Indonesian Fires Push Smoke Emissions Past 2015's Strong El Niño Levels

Thick smog has blanketed parts of Indonesia as the archipelago battles fires that have burned large swaths of Borneo and Sumatra for weeks. So far this year, nearly 300,000 hectares of land have burned in Indonesia, according to an independent estimate from the Nusantara Atlas portal. Fires in the archipelago released more than 23 million metric tons of carbon emissions between Aug. 28 and Sept. 3, according to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service's Fire Emission Watch portal, higher than the 20.7 million metric tons emitted over the same period in 2015, a strong El Niño year.

“We're seeing already now really extreme fire emissions comparable to those previous strong El Niño years, and also the extent of the smoke and the haze and the air quality impacts,” said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. Analysts said the El Niño weather phenomenon, which the United Nations said this week could turn out to be the strongest in four decades, has dried out conditions in Indonesia and made it easier for fires to spread. But slash-and-burn land-clearing practices also contributed to the damage, said David Gaveau, founder of the Nusantara Atlas. “El Niño does not ignite fires. It creates the dry conditions that allow human-started fires to escape and become very large,” he said.

Many of the fires occurred on peatlands, wetland ecosystems with layers of partially decomposed organic material that becomes flammable when dry, making them difficult to extinguish. Between January and August this year, more than 210,000 hotspots were detected in peatland areas across the country, according to the NGO Pantau Gambut. “Peat is a naturally wet ecosystem and stores large amounts of organic material. When peat is drained, this organic material is converted into fuel,” said Pantau Gambut spokesman Wahyu Perdana.

More than 5 million people across Borneo and Sumatra are directly exposed to health risks from the haze, Indonesia's Deputy Health Minister Dante Saksono Harbuwono said last month, and more than 1.4 million students have been attending classes remotely because of worsening air quality. In Malaysia, soaring pollution levels prompted the government to declare an emergency in a region of Sarawak state on Borneo, with nearly 650 schools set to close. In the Philippines, air quality was slowly returning to normal after a week of “very unhealthy” and “severely unhealthy” PM2.5 levels, and the haze also pushed air quality in Singapore's central region to an “unhealthy” level.