KUCHING: Natural Resources and Environment Board (NREB) will not issue any open burning permits next month (August) to control the haze, particularly during the 15th International Peat Congress to be held here from Aug 15-19.

Its controller Peter Sawal said the issuance of such permits would be frozen from the first week until the end of August to contain haze from local sources.

“I have instructed our men on this matter. We have received a lot of applications (for open burning during that period) but we will put them on hold. We will not issue such permit during that time,” he told reporters at NREB headquarters yesterday.

He said NREB was taking the initiative to ensure there was no unnecessary haze problem arising from local sources during the 15th International Peat Congress (IPC), the first to be held outside Europe.

“I have instructed my men at the regional office to monitor and to carry out enforcement,” he said.

Peter also said that NREB’s enforcement was aided by the Centre for Remote Environmental Monitoring (CREM) system, which adopts the fire danger rating system as a basis to regulate open burning using data collected from NOAA satellite through the Asean Specialised Monitoring Centre in Singapore.

He said at the moment, the only hotspots detected were permitted open burning or local farmers doing subsistence farming.

“Any issue of illegal open burning will be dealt with strictly by the state,” he said, adding that NREB would be presenting a paper on the CREM system during the IPC.

Talking about the weather condition in Sarawak, he said Sarawak was quite fortunate because there’s a lot of intermittent rain and even heavy rainfall during this period compared to drier weather during the same period last year.

He also said NREB was planning to use drones in the near future to regulate open burning especially in areas which were not easily accessible.

On a related matter, he said NREB would be signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with four major companies in Miri for standard operating procedures on fire prevention and separation on peat soil.

The MoU, a landmark of sorts he said, would be signed on August 5 in Miri.