Why Have Indonesia’s Fires Gotten So Bad?

Filed 1h ago · Via Foreign Policy · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Jason Krüger for Wikimedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Wildfires across Indonesian rainforest and peatland have burned nearly 900,000 hectares from January through August, already surpassing 2019's record pace, with smoke drifting as far as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Manila. Fire hotspots track closely with plantation density, as logging debris, drained peatland, and land-clearing fires routinely spiral out of control during dry season.

This year's El Niño has made the dry season longer and hotter, a factor research links directly to spikes in fire activity. Compounding the problem, Indonesia's disaster management agency saw its budget slashed from nearly 5 trillion rupiah in 2024 to about 491 billion rupiah this year, part of broader cuts redirected toward social welfare programs, leaving some firefighting teams contending with water shortages.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

You can cut a disaster agency's budget by ninety percent and call it fiscal discipline, right up until the disaster shows up on schedule anyway. The fires did not get the budget memo, and neither did the smoke drifting into three other countries' lungs. Somebody always finds money for new land to clear; funding the people who put the fires out is apparently a tougher sell.

Source: Read the original at Foreign Policy → Scored: Relent · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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