Sabah on high alert as haze blankets Tawau and Kota Kinabalu with unhealthy air quality

Each dry season, the ancient practice of burning land sends smoke across borders and into the lungs of those who had no part in the burning. On the morning of August 31, Sabah awoke to this familiar reckoning — Tawau and Kota Kinabalu registering unhealthy air, fed by over a thousand fire hotspots across Kalimantan's peatlands and compounded by a devastating residential fire that erased 202 homes overnight. The haze is both a regional inheritance and a local failure, and Sabah's authorities now face the enduring question of whether enforcement can outpace the fire.