Analysts put the price of this year's smoke at 6.9 billion dollars

Most of the fire coverage this year has counted hectares and air quality readings. The South China Morning Post counted money instead. Resty Woro Yuniar reports that analysts put the total economic and health cost of the haze from January to August at up to 6.9 billion dollars, in what is Indonesia's most intense fire season in eleven years. A Super El Niño, the warm Pacific weather pattern that makes Indonesia's dry season drier than usual, set the conditions for it.

The health side of that bill is enormous. The Post cites Health Ministry figures showing acute respiratory infection cases passed 15.6 million between 1 January and 20 August. Acute respiratory infection, or ISPA, covers infections of the airways from the nose and throat down into the lungs. At the worst of the dry season the country was adding about 400,000 new cases a week. Every one of those is a clinic visit, medicine to buy, and often a day of work or school lost, which is how smoke turns into an economic number rather than only a health one.

The Post also says the fires are testing confidence in Indonesia's young carbon market. A carbon market lets a buyer pay for a credit, and each credit is a promise that a patch of forest is holding carbon that would otherwise be in the air. Smoke over that same forest is evidence the promise was not kept, and buyers who cannot tell which credits are safe tend to pay less for all of them. Indonesia has been trying to build this market as a way to earn from forests left standing, at exactly the moment the forests are burning.

Why it matters

A figure this size is mostly made of small ones: masks bought, clinic visits paid for, work days lost, spread across millions of households that will not get any of it back. If you live in a smoke-hit province, the number gives you something to argue with, so watch whether your provincial health budget moves in response to it. The carbon market matters to a different group, the communities and companies paid to protect forest, whose future income depends on foreign buyers still believing Indonesian credits are worth something.