By admin 
These subterranean fires are a slow-motion ecological disaster. Peat, a dense accumulation of partially decomposed organic matter formed over millennia in waterlogged conditions, acts as an immense natural carbon sink. When drained and exposed to air, it becomes highly combustible. Once ignited, often by human activity such as land clearing or discarded cigarettes, the fire can propagate through this rich organic material for weeks or even months, consuming the very foundation of the ecosystem. The low-oxygen environment underground means the combustion is incomplete, releasing a cocktail of hazardous gases and particulate matter far more potent than typical forest fires.
Indeed, the environmental toll is staggering. By conservative estimates, peat fires produce three times more fine particulate matter (PM2.5) than other tropical forest fires. This microscopic airborne pollution poses severe health risks, penetrating deep into the lungs and bloodstream, exacerbating respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular problems, and even premature deaths. Beyond PM2.5, these fires unleash five times more sulfur dioxide (SO2), a precursor to acid rain and a respiratory irritant; three times more organic carbon, contributing to smog and haze; and twice as much methane (CH4) and carbon monoxide (CO). Methane is a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide over a shorter timescale, while carbon monoxide is a toxic gas that can cause asphyxiation. The sheer volume of these emissions not only creates a public health crisis but also significantly accelerates climate change, making peatland fires a critical global environmental concern.
Satellite Images Reveal Indonesia’s Fire Season’s Ominous Start
The year 2026 serves as a stark hypothetical example, illustrating the recurring crisis that grips Southeast Asia. Indonesia’s fire season was already well underway when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite captured a troubling image of the region on September 1, 2026. This visual evidence, often presented on annotated maps, showed a proliferation of red dots, each representing a "fire detection." These detections signify that the satellite sensor, aided by sophisticated algorithms, identified a specific pixel exhibiting thermal anomalies consistent with active fire. It’s crucial to understand that a single, large fire, or even a cluster of smaller, smoldering blazes, can generate multiple such detections, hinting at the true scale of the conflagration.
The persistent problem of peat fires is inextricably linked to Indonesia’s geography and land use history. The archipelago nation is home to approximately 36 percent of the world’s tropical peatlands, vast and ecologically vital ecosystems that store an immense amount of carbon. Historically, these landscapes remained saturated with water, rendering them naturally fire-resistant. However, during severe droughts, the water table drops dramatically, drying out the surface and subsurface peat layers enough to ignite. Over the past three decades, such conditions have repeatedly culminated in devastating, long-lasting fires that blanket vast areas in a choking haze for weeks, disrupting the lives of millions across Indonesia and neighboring countries. The economic costs, health impacts, and ecological damage from these events are immeasurable.
El Niño Intensifies the Dry Season and Exacerbates Fires
While wildfires are an annual occurrence in Indonesia, their intensity and destructive power escalate dramatically during specific climate phenomena. Some of the most catastrophic fire seasons in recent memory, notably in 1997 and 2015, coincided with strong El Niño events.
El Niño, the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern, is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific. This warming triggers a cascade of atmospheric changes that significantly alter global weather patterns. For Southeast Asia, and particularly Indonesia, a strong El Niño typically translates into a prolonged and more severe dry season, with reduced rainfall and increased temperatures. In August 2026, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had assessed El Niño as not only present but strengthening, setting the stage for a potentially dire fire season.
The situation becomes even more precarious when El Niño occurs concurrently with a positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). The IOD is an irregular oscillation of sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, and its positive phase is characterized by warmer waters in the western Indian Ocean and cooler waters in the eastern part, near Indonesia. This temperature gradient further suppresses rainfall over Indonesia, intensifying the drying effect initiated by El Niño. The combined force of these two powerful climate patterns creates an exceptionally arid environment, making the peatlands highly susceptible to ignition and prolonged burning.
Robert Field, a distinguished researcher at Columbia University and a leading expert in fire weather, who developed the Global Fire Weather Database (GFWED) for experimental, real-time fire weather forecasts, grimly noted the unfolding crisis in 2026. "Indonesia is only about three weeks into its fire season, but we’re seeing fire activity track sharply upward, similar to 2015," Field observed. He added, "The strong El Niño is making the dry season drier over the fire-prone parts of the country and exacerbating burning—just as we anticipated it would." Field’s GFWED, which integrates meteorological data with fuel moisture models, provides crucial insights into fire risk, allowing for proactive measures and better understanding of fire dynamics.
The comparison to the 2015 fire season is particularly alarming. That year, after more than three months of relentless burning, Indonesia’s fires released an astonishing 1.75 billion tons of greenhouse gas equivalents into the atmosphere—an amount greater than Japan’s total annual emissions. By September 2, 2026, with the fires having burned for only about a month, they had already released roughly 10 percent of the amount produced during the entire 2015 crisis. This rapid accumulation of emissions underscores the unprecedented scale and environmental impact of peat fires, especially under extreme drought conditions.
Underground Peat Fires Can Burn for Months, Defying Conventional Firefighting
The summer of 2026 also witnessed severe, widespread drought across Indonesia, mirroring the conditions of 2015. Data from the Indonesian meteorological agency revealed that approximately 90 percent of the country received little to no rainfall in early August, transforming normally waterlogged peatlands into desiccated tinderboxes.
Under typical conditions, the deep peat deposits found in regions like Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Papua are saturated with water, making it virtually impossible for fire to penetrate and move underground. However, severe drought fundamentally alters this dynamic. As the water table recedes, the exposed peat dries out, becoming highly flammable. Once a surface fire ignites, it can then descend into the dried peat layers, continuing to smolder below the surface, often undetected.
