The Indonesians facing El Nino’s fires have lessons to teach us (commentary)

Writing in the first person, ecologist Akane Nishimura recounts helping fight Indonesian forest fires by hand in 2006 and returning two decades later to find a 'Super El Niño' driving what may be record-breaking wildfires, with at least 1.5 million acres burned in Indonesia by mid-year and reports suggesting the toll has topped 2 million acres. She now works with the Governors' Climate and Forests Task Force, a network of subnational governments founded in 2008 that recently held a technical exchange in Indonesia, relocated at the last minute from West Kalimantan to Bogor because of the fires themselves.

The piece is a reflection on resilience among the Indonesians she has worked alongside, rather than a report with new findings, and it closes on the author's own insistence on staying hopeful amid worsening fire seasons and rising global temperatures.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.