Nearly 50,000 firefighters, six provinces, and planes trying to make rain

Indonesia has put nearly 50,000 firefighters on the ground as wildfires spread across six priority provinces, and dozens of schools stayed closed for a second day in a row as the smoke thickened. More than 100,000 hectares have burned so far this year, and official figures for January to June alone show about 110 per cent more land lost than in the same months of 2023. Chief Security Minister Djamari Chaniago said the government is on alert "because the weather conditions really make it possible for these fires to become larger."

The six provinces are Riau, Jambi and South Sumatra on Sumatra, and West, Central and South Kalimantan on Borneo. In Pontianak, the capital of West Kalimantan, Mayor Edi Rusdi Kamtono moved schools to remote learning "for as long as air quality remains poor", Al Jazeera reports. Borneo is shared with Malaysia and Brunei, so the smoke does not stop at a border. It drifts, and then it is someone else's air problem too.

A lot of the response now rests on cloud seeding. More than a dozen aircraft are dropping silver iodide and salt into clouds so that rain falls sooner and heavier than it would on its own, which officials say can add roughly 15 per cent more rainfall. The catch is that seeding needs a rain cloud to work on, so teams watch the forecast and chase the few clouds worth flying into. Another 43 helicopters are carrying water to the fire lines. The Mount Bromo fire in East Java shows how slow that work is: it burned about 900 hectares over nine days before crews cut it back to around 2 hectares.

Why it matters

If you live in Sumatra or Kalimantan, this is a health story before it is a climate one. Check the air quality reading where you are each morning, keep masks at home, and expect schools to switch to online classes at short notice. Anyone with asthma, and parents of small children, should treat a heavy smoke day the way they would treat a sick day. The cloud-seeding push is its own kind of warning: when the plan is to make rain fall, the easier options are already gone.