When Fire Meets Peat: Why Burning Is Not The Answer For Malaysia
Ir Dr Azfarizal Mukhtar and Wan Mohd NurulHisam Wan Nawang
29 April 2026 - Most Malaysians have lived through at least one bad haze season. You remember because the sky went yellow before noon, and the school called to say classes were cancelled. Masks sold out at pharmacies. Elderly relatives were told to stay indoors. On the news, officials talked about hotspots across the Strait of Melaka, and somewhere a map showed fires burning in Sumatra or Kalimantan, sometimes in Johor or Pahang itself.
What most people do not know is where exactly that smoke comes from. Not from trees burning above ground, at least not primarily. Much of the worst haze comes from soil. Specifically, from peat soil that has caught fire underground and is slowly burning its way downward, sometimes for weeks on end, through deposits that took thousands of years to form.
Understanding why this happens, and why it is so difficult to stop, matters more than ever. There is growing interest in using fire deliberately as a land management tool in Malaysia, a technique called prescribed burning that is widely used in countries like the United States and Australia.
Researchers from Malaysia and the United States recently completed a study comparing soil at fire management sites in Florida with soil collected in Johor and Terengganu. What they found raises serious questions about whether that kind of fire management could ever work safely on Malaysian ground.
What prescribed fire actually is
Prescribed fire is not accidental burning. It is a planned operation, carried out under specific conditions of humidity, wind speed, and temperature, on a defined area of land.
In the United States, it is used to clear dried vegetation before it builds up into dangerous wildfire fuel. Ecologists also use it to maintain habitats that need occasional burning to stay healthy.
At Tall Timbers Research Station in Florida, fire managers have been doing this for over sixty years. The technique works there because the forests sit on mineral soil, which is the ordinary sandy or clay-based ground that most people picture when they think of soil. There is a thin layer of leaf litter on top, the fire burns through it, and then it stops. The ground beneath acts as a natural barrier. Rain can put the fire out. A gap in the vegetation, called a firebreak, can stop it from spreading sideways. The process is predictable enough that trained professionals can manage it safely.
Officers from Malaysia's Fire and Rescue Department visited Tall Timbers as part of this research collaboration. The site is impressive, and the science behind prescribed burning is genuine. But as the team spent time in the field and then compared soil samples from both countries in the laboratory, something became very clear. The ground in Florida and the ground in Malaysia are not the same thing, and that difference changes everything.
Get to know about Dr. Muhammad!
- Name: Dr. Muhammad Abdullah Rahmat
- Position: Senior Lecturer at the College of Engineering
- Academic background: PhD in Nuclear Science at National University of Malaysia (UKM)
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