Making air pollution legible: Environmental‐health data and the naturalization of the smoky season in Northern Thailand†
Abstract
Air pollution is one of the most significant environmental threats to human health, causing over seven million premature deaths annually, with two‐thirds occurring in the Asia‐Pacific region. Each year, from February to April, northern Thailand experiences some of the world's worst air quality. The region's seasonal air pollution is primarily blamed on biomass burning from maize cultivation in the highlands and is perceived to have deteriorated over the past two decades. However, official data only partially supports these claims, while local knowledge often counters them. Drawing on ethnographic research between 2019 and 2024, we trace how the ‘smoky season’ evolved into the ‘haze crisis’ through wide‐ranging interpretations of air pollution data that facilitated the delegitimation of local environmental management practices. We argue that while air pollution is broadly recognized as a significant environmental health crisis, solutions are often framed as technocratic challenges rather than problems that require a fundamental restructuring of socioeconomic relations of production. This paper contributes to ongoing debates at the nexus of political ecology and science and technology studies (STS) on the social production of environmental‐health data and its consequences for environmental justice.
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BibTeX
@article{mostafanezhad2026making,
title = {{Making air pollution legible: Environmental‐health data and the naturalization of the smoky season in Northern Thailand†}},
author = {Mary Mostafanezhad and Chaya Vaddhanaphuti and Olivier Evrard},
journal = {Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.1111/sjtg.12578},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05770598v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Making air pollution legible: Environmental‐health data and the naturalization of the smoky season in Northern Thailand†
AU - Mary Mostafanezhad
AU - Chaya Vaddhanaphuti
AU - Olivier Evrard
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/30
JO - Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
DO - 10.1111/sjtg.12578
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05770598v1
AB - Air pollution is one of the most significant environmental threats to human health, causing over seven million premature deaths annually, with two‐thirds occurring in the Asia‐Pacific region. Each year, from February to April, northern Thailand experiences some of the world's worst air quality. The region's seasonal air pollution is primarily blamed on biomass burning from maize cultivation in the highlands and is perceived to have deteriorated over the past two decades. However, official data only partially supports these claims, while local knowledge often counters them. Drawing on ethnographic research between 2019 and 2024, we trace how the ‘smoky season’ evolved into the ‘haze crisis’ through wide‐ranging interpretations of air pollution data that facilitated the delegitimation of local environmental management practices. We argue that while air pollution is broadly recognized as a significant environmental health crisis, solutions are often framed as technocratic challenges rather than problems that require a fundamental restructuring of socioeconomic relations of production. This paper contributes to ongoing debates at the nexus of political ecology and science and technology studies (STS) on the social production of environmental‐health data and its consequences for environmental justice.
SN - 0129-7619
SN - 1467-9493
ER -