"Surface fires are certainly a concern and can be devastating, but when fires get underground, they just won’t stop," Field explained, highlighting the unique challenge of peatland fires. "They’ll keep burning, often silently and invisibly, until the heavy monsoon rains eventually arrive in October or November, or even later." This characteristic makes extinguishing them incredibly difficult, as conventional firefighting methods like aerial water bombing or ground-level hoses are ineffective against deep-seated, subterranean fires. Specialized techniques, such as injecting water directly into the peat or constructing fire breaks, are often required, but these are labor-intensive and challenging to deploy across vast, remote areas.
Indonesia relies heavily on a network of Earth-observing satellites from agencies like NASA and NOAA to monitor active fires in near-real-time. Instruments such as MODIS and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) are critical for this surveillance. The Indonesian Ministry of Forestry operates the SiPongi fire-monitoring platform, which integrates data from MODIS and VIIRS. On August 31, 2026, the SiPongi system counted 946 hotspots, providing a snapshot of the widespread burning.
The Worst Fires Can Be Hardest to See From Space
Despite the advancements in satellite technology, monitoring peat fires presents significant limitations. Instruments like MODIS and VIIRS, while powerful, can struggle to detect fires that are obscured by thick smoke plumes, hidden by extensive cloud cover, burning beneath dense forest canopies, or smoldering deep underground within peat deposits. These limitations mean that the satellite-derived hotspot counts, while indicative, often underrepresent the true scale and intensity of the crisis.
Paradoxically, when Indonesian fires become particularly intense and widespread, the very smoke they generate can block the satellites’ view, leading to a decline in detected hotspots even as the situation on the ground worsens. "The worst smoke events, paradoxically, can be the hardest to observe from space with MODIS and VIIRS," commented Mark Cochrane, an ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who has spent nearly a decade conducting field research on peat fires in Indonesia. This ‘blind spot’ in satellite monitoring complicates disaster response and accurate assessment of the environmental impact.
The modern vulnerability of Indonesia’s peatlands to fire is not a recent phenomenon but a legacy of decades of unsustainable land management practices. According to Cochrane, extensive construction of irrigation canals and the widespread drainage of peat swamps during the 1990s played a pivotal role. These activities, often undertaken for ambitious agricultural projects such as the "Mega Rice Project" aimed at creating massive rice farms, drastically lowered water tables across vast wetland areas. This drainage converted naturally waterlogged, fire-resistant peat into dry, highly combustible fuel. The subsequent expansion of oil palm plantations and other forms of plantation forestry further exacerbated the problem, as these industries often involve clearing land, which can lead to accidental or intentional ignitions.
Following the devastating fire season of 2015, there was a concerted effort by governments and various organizations to address the root causes of the problem and reverse some of the damage. Key initiatives included blocking irrigation canals to help restore natural water levels in peatlands, significantly strengthening firefighting capabilities with better equipment and training, and stepping up community-based efforts to prevent accidental human ignitions. The establishment of the Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG) in Indonesia was a crucial step, tasked with rewetting, revegetating, and revitalizing degraded peat ecosystems.
2026: A Major Test of Fire Protections and Restoration Efforts
The hypothetical 2026 fire season, intensified by a strong El Niño, would serve as a crucial "stress test" for these post-2015 measures. "This year will be a real stress test of the measures that were put in place after 2015," affirmed Shi Jun Wee, a University of Maryland graduate student. The question lingered: would the significant investments in restoration, prevention, and response prove resilient against the formidable combined forces of El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole?
Wee is part of a dedicated team collaborating with NASA and MapBiomas to develop advanced methodologies for spotting understory fires that MODIS and VIIRS might miss. Their innovative approach leverages shortwave infrared observations from the Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellites. Shortwave infrared wavelengths are particularly effective at detecting heat signatures from fires, even those smoldering beneath dense canopies or deep within peat, and can often penetrate through moderate smoke plumes, offering a more comprehensive view of the fire landscape.
As the 2026 fire season progressed, researchers like Wee would meticulously follow conditions using a suite of NASA’s powerful data visualization and information systems. These include the Worldview data browser for rapid satellite imagery, the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) for near-real-time fire detections, Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) observations for higher-resolution insights, and the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED) for quantifying the atmospheric impact of the fires. These tools are indispensable for understanding the scale, progression, and environmental consequences of the burning.
Hazardous Smoke Is Already Disrupting Daily Life Across the Region
For the millions living in Indonesia and its neighboring countries, the impacts of these severe fire seasons are immediate and profound. Indonesian officials have consistently warned that large portions of the population are exposed to hazardous levels of smoke and particulate matter. The acrid haze often extends far beyond Indonesia’s borders, engulfing cities in Malaysia, Singapore, and even parts of Thailand and the Philippines, creating a transboundary health crisis.
News reports from such events frequently describe widespread disruption: schools forced to switch to remote learning to protect children from the toxic air, national parks closing their gates, and numerous flights experiencing significant delays or cancellations due to severely reduced visibility. Beyond these immediate inconveniences, the long-term health consequences for exposed populations, particularly vulnerable groups like children and the elderly, are a grave concern, including increased rates of acute respiratory infections, asthma, and other chronic illnesses. The economic repercussions are also substantial, affecting tourism, agriculture, and overall productivity.
Mark Cochrane, reflecting on the cyclical nature of public attention to this crisis, cautioned that interest often peaks during major El Niño fire seasons and then wanes once conditions improve. "People tend to focus on these fires during an El Niño and then forget about them," Cochrane lamented. "We need sustained focus, even during the years when they aren’t as bad, to solve this." He emphasized the urgent need for consistent, long-term commitment to peatland restoration, sustainable land use practices, and robust fire prevention measures. "These fires create a tremendous amount of emissions," he concluded, underscoring that the fight against peatland fires is not merely a local environmental issue but a critical global challenge demanding enduring attention and collaborative solutions.
