Nearly two million hectares of forests have already burned this year in Indonesia

According to a report published on Monday, nearly two million hectares burned in Indonesia between January and the end of September. This figure, corresponding to 12 times the area of ​​London, is a conservative estimate, according to David Gaveau, founder of the deforestation monitoring site Nusantara Atlas. But it is 38% higher than that recorded over the same period in 2019.

“We have already responded to the assistance proposal... They (Malaysia) will assist us with three planes and 52 personnel,” Coordinating Minister for Political Affairs and Security Dudung Abdurachman told reporters in Jakarta. Singapore will also provide assistance, the Indonesian minister added without giving details. Malaysia had stepped up offers of help to fight fires that have sent air pollution levels soaring in its capital and other cities in the region.

These announcements come as a new firefighter death has been reported. The volunteer died in hospital from his injuries. Last Thursday, he was part of a team that was overwhelmed by flames in Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park in East Java, the park said. He is the fifth member of the team to succumb.

Indonesia has deployed 47 aircraft and 60,000 troops to fight the fires, according to the minister. But the government has rejected calls to declare a state of national disaster.

In Palangkaraya, a town in the hard-hit Central Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo, about 150 students demonstrated Monday to demand more action from the government.

The demonstrators carried a doll wrapped in a white shroud in accordance with Islamic funeral rites. “The government... has not been really effective in handling the fires,” said Naomi, among the protesters, “this deserves to be noted and recorded in history as a serious violation of human rights.”

The majority of the devastation has occurred since the drought set in in June, aggravated by a strong El Niño episode, specifies David Gaveau. He said the true scale of the fires is probably much higher than the 1,916,588 hectares burned that his organization has estimated so far. Indeed “we exclude fire scars of less than 6.25 hectares”, “we choose to prioritize avoiding false detections”, and this year, thick smoke has sometimes obscured satellite images.

The government is still calculating the total area burned, Forestry Ministry spokesman Ristianto Pribadi told AFP. At the end of July he spoke of 202,000 hectares devastated.

Fires rage in Indonesia every dry season, but this year they were particularly violent. The pollution they caused affected the health of hundreds of thousands of people in the country. The fumes led to the closure of schools in Malaysia and East Timor, even reaching the Philippines.

According to the National Environment Agency of Singapore (NEA), the number of consecutive days where air quality reached "unhealthy" levels in 2026 has exceeded that of 2015, the year of the worst air pollution linked to fire smoke in the region.

As of Monday, there were 15 days classified at “unhealthy” levels, according to the local PSI air quality index, compared to eight at the height of the 2015 crisis, NEA deputy director Jason Evan Tan told AFP.

Singapore considers air quality "unhealthy" if the local PSI exceeds 100 at any time of the day. A separate analysis by AFP data journalists confirmed that Monday was the 15th day in a row that the PSI average across Singapore had exceeded 100 each day, although the levels were lower than the previous week.