A firefighter in West Kalimantan spent the first week of September 2026 doing the same job he did in 2015 — except this time, standing in the smoke, he told a reporter the quiet part out loud: conditions this year are worse than 2015 was. 2015 is the year Southeast Asia's haze crisis became a benchmark, the season everyone since has measured themselves against. It took eleven years to get from that benchmark back to a season people are already comparing unfavourably to it. The last leg of that eleven years — from the last crisis in 2023 to this one — took three.
Key takeaways
- Indonesia's Jan-Jun 2026 forest fires ran 110% higher than the same period in 2023, with 200,000+ hectares burned nationally by early September — before August is even counted (ABC News, 2026-09-07).
- An AQI monitor in Pontianak recorded a reading above 900 during the same reporting trip — roughly three times the threshold that defines "hazardous" air (ABC News, 2026-09-07).
- The gap between Southeast Asia's crisis-level haze seasons has been shrinking: eight years from 2015 to 2023's return, then just three years from 2023 to 2026.
- Peer-reviewed climate research finds that anthropogenic warming is projected to increase the frequency of extreme ENSO events specifically — the same climate driver behind 2015, 2023 and 2026 (PMC synthesis).
Is haze actually getting worse every year in Southeast Asia?
Not every single year — but the years it does get bad are arriving closer together, and 2026 is already worse on the ground than the benchmark year the region uses to measure "bad." Indonesia's Jan-Jun 2026 fire season burned 110% more area than the same months in 2023, and by early September more than 200,000 hectares were gone nationally, without August's total even factored in yet (ABC News, 2026-09-07). That is the direct answer. The rest of this post is about why the interval between these seasons, not just their severity, is the number worth tracking if you ride.
Four crises in eleven years: 2015, 2023, and now 2026
Southeast Asia has one universally-cited disaster year: 2015. A super El Niño dried out Indonesia's peatlands, fires burned out of control for months, and the resulting haze exposed tens of millions of people across the region to toxic smoke, with more than 500,000 people treated for respiratory ailments — the historical baseline that current reporting still measures against (ABC News, 2026-09-07). Every haze story written since uses 2015 as the yardstick.
For eight years after that, nothing matched it. Then El Niño returned in 2023, and Indonesian forest fires reached roughly 152,678 hectares in August alone, with the cumulative January-to-August total passing 250,000 hectares (Databoks/Katadata, Indonesian Ministry of Forestry data, 2023). Bad, but still framed at the time as "the worst since 2015" — a callback, not a new baseline.
Three years later, 2026 has already outpaced 2023's comparable period by 110%, with the dry season not finished (ABC News, 2026-09-07). On the ground in West Kalimantan, firefighter Andri Susanto put it plainly to a reporter: "Conditions in 2026 are indeed worse than in 2015" (ABC News, 2026-09-07). A Pontianak health clinic reported haze-linked respiratory patient volume roughly doubling versus the year before, and the attending doctor called it the worst year yet (ABC News, 2026-09-07). An AQI monitor at the same location read above 900 — three times the level that defines hazardous air (ABC News, 2026-09-07).
Read those three years end to end and the story stops being "pollution is bad" — every post on this subject already says that — and becomes something more specific: the time between "bad" and "the worst on record" is getting shorter. Eight years, then three.
The gap between crisis-level haze seasons is shrinking
Years elapsed since the previous crisis-level haze season
Recorded gapIllustrative projection
| Crisis year | Gap since previous crisis (years) | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 8 (since 2015) | Recorded |
| 2026 | 3 (since 2023) | Recorded |
| ~2029 | ~2-3 (illustrative) | Projected, not measured |
Passive protection was sized for a rare event. It isn't one anymore.
Buying a box of masks before "haze season" and putting them away afterward is a rational response to an intermittent problem. Tolerate a bad fortnight once every several years, then move on. That logic only works if the bad weeks stay rare — and the interval data above says they are not staying rare.
The physics of why a passive vent fails hasn't changed. It is the same mechanism whether the particles came from a tailpipe next to you or a peatland fire a thousand kilometres away: PM2.5 is 2.5 microns and smaller, vent mesh and comfort foam are nowhere near fine enough to stop it, and the whole system depends on forward motion to push any air through at all. What has changed is the denominator — how many days a year that failure mode is actually live. A Pontianak AQI reading above 900 makes the point starkly: at three times the hazardous threshold, any protection strategy short of a sealed, actively-driven filtration path is functionally decorative, and the number of days per year that threshold gets crossed is the variable trending up.
Why a passive vent can't tell haze smoke from tailpipe exhaust
Side view of a helmet vent, moving vs. stopped
Projecting the interval: what happens if the gap keeps shrinking
To be direct about what follows: this is a synthesis, not a sourced forecast number, and it should be read that way. No agency has published "the next Southeast Asian haze crisis will land in year X."
What does exist is two real inputs. First, the observed pattern above — a long, comparatively quiet stretch before 2015's catastrophic baseline, another long stretch before 2023's return, then only three years to 2026, a season on-the-ground responders already assess as worse than 2015 with the fire season not yet finished. Second, the peer-reviewed finding that anthropogenic climate change is projected to increase the frequency of extreme ENSO events specifically, not just El Niño broadly in general terms (PMC, "Synergies Between Observed Warming and ENSO Episodes on Extreme Events").
Put those together, and the reasonable planning assumption for a rider in Indonesia, Malaysia or the Philippines is: at least one more crisis-level haze season before 2031, and a real chance of two, if the 2023-to-2026 gap turns out to be closer to the new normal than the longer gaps that came before it. That is a conclusion built from direction, not magnitude — the climate literature says the frequency of extreme ENSO events is increasing; it does not hand out a year.
If that holds, the practical consequence for riders is straightforward: a "stock up before haze season" strategy is a timing bet on an interval that keeps getting harder to predict, and 2026 already beat even the people whose job it is to be ready for it. Read the wider context of what a single season like this does to a rider's exposure in our earlier piece on the 2026 haze season and helmet vents, and how one city plans around it in our Singapore haze contingency guide. For the general picture on what riders are breathing across the region day to day, start with our rider air pollution guide.
A system that doesn't care what year it is
A stock-up-for-haze-season strategy is a timing bet, and the interval keeps getting harder to call. Easi Breezi's active, sealed induction-and-filtration path runs the same on every ride, in a quiet year or the next 2026 — an H11 HEPA element rated ≥95% on PM2.5, driven by a fan rather than depending on forward speed, so it keeps working in a stationary queue where ram-air vents go dead. Patent pending. It removes the timing bet instead of trying to win it.
Frequently asked questions
Is haze getting worse every year in Southeast Asia?
Not every single year, but the crisis-level years are arriving closer together and are getting worse when they land. 2026's Jan-Jun fires ran 110% above the same period in 2023, and on-the-ground responders in West Kalimantan already rate 2026 worse than 2015, the historical benchmark year.
What years were Southeast Asia's worst haze crises?
2015 is the regional benchmark — a super El Niño year with over 500,000 people treated for respiratory ailments (ABC News, 2026-09-07). 2023 was the next crisis-level return, eight years later, with forest fires reaching roughly 152,678 hectares in August alone (Databoks/Katadata, 2023). 2026 followed just three years after that, and by early September had already burned more than 200,000 hectares nationally, without August counted (ABC News, 2026-09-07).
Will a crisis-level haze season happen every year now?
There's no evidence for that — the pattern so far is a shrinking gap between crisis years, not an annual event. Based on the observed 2015-2023-2026 interval and peer-reviewed research on climate-amplified ENSO frequency, a reasonable planning assumption is at least one more crisis-level season before 2031, with a real chance of two. That is a synthesis of direction, not a published forecast.
Does a mask or a passive helmet vent still work during a severe haze event?
The physics doesn't change with the source: PM2.5 from a peatland fire passes through vent mesh and mask gaps exactly as easily as PM2.5 from a tailpipe. Passive vents additionally depend on forward motion, so they stop moving any air at all the moment you're stationary in traffic — which is often when concentrations peak.
How can riders plan for haze seasons that are harder to predict?
Treat the timing as unreliable rather than betting on "it probably won't happen this year." A system that filters continuously regardless of the calendar removes the need to guess when the next season lands, instead of restocking supplies each time a crisis is already underway.
Ready to stop betting on the calendar?
The interval between Southeast Asia's worst haze seasons has gone from eight years to three, and 2026 outpaced even the people whose job is being ready for it. Waiting for the next "haze season" announcement to act is a bet on timing you don't control.
See the Easi Breezi system built to filter every ride the same way, whichever year it turns out to be — or stock up on replacement HEPA filters so the system is ready before the next gap closes.
Written by Ash — mechanical engineer and founder of Easi Breezi, building an active HEPA filtration system for motorcycle helmets (patent pending). Based between Hong Kong and Bali, riding daily in the traffic this blog writes about.