Reporting on Indonesia's fires has turned into dangerous work

Birgit Bräuchler, an anthropology professor at the University of Copenhagen, has spent years researching how Indonesians report on the environment. Writing for New Mandala, she argues the useful question is no longer whether environmental journalists in Indonesia have turned into activists. It is why the country keeps putting them in a position where there is no difference. Auriga Nusantara, which runs a monitoring platform called Environmental Defender, counts more than 1,000 environmental defenders, journalists among them, who faced threats, violence or criminal charges between 2014 and 2025.

The pressure comes from the land. Strategic National Projects, known by the Indonesian initials PSN, are a Jokowi-era category of investment that moves faster because fewer regulatory steps apply to it. Bräuchler says that trade-off weakened environmental safeguards, so a reporter covering a mine, a plantation or a new road is covering something the state wants finished. One journalist she interviewed described physical and digital threats against their family, from unknown people and from the military. Another, reporting on illegal mining where companies and police held stakes, was attacked online instead. Legal pressure runs alongside: the Electronic Information and Transactions Law, the ITE Law, is a standard tool for turning a story into a criminal complaint. The tone from the top is not subtle either. In a speech from December 2024 that spread widely, President Prabowo Subianto urged more oil palm expansion and waved away deforestation worries on the grounds that oil palms also absorb carbon dioxide.

Then there is money. Investigations into mining, deforestation and food estates are expensive, risky and bring in little revenue, so newsrooms ration them. A 2024 revision of the Broadcasting Bill would have squeezed investigative work further, was shelved after public pushback, and reappeared as a new draft in September 2026. Greenpeace Indonesia warned at the time that "this might be the last environmental investigation we get to watch." Journalists have built their own defences: shared reporting across outlets, digital security training, and the Society of Indonesian Environmental Journalists, founded in 2006 by the veteran reporter Harry Surjadi, which offers grants, training and somewhere safe to go. Bräuchler calls all of it mitigation, and her conclusion is blunt: without legal protection and independent media, the risk stays. Satellite monitoring had already recorded more fire hotspots by late July this year than in any year on record.

Why it matters

The reporting that names which company holds the concession behind the smoke over your city comes from a small group of reporters who can be sued, charged or followed home for doing it. If that work shrinks, what shrinks with it is your ability to know who lit the fire, which is exactly the question Jakarta and Singapore are now arguing about. Watch the new Broadcasting Bill draft, because the version that passes will decide how much investigative reporting survives the next dry season.