impacts of the smoke haze pollution on urban environment. A case of Pekanbaru City, Riau Province, Indonesia

Smoke haze in Pekanbaru City is mainly caused by forest and land fire, mostly occuring out of Pekanbaru City. It is predicted to have resulted in adverse impacts on urban environment of Pekanbaru. Therefore, this research tries to investigate the possible influence of forest and land fire in Riau Province as well as dominant direction of wind on the deterioration of air quality, due to smoke haze pollution, in Pekanbaru City. In addition, the research is aimed at identifying impacts of smoke haze on urban environment of Pekanbaru City according to opinions of experts & perception of citizents. The type of the research is a mixed explanatory-descriptive-exploratory research with a time scope of 2002-2005 using a purposive sampling technique used to choose key persons/experts and citizents. The research confirms that forest and land fire as well as wind direction, in general, contributed to deterioration of air quality of Pekanbaru City. Even, it looks like to exist a trend to relate the air quality deterioration of Pekanbaru City with the increase of hotspot number especially when the number of hotspot in Riau Province is very high and the number of hotspots of regencies from which dominant wind direction blows is high as it was the case of February & March 2005. However, the analysis for February and March 2002 shows that contribution of the increase of forest & land fire as well as dominant wind direction on the deterioration of air quality of Pekanbaru City is very less evident. This is probably because the existence of other variables, besides dominant wind direction, such as raining rate, wind speed and temperature which may also play an important role in the air quality of Pekanbaru City. Thereby, the hypothesis "the increase of forest and land fire as well as wind direction have contributed to the deterioration of air quality in Pekanbaru City" is only partially accepted. On top of that, smoke haze pollution in Pekanbaru City, both according to the opinions of key persons/experts and the perception of citizents, has caused adverse impacts on urban environment of Pekanbaru City both on environmental aspect and human aspect. In terms of environmental aspect, the environmental impacts are deterioration of air quality and reduction of visibility range. Meanwhile, in the light of human aspect, the impacts can be both health and social impacts. Health impacts include respiratory diseases such as Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI), eye irritation and the increasing risks of traffic accidents in the streets as a result of a reduced visibility range. On the other hand, the social impacts comprise disruption of educational activities and transportation and restriction of people from doing their daily activities. Finally, the research result also shows that key actors involved in the forest and land fire in Riau Province, leading to smoke haze pollution in Pekanbaru City, in the period 2002-2005 are categorized into 2 types; indirect actors (mostly palm-oil companies, timber estate companies and cukong) and direct actors (migrand and local community). To overcome forest and land fire in Riau Province, three types measures undertaken are prevention, suppression and law enforcement.