Indonesia was reduced to ashes: More than 1.9 million hectares were affected

David Gaveau, founder of the Nusantara Atlas site, which tracks deforestation, said this figure, about 12 times the size of London, was a conservative estimate and one of the reasons was that the smoke made satellite verification difficult.

Fires that broke out in Indonesia between January and the end of September this year burned more than 1.9 million hectares of land, a monitoring agency that examined satellite images said on Monday.

Gaveau said the true size of the fire is likely to be even larger than the 1,916,588 hectares his agency has identified so far.

38 PERCENT MORE SPACE

However, Nusantara Atlas data shows that the area burned by the end of September this year was 38 percent more than in the same period in 2019.

The Indonesian government announced that 202 thousand hectares had been burned by the end of July.