forestfire

JAKARTA — 2023 saw the worst fire season in Indonesia since 2019, with an area the size of Qatar going up in flames, according to official government data. A total of 1.16 million hectares (2.87 million acres) of land and forest were burned last year, with an intense El Niño weather pattern a major factor. […]

JAKARTA — A diplomatic spat has once again flared up between Southeast Asian neighbors Indonesia and Malaysia, sparked by smoke from forest fires in the former that have reportedly crossed over into the latter. Air quality in parