For months, the air over West Kalimantan has been thick enough to taste. Now, some of the province’s residents are taking the government to court over it.

Indonesia’s worst wildfire season in 11 years has been sending plumes of toxic haze drifting across borders to Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines since at least August.

But nowhere has been worse hit than West Kalimantan, where more than 48,000 hectares (185 square miles) of land and forest have burned since the start of the year, according to Indonesia’s national disaster management agency.

Of the more than 175,000 acute respiratory infections Indonesia’s Health Ministry has recorded so far, over 116,000 were in West Kalimantan, with nearly of those 28,000 patients under the age of five.

On September 17, a coalition of civil society groups calling itself Nafas Kalimantan Barat, or West Kalimantan Breathe, filed a class-action lawsuit accusing President Prabowo Subianto, Vice-President Gibran Rakabuming Raka and 25 other officials and state bodies of failing to “handle the forest and land fires effectively”. The first hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

Glorio Sanen, who leads the plaintiffs’ 14 lawyers, told This Week in Asia that the group wanted the wildfires to be declared a national disaster, because of the local government’s “inability, in terms of budget and resources” to deal with it.

“The lawsuit is merely to remind state administrators to work according to their respective duties and responsibilities,” he said. “Don’t pass the buck to each other.”The plaintiffs want the government to address the disaster by enforcing the law, restoring the affected areas and preventing future fires.

They are asking the Ministry of Forestry to audit the burned forest areas and publish the results. They want the Ministry of Environment to investigate alleged environmental crimes and sanction those responsible.

They also want the national and West Kalimantan police to prosecute those who start fires. Glorio argues that this year’s fires were foreseeable, given that a “super” El Nino and a long dry season had long been forecast, yet national and regional governments “ignored” the risks.

As of Wednesday, national police had named 196 suspects linked to fires on more than 5,000 hectares of land in several provinces.

Prabowo has called for harsher punishments. At a cabinet meeting on September 16, he said he had told the law minister and his chief administrative officer, known as the minister of state secretary, to investigate.

He floated the possibility of asking the House of Representatives for a law that would increase penalties and classify arsonists as “ecological terrorists”.

“This is very serious,” Prabowo said. “We’ve worked hard to mitigate these problems.”He also rejected the idea that tradition could justify slash-and-burn agriculture. “There should be no excuses for the practice, such as local wisdom and so on,” he said.

“If the people need it, we’ll help clear the land, but this absolutely must not continue. There must be no more forest fires for land clearing or any other reason.”Indonesians have sued their government over wildfires before, with limited success. In 2016, seven environmental activists sued then president Joko Widodo, his ministers and regional governments over the previous year’s fires in Central Kalimantan.

The plaintiffs won in the district and appellate courts, only for the Supreme Court to overturn those verdicts in 2022 after granting the government’s petition for a judicial review.

Siti Rakhma Mery, a researcher at the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation, said the problem stemmed from a reluctance among the judiciary to be seen as setting precedents in environmental cases. Cases were often dismissed on procedural grounds before their “core substance” had even been considered, she said.

By her count, of 15 state administrative court decisions on environmental protection between 2018 and last year, only two went the plaintiffs’ way. The rest were either lost or thrown out over technical or procedural errors.

That is despite a legal framework that Siti describes as already rich in “provisions that favour the environment” and local communities.

Under the principle of “strict liability”, for example, a plaintiff need not prove fault when a fire starts on land leased by a company.

“However, judges’ knowledge of environmental law is not encouraging in Indonesia as they lack sufficient knowledge of it,” she said.

Siti expects the defence in the West Kalimantan case to rest on paperwork. The plaintiffs were alleging negligence causing material and immaterial losses, she said, so the government would likely produce letters and documents to show “that they have taken the steps that should have been taken” and broke no law.

Victory in court is unlikely to end the matter, however. In 2021, 32 plaintiffs – including activists, residents, and environmental groups – won a civil lawsuit against Widodo over air pollution in Jakarta. The court ordered Indonesia’s then president to set adequate national air quality standards that would “protect the people’s health” and the environment. Jakarta’s air is still polluted.

“Even winning doesn’t guarantee execution,” said Yance Arizona, a constitutional law lecturer at Gadjah Mada University. He said court victories against the state in Indonesia often stalled at the enforcement stage, yet a ruling would “certainly be a point of reference for people to evaluate a government, as a lack of change indicates poor performance”.

For Yance, the class-action lawsuit matters whatever the verdict, as it could help “to educate the public that forest fires are one shared problem”.

He urges anyone concerned about haze and recurring wildfires to support the case by submitting information or expert testimony to the district court in Pontianak where the suit was filed or to file similar lawsuits in other affected regions.

“Disasters in Indonesia are often perceived as a local issue,” he said. “We need to escalate this. We need to show that this isn’t just about Kalimantan, because forest destruction in Kalimantan will impact Indonesia as a whole.”