solution the government offered, and their leader, representing about 300 cultivators, planned to take the question to the Kubu Raya council (detikNews, 27 Mar 2016). A suspect in Berau, East Kalimantan, said he burned about 12 hectares for oil palm on an individual landowner's orders; police named two more suspects on 1 September 2026 (Gebrak, August 2026). The charges had not been tried as of October 2026. Ketapang: at Sungai Awan Kiri, Muara Pawan district, a joint team caught an excavator clearing freshly burned land for oil palm on 4 September 2026, and the Forestry Minister sealed the site on 8 September (Kompas.id; detikKalimantan, 8 Sep 2026).
Kalteng Online reported that "sejumlah warga" (a number of residents) at Sungai Tendang, Kumai, asked crews not to spray near some concrete buildings on 7 September 2026, that the burned land was suspected of being cleared for farming, and that the district disaster agency warned that obstruction can be prosecuted (Kalteng Online, 8 Sep 2026).
Shifting cultivation of hill rice in burned forest clearings is old in Borneo; in the Kelabit Highlands rice cultivation may date to between about 2,800 and 1,200 years ago (Lentfer and others, The Holocene 23, 2013). Great fires in extreme droughts, such as 1877–78, are recorded much earlier (UNU Press).
Law 32/2009, Article 69(2) and its Elucidation: at most 2 hectares per household, planted with local varieties and ringed by a firebreak (Detik; CNBC Indonesia, 3 Nov 2020). The statute's exemption had not been repealed as of October 2026.
Sarawak's Natural Resources and Environment Board has scheduled staggered open burning for shifting cultivators since 2003 (The Star, 30 May 2003) and reviews permits against local dry conditions (The Star, 20 May 2004). Permits were revoked when the haze came in July 2026 (The Star, 27 Jul 2026); the same report gives Sarawak 16 hotspots against Kalimantan's 1,081 from 1 to 26 July.
Field, van der Werf and Shen, "Human amplification of drought-induced biomass burning in Indonesia since 1960", Nature Geoscience, February 2009: from airport visibility records, Indonesian Borneo changed from highly fire-resistant to highly fire-prone sometime between the droughts of 1972 and 1982 (press release; Mongabay, 22 Feb 2009).
Field and colleagues found Indonesian Borneo "resistant to large fires, even in dry years, until population density and deforestation increased substantially and land use changed from small-scale subsistence agriculture to large-scale industrial agriculture and agroforestry" (Nature Geoscience press release, February 2009). The Basic Forestry Law and the Foreign Investment Law, both of 1967, opened Indonesia's forests to logging concessions, and East Kalimantan's "timber boom" followed (Lambung Mangkurat University, ICSSE). The 1982–83 fire destroyed about 3.5 million hectares of tropical forest in East Kalimantan, 80 per cent of it logged-over, after a drought from July 1982 to April 1983 (FAO, citing Lennertz and Panzer, 1983). A later study of 1982–2010 found fire activity in Borneo driven by industrial land conversion and El Niño drought, with logging intensity of negligible influence on fire frequency (Sloan and others, 2017, James Cook University).
Loggers dug canals through the peat-swamp forest of Sebangau, Central Kalimantan, to float timber out, and the canals went on draining the peat after the logging ended (Eco-Business; Borneo Nature Foundation). Oil palm and pulpwood on peat are grown on drained land: the RSPO's best practice is a water table 40 to 60 cm down (note 26). Hydrological modelling of Central Kalimantan peat treats groundwater deeper than 40 cm below the surface as critical for fire and subsidence (Wösten and others, 2008; note 24).
West Kalimantan's Regional Regulation (Perda) 1/2022 adds mineral soil only, never peat, outside the peak of an extreme dry season (Metro TV, 22 Aug 2026).
Lt-Gen Kristomei Sianturi, head of BNPB (Indonesia's National Disaster Management Agency), at Pulang Pisau on 19 October 2026: about 90 per cent of active fire points are on peat, with 129,502 hotspots in Central Kalimantan in 2026 (Berita Sampit, 20 Oct 2026). No data were published with the figure. Earlier, in mid-August, 455 of 592 hotspots in Kalimantan were on peat (Greenpeace, 24 Aug 2026); from 8 August to 1 October, 3,557 of 6,811 smoke sources nationally lay inside peat hydrological units, by Greenpeace's count (NU Online).
On 9 October the World Meteorological Organization said the 2026 El Niño was firmly established and strengthening rapidly (News On AIR, 9 Oct 2026).
The ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre is hosted by the Meteorological Service Singapore and designated under the ASEAN Regional Haze Action Plan to monitor land and forest fires and give early warning of transboundary haze; it runs numerical weather prediction models for the region (ASMC).
Government Regulation 57/2016 requires the water table in cultivated peat to be kept no more than 0.4 metres below the surface, bans new canals and bans burning on peat (Environmental Paper, 5 Dec 2016). The 40 cm figure appears earlier in hydrological modelling of Central Kalimantan peat, which treated groundwater deeper than 40 cm below the surface as critical for fire and subsidence (Wösten and others, Catena 73, 2008, Wageningen University). Some academics and the plantation industry criticised the 0.4 m limit as lacking a scientific basis when it was issued (Hukumonline; Jakarta Post, 17 Mar 2017).
In a 2022 assessment, peat burned only where the water table was below 60 cm, and fire danger was high mostly below 40 cm (Taufik and others, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 312:108738, 2022).
Oil palm is a monocot with fibrous roots; on peat the heaviest root mass is in the top 30 cm, with a few roots to 90 cm, in a small Sriwijaya University study (repository). On a plantation on peat in Malaysian Borneo, photosynthesis peaked with the water table 0.3 to 0.4 m down, and raising it from the usual 0.6 m would increase uptake by about 3.6% and cut soil CO2 by about 11%; the authors judged significant yield loss unlikely, at one site (ScienceDirect, 2022; St Andrews). On 41 smallholder farms in Jambi, with water tables of about 3 to 50 cm, no effect of water-table depth on yield was detected, in observational data (Mongabay, June 2022; Dryad dataset). Neither study is a controlled trial of yield at set water levels. The best practice of the RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) is 40 to 60 cm (RSPO); the Indonesian Palm Oil Association (GAPKI) has said yields peak at 50 to 75 cm and fall by up to 10% at 25 to 50 cm, as reported (Eco-Business).
The first nine implementation agreements are listed in order (Papua New Guinea, Ghana, Bhutan, Chile, Peru, Rwanda, Paraguay, Thailand, Vietnam) by Allen & Gledhill; then Mongolia, 6 October 2025 (MTI), the Philippines, 2026 (METI; sources give 30 April or 8 June), and Laos, the twelfth, 4 September 2026 (METI). On 16 September 2025 the Government said it "will contract" 2,175,000 tonnes from four nature-based projects in Peru, Paraguay and Ghana, about S$76 million, for 2026 to 2030 (NCCS). Singapore and Indonesia exchanged memoranda on carbon credits on 6 July 2026 (MFA, 6 Jul 2026); no implementation agreement had been signed by October 2026.
Presidential Regulation 110/2025 re-authorised international sales of Indonesian carbon credits, and forestry projects were cleared to issue credits in 2026 after a three-year freeze (Fastmarkets; Carbon Pulse).
A water-level logger is a pressure sensor in a perforated pipe sunk into the peat. It records the water level at set intervals, and a telemetric logger sends the readings on by mobile or satellite modem (Mongabay Indonesia, 28 Jan 2019). Makers rate such loggers for about 7 to 10 years on internal batteries (Bell Flow Systems), and a borehole logger with remote monitoring is listed at about US$2,000 in UNICEF's supply catalogue (UNICEF).
Indonesia's peat restoration agency had 142 telemetric stations logging peat water levels every ten minutes by December 2018, against an official estimate of 21,656 monitoring points needed across the country's peat hydrological units (Mongabay Indonesia, 28 Jan 2019). Studies of the network record missing data, damaged equipment and failed transmissions (IPB University; Universitas Gadjah Mada).
21,656 monitoring points at about US$2,000 a logger (UNICEF supply catalogue) come to about US$43 million, or about S$56 million at roughly S$1.30 to the US dollar; three maximum fines of $20 million under the Bill come to $60 million. The figure is for hardware only; installation, telemetry and upkeep are extra.
Under a 2010 Letter of Intent, Norway paid Indonesia for verified cuts in emissions from deforestation. Indonesia ended it on 10 September 2021, citing an unpaid US$56 million for 2016–17 results (Mongabay, Sep 2021); a new memorandum was signed on 12 September 2022 and the US$56 million paid that October (Jakarta Post, 21 Oct 2022), and payments total about US$216 million (Antara, 31 Jul 2026). The World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility pays East Kalimantan for verified emission reductions, with an advance of US$20.9 million in November 2022 (World Bank, 8 Nov 2022).
In his State of the Nation address on 14 August 2026, President Prabowo said growth and investment are not the final goal, and that high growth most people cannot enjoy is of no benefit (AP via WTOP, 14 Aug 2026). He has said every investment must deliver tangible benefits to the people, particularly those at the lower end of the income scale (Antara).
New s 8C(1): an assessor must evaluate the entity's involvement in fires outside Singapore and "any other matter as may be specified by the Director-General in a direction to the assessor" (s 8C(1)(b) of the Bill as introduced). The defence a company may raise is new s 7(1): that it took "all measures as are reasonable" to prevent the fire and its spread (note 5). Indonesia's rule on peat water levels is Government Regulation 57/2016, which sets 40 cm (note 24). The Bill does not say whether keeping peat wet is one of those reasonable measures.