Satellites see every fire. No rule says anyone must act on it.

The equipment is not what is failing. Karryl Kim Sagun Trajano and Iuna Tsyrulneva, both researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, write for the Lowy Institute that heat-sensing satellites pass over Indonesia several times a day, and radar satellites can look straight through smoke and cloud. On 30 August, four days after ASEAN's weather centre raised its highest haze alert, satellites counted 1,211 hotspots across the region. A "hotspot" is just a patch of ground the satellite reads as burning. Of those, 1,180 were in Kalimantan. A satellite image changes nothing unless some office is required to check it and send people.

Who that office is, inside Indonesia, is the part the authors find worrying. Peat fire work is divided between national, provincial and village bodies, with no single body in charge. The peat restoration agency, which ran the ground sensor network and held the staff who knew how to read it, saw its mandate end in 2024, and the sensors and expertise were passed to ministries and local governments. A successor agency is planned but not yet set up, and access to forest and fire data has been tightened. Indonesia gained better instruments and lost the office that held them together.

The bigger chance being missed is prevention, not faster response. Peat is a thick layer of old wet plant matter. Drained for planting, it dries out and burns downward, which is why the smoke lasts for weeks. Water-table sensors, rainfall forecasts and radar together can mark drained peat as dangerous before any fire starts. That only helps if officials can enter the land, order a company to re-wet its peat and punish it when it refuses. The law is not the gap: the ASEAN haze agreement has been in force since 2003, Indonesia ratified it in 2014, and the regional roadmap to 2030 already asks for better early warning. Technology, the two researchers write, "cannot make up for weak implementation" or for a failure to hold those who set the fires to account.

Why it matters

If you live downwind, the useful question this season is not whether anyone can see the fires, because they can, in detail, several times a day. Watch instead for two things: whether the replacement peat agency is actually created, and whether fire and forest data goes back to being public, because outsiders cannot check a map they are not allowed to see. Without one body that must act on a warning, each dry year starts the same way, with good pictures and slow crews.