Antara/Bayu Pratama S

An environmental catastrophe occurred in London in late 1952. This calamity began with the coming of cold winter air to the city on Dec. 4. It was a Thursday afternoon when London residents burnt extra coal in their furnaces to get warm, according to accounts of “The Great Smog of London”.

The smoke from the furnaces, along with that from industrial areas and vehicles, caused extraordinarily heavy smog to blanket the capital.

At the same time, London had a windless period that trapped the toxic pollutants in the city for five days.

The smog caused 4,000 deaths and made 25,000 people sick. The exact number is still debatable because deaths increased for months after the smog.

More than half a century later, air pollution is still a major human killer. Forest and land fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan have affected hundreds of thousands, including a 4-month-old infant who died of pneumonia and meningitis, the media reported.

The smog had caused many disruptions in Indonesia and neighboring countries. The government is grappling to solve this issue. Fatalities as smog spreads are clear signs that the government needs stronger action. On the other hand, we also have to think how we can contribute to tackling this problem.

While the government and other stakeholders are struggling to stop the smog in fire locations, we can contribute in different ways.

We don’t have to go to Sumatra or Kalimantan to pour water on the fire. It is not the smog that solely kills human, but the toxic particles inside the smog. Thus, we can contribute to limit the pollution. There are some best practices to do this.

First, stop burning waste. In a poor waste management area, some households burn their garbage in the open air. Burning waste is the easiest way to get the trash out of our sight, but this is also the easiest way to produce toxic pollutants.

Everyday trash from households and businesses is a complex problem in urban areas. Burning involves little to no cost, but it potentially leads to uncontrolled and destructive fires. Open burning in landfills releases harmful dioxins and black carbon.

Advanced incinerators burn waste and produce electricity. However, incinerators still potentially release toxic gases, especially gas from burning plastic waste. Gas from incinerators needs complicated treatment before it is safe to be released into the atmosphere. As waste burning is illegal because it is hazardous, we surely need to reduce, reuse or recycle our trash before disposing of it.

Improvements in waste management practices are not enough. At the same time, awareness of the risk of air pollution from waste burning should be promoted.

Second, precision is needed in agriculture. Agriculture is a main source of air pollution because it is the dominant source of ammonia and other gases, especially from livestock and mineral fertilizers. Undoubtedly, agriculture is one of the key sectors in Indonesia’s economy.

Thus, reducing air pollution from agriculture is essential. Indonesia should improve its agricultural practices to become less harmful to the environment.

Precision agriculture means the crops and livestock have to receive exactly what they need. In the other words, crops and livestock need precise and correct amounts of inputs like water, fertilizer and pesticides. Excessive amounts of inputs will pollute the environment.

In fertilizer application, air pollution in the form of ammonia comes from excessive use of nitrogen that is not taken up by plants. Ammonia also releases when fertilizers are spread but not immediately incorporated into the soil.

Livestock production should also apply precision farming. Livestock activities contribute to the emission of considerable amounts of greenhouse gases (GHG), such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, which increase the Earth’s temperature.

Efficiency in livestock feed is important to make larger portions of energy in animal feeds convert into products (meat or milk). This is important because air pollution from animal production comes from wasted energy content in animal feed.

Precision in matching feed nutrients and livestock’s feed requirements is the main challenge in Indonesia because the main players in livestock production are smallholder farmers with small numbers of livestock.

In a smallholder system, the farmers often feed livestock with low quality feed, such as rice straw, which contributes to GHG production from the animals’ digestive systems. Traditional farming practices need to change and farmers must be assisted to accept new ways of farming.

Farmers should not walk alone. Governments, universities and corporations have to walk side by side with them. Each has its own responsibility to disseminate proper information to the farmers and assist farmers to limit air pollution.

We may say we didn’t start all the fires in Sumatra or Kalimantan, but the pollution we produce can make the smog become more fatal. We must consider the smog issue as our common problem, although it occurs hundreds of kilometers away from us.

More productive actions are needed rather than pointing fingers at whoever is suspected to have caused the smog. Outside the hot spots, we, who still breathe cleaner air, must stop our ignorance and start to limit air pollution. We certainly do not want “The Great Smog of Sumatra” to occur in the future.

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The author holds a MSc degree in animal sciences from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and has specializations in global and sustainable production. He recently conducted research on greenhouse gas emissions for his thesis.