Satellite data reveals Indonesian forest fires have burned nearly two million hectares, as officials reject external aid despite regional haze concerns.
JAKARTA: Fires in Indonesia that have caused a regional haze crisis burned through over 1.9 million hectares between January and the end of September this year, a monitor analysing satellite imagery said on Monday.
The new figures came as Indonesian officials rebuffed calls to declare the fires a national disaster and said the country was “still capable of handling the situation ourselves” after neighbouring Malaysia again offered assistance.
New figures from deforestation monitoring site Nusantara Atlas showed an area nearly 12 times larger than London has burned this year in Indonesia, the bulk of it as drought took hold from June, exacerbated by a strong El Nino cycle.
Indonesia’s government has not provided official figures for areas burned since announcing 202,000 hectares had been razed by the end of July.
Nusantara Atlas founder David Gaveau said the true scale of the burning was likely to be even higher than the 1,916,588 hectares his organisation has detected so far.
“Our burned-area estimates are conservative for two reasons. First, we exclude individual burn scars smaller than 6.25 hectares… Second, we prioritise avoiding false detections,” he said.
This year, the calculation has also been impacted by heavy haze, which has obscured satellite images at times.
“The total reported burned area therefore underestimates the true area burned,” he said.
Even so, Nusantara Atlas data shows the area burned by the end of September this year was 38 percent higher than the same point in 2019.
The satellites the monitor uses were not available during severe fires in 2015, so comparable data is not available.
But Gaveau said it was likely this year would be similarly bad.
“My intuition is that it probably is as bad. If you look at the sheer number of hotspots, it’s still trending up and up,” he said.
Indonesia’s forestry ministry did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment on the figures.
‘We are still capable’
Indonesia experiences fires every dry season, but this year’s blazes have been particularly severe, sickening hundreds of thousands of people locally and spiking air pollution in neighbouring countries.
The haze has prompted school closures in Malaysia and East Timor, with haze drifting into Singapore and as far afield as the Philippines.
Singapore’s National Environment Agency (NEA) confirmed Monday that the number of consecutive days in which air quality dipped into “unhealthy” levels has surpassed that of 2015, when the region experienced its worst haze crisis.
By Monday, there had been 15 consecutive days classed as “unhealthy” based on the local PSI air quality measuring system, exceeding the eight measured in 2015, NEA deputy director Jason Evan Tan told AFP.
Singapore classes a day as “unhealthy” if the local PSI measure tips over 100 at any point during the day.
A separate analysis by AFP data journalists showed Monday was the 15th consecutive day on which the average PSI across Singapore hit over 100 at any hour of the day, though overall haze levels were lower than last week.
Singapore sent warnings to three more companies on Monday, urging them to take action against the fires, the NEA said.
It followed notices sent to seven other Indonesian companies on Friday, telling them to deploy fire-fighting teams, stop burning or starting new fires, and submit their action plans to the NEA.
“Since then, there are indications that smoke from fires in Kalimantan on lands held via concessions under three additional companies in Indonesia could have moved to Singapore,” the NEA said in a statement.
Indonesia insisted Monday it did not need foreign help fighting the blazes.
“It is not a question of whether assistance is available,” said Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs, Dudung Abdurachman
“For the time being, however, we are still capable of handling the situation ourselves.”