Indonesia fights fires hard and prevents them cheaply

By 23 August the monitoring platform Nusantara Atlas had counted more than 268,000 fire hotspots in Indonesia this year. At the same point in 2019, the last catastrophic season, the count was 196,000. The government has thrown people at it: the Ministry of Forestry says 12,880 personnel are working across West, Central and South Kalimantan, with another 1,200 soldiers sent from Java, and President Prabowo Subianto flew to the burning areas on 22 August. Writing for Indonesia at Melbourne, Hans Nicholas Jong argues the country is good at the emergency and bad at the year before it.

The reason is under the ground. Peatland is waterlogged soil made of half-rotted plants, and it does not burn while it stays wet. Drain it with canals so plantations can be planted, and it turns into fuel. A 2025 study in Environmental Research Letters found that drained peatlands in Sumatra and Kalimantan had up to 13 times the fire hotspots of peatlands left undrained. El Nino makes this worse, and a 2026 study put the risk of major fires in Indonesian Borneo at 2.7 times higher in El Nino years, but the same study found big fires happen in normal years too. People also light them on purpose, because burning is the cheapest way to clear land.

The money tells the rest. After the 2015 disaster, Joko Widodo created a peat and mangrove restoration agency, which had rewetted about 1.6 million hectares by the time Prabowo dissolved it in December 2024 and split the work between ministries. This year the Forestry Ministry's forest-fire-control program got Rp145.9 billion, about 2.4 per cent of its budget, and the Environment Ministry's peatland protection program got Rp15.75 billion, roughly 1.13 per cent of its own. The NGO Pantau Gambut checked the older work in July and found 70 per cent of the canal blocks it assessed were damaged, and half the sites still had groundwater below the safe level.

Why it matters

If you live under this smoke every El Nino year, the thing to watch after the fires die down is not how many helicopters were sent, but whether anyone pays to repair the canal blocks that keep peat wet through the next dry season. Those repairs are cheap next to a national firefighting operation, and they decide how bad 2027 gets. Pantau Gambut also found only 3 per cent of the peatland burned between 2015 and 2019 came back as forest, so each bad season leaves behind more dry scrub that catches fire faster than the year before.