More than 1.9 million hectares of Indonesia have burned since January, according to satellite measurements released on October 19, and the smoke long ago stopped being an Indonesian problem.
The drift has reached Singapore and travelled as far as the Philippines.
It has closed schools in Malaysia and East Timor, and it has made hundreds of thousands of people ill.
The Nusantara Atlas deforestation monitor counted 1,916,588 hectares, or 4.7 million acres, scorched between January and the end of September. That is an area roughly 12 times the footprint of London. Founder David Gaveau believes the real total is larger, because the smoke itself kept blurring the satellite images his team relies on.
Even the countable damage is brutal. It stands 38% above the same point in 2019, the last catastrophic fire year. Drought that took hold from June, fed by a strong El Nino cycle, turned seasonal land clearing into fires nobody could contain. Indonesia’s government has released no official number since it reported 202,000 hectares razed by the end of July.
Jakarta is not disputing the emergency, only the figures. Forestry Ministry spokesman Ristianto Pribadi told the AFP news agency the total was still being calculated and that the monitor’s data “cannot be readily confirmed.” President Prabowo Subianto, according to the government, has ordered a “massive deployment” of resources against the blazes.
Neighbors step in
Malaysia, whose capital has choked on the drift for weeks, finally had its repeated offers of help accepted. “We’ve already responded to the aid proposal… they (Malaysia) will be assisting with three aircraft and 52 personnel,” said Dudung Abdurachman, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political and security affairs. Singapore will assist too, though he offered no details.
Indonesia has 47 aircraft and 60,000 personnel committed to the fires, Dudung said, while insisting his country was “still capable of handling the situation ourselves” even as a volunteer firefighter died in hospital, the fifth man from a crew overwhelmed by flames on Thursday in East Java’s Bromo Tengger Semeru national park.
Singapore turns up the pressure
When the PSI index crosses 100 at any point in a day, Singapore logs the day as “unhealthy”. By that measure, the National Environment Agency said, the run of such days has now stretched past 2015, the region’s worst haze crisis on record.
Enforcement is following the smoke. The agency sent warnings to three companies on October 19, pressing them to act against fires on land they exploit, after notifying seven Indonesian companies on Friday that they must deploy firefighting teams and submit plans to stop the burning. Senior Minister K. Shanmugam promised consequences. “Some companies may deny responsibility. They may think they can escape scrutiny. But they should not underestimate the Singapore government’s determination to act,” he told reporters.
Anger is also building on the burning ground itself. In Palangkaraya, the Central Kalimantan provincial capital on Borneo, about 150 students marched on Monday to demand more from their government, carrying a doll wrapped in white cloth in the manner of an Islamic burial. “The government… has not been truly effective in handling forest and land fire,” said a protester who gave her name only as Naomi. “This warrants being designated and recorded in history as a gross human rights violation,” she added.
