The importance of this issue lies in the fact that smoke haze pollution has been occurring for several decades in Southeast Asia and with each passing year the pollution gets worse and lasts longer (Lin et al 2017). While the haze in 2015 was the longest on record (Tan 2015) the pollution standards index (PSI) data from Singapore has exhibited increasingly higher peaks. The longer the issue goes unaddressed, the greater the public and environmental health impacts and economic costs become. Furthermore, it risks straining relations between the countries within the ASEAN region.