Indonesian fires impact Southeast Asia

Thick smog has blanketed parts of Indonesia as the vast archipelago for weeks battles to contain fires that have burned large swathes of Borneo and Sumatra.

The hazardous smoke has led to an increase in respiratory problems, forced schools to close and has been drifting to neighboring countries including Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines.

Most of the fires are concentrated on Borneo island, home to vast tropical jungle that Indonesia shares with Brunei and Malaysia, as well as Sumatra.

People look at Singapore’s central district shrouded in haze from Indonesian forest fires on Friday.

Photo: AFP

So far this year, nearly 300,000 hectares of land have burned in Indonesia, the Nusantara Atlas estimated.

Indonesia saw an uptick in carbon emissions since late July, and by the end of last month, the levels were comparable to previous El Nino years of 2015 and 2019, Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) senior scientist Mark Parrington said.

Fires in the archipelago have released more than 23 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions between Friday last week and Thursday, CAMS’ Fire Emission Watch said.

It was higher than 20.7 million metric tonnes of emissions from fires over the same period in 2015, which was a strong El Nino year.

Analysts said the El Nino weather phenomenon has contributed to creating drier conditions in Indonesia and made it easier for fires to spread.

However, slash-and-burn land-clearing practices also contributed to the damage, Nusantara Atlas founder David Gaveau said.

“El Nino does not ignite fires. It creates the dry conditions that allow human-started fires to escape and become very large,” he said.

The fires are difficult to extinguish, because many occurred on peatlands, a wetland ecosystem with layers of partially decomposed organic materials that become flammable when dry.

Between January and last month, more than 210,000 hotspots were detected in peatland areas across the country, non-governmental organization Pantau Gambut said.

“Peat is a naturally wet ecosystem and stores large amounts of organic material. When peat is drained, this organic material is converted into fuel,” Pantau Gambut spokesman Wahyu Perdana said.

More than 5 million people across Borneo and Sumatra are directly exposed to the health risks from haze, Indonesian Deputy Minister of Health Dante Saksono Harbuwono said last month.

More than 1.4 million students were attending classes remotely, with many schools closed due to worsening air quality, an education ministry official said this week.

In Malaysia, soaring pollution levels prompted the government on Friday to declare an emergency in a region of the Sarawak state in Borneo, with nearly 650 schools closed next week.

In the Philippines, air quality was slowly returning to normal after a week of reaching “very unhealthy” and “severely unhealthy” PM 2.5 levels that saw officials shutter schools in cities and provinces, citing the drifting haze.

The haze also drove air quality in Singapore’s central region to an “unhealthy” level on Friday, the country’s National Environment Agency data showed.