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The modern financial system has enabled a globalized economy by leveraging investments for production, consumption, and the trade of goods and services. However, this system has also engendered a series of wicked problems and externalities, including but not limited to climate change, environmental pollution, biodiversity loss, and inequalities that significantly challenge the well-being of nature and people. The system is also currently inadequate with regards to financing sustainable development, as recognized by the 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda. This Voices asks: what must be done to transform today's financial system for a sustainable future?

In the last three decades, a new ‘haze season’ has emerged in Indonesian, Malaysian, and Singaporean societies to signify the recurring air pollution episode caused by the widespread burning of tropical peatlands. This study delves into the discursive framework of ‘seasonality’ surrounding the societal perception and response to haze, exploring ‘haze season’ as an adaptation context and ‘haze’ as a mitigation strategy. Deploying a three-step methodology, this paper identifies and analyses key storylines used by various political actors to attribute meaning to haze, namely (1) ‘it keeps coming back’, (2) ‘it will go away’, and (3) ‘it is normal’. Different political actors deploy these storylines for distinct purposes. The objectives of storyline deployment align mostly between governments and corporations seeking to explain, legitimise, and detract from mitigation inefficiencies and adaptation inadequacies, with civil society organisations being the sole challenges and critique of this patronage network structures, where governments and companies tolerate unsustainable agroforestry practices leading to haze. The study underscores the significance of understanding the politics involved in constructing ‘seasons of the Anthropocene’. Divergent framing of seasonality by different actors reveals the underlying mechanisms influencing environmental change mitigation and adaptation. The construction of Anthropocene seasons can be a double-edged sword, with familiarisation enhancing societal preparedness, while normalisation can lead to desensitisation and inertia towards mitigation. Untangling the divergent pathways of politicising Anthropocene seasonalities holds the key to determining whether and how societies can build a ‘liveable future’. By grasping the dynamics of the ‘haze season’ discourse, we can project effective environmental action and address the challenges posed by recurring haze episodes.

The widespread burning of tropical peatlands across regions of Malaysia and Indonesia is now considered an annual event in equatorial Southeast Asia. The fires cause poor air quality (‘haze’) across the region, affecting the health of millions, but little has been written about how people in Southeast Asia make sense of this recurring phenomenon. In this paper, we investigate the emergent social construction of the ‘haze season’. Borrowing from anthropology literature, we define ‘seasons’ as a social construct that enables societies to organise their livelihoods around the expectation of recurring phenomena. The construction of ‘haze season’, in turn, reflects ongoing deliberation and contestation of the societal perception of and reaction to the causes and effects of haze. To do that, we analysed more than 35,000 news articles published in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore to investigate the timing of haze season reporting and key themes associated with the season. Deploying keyness analysis and structural topic modelling (STM), we find a strong distinction between the themes of articles written about the ‘haze season’ and articles that simply refer to the haze problem alone. Articles that mention ‘haze’ but not ‘haze season’ focus on the root causes of the haze crisis – peatland fires in Indonesia, oil palm plantations, deforestation – as well as geopolitical cooperation to prevent fires (e.g., through ASEAN). We found that the ‘haze season’ articles have a strong association with the effects of the haze crisis, particularly during the haze season months (June to October), suggesting that seasonality plays a role in adaptation behaviour. Outside of the haze season months, articles focus more on haze mitigation and associated political action. As a season that has emerged entirely as the result of human activity, affecting hundreds of millions of people over a spatial extent of millions of square kilometres, we argue that the ‘haze season’ is a ‘Season of the Anthr

Even though there is an increased understanding that the haze issue is anthropogenic, as the haze season becomes increasingly normalised (more severe one year and less so the other, but taken as a given), society may “forget” that haze is anthropogenic and hence avoidable. This storyline thus may also contribute to absolving governments of responsibility or pressure to act, writes Helena Varkkey, Felicia Liu, and Tom Smith

This article analyses the denialist narratives of the negative environmental impact of oil palm plantations on tropical peat by the media of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Specifically, we focus on media coverage of the 2016 International Peat Congress, where scientifically misleading claims that it is sustainable to develop oil palm plantations on tropical peatlands were made. We found that media reporting of the denialist narrative is more prevalent than that of the peer-reviewed science consensus-view that plantations on tropical peat could cause excessive greenhouse gas emissions and enhance the risk of fires. Four mutually complementary narratives were used by Indonesian and Malaysian media to construe denialism, which closely resemble the four climate denialist narratives identified by Elsasser and Dunlap (2013). These denialist narratives draw heavily upon information advocated by divergent knowledge communities (Goldstein 2016) and appeal to a nationalist sentiment of ‘us’ - palm oil-producing developing countries - and ‘them’ - western developed countries producing research critical of the industry. The Malaysian press has most extensively deployed this nationalistic sentiment, whereas the Singaporean media has not actively endorsed or rejected any of the denialist narratives. Our findings suggests that media representation of the issue is a reflection of an amalgamation of economic, diplomatic and nationalistic concerns, determined by political, socio-cultural nuances specific to each country. Importantly, our article alerts to the continuation of unsustainable practices as justified by the media to the public, and that the prevalence of these denialist narratives constitute a significant obstacle in resolving pressing issues such as transboundary haze, biodiversity loss, and land-use change related greenhouse gas emissions in Southeast Asia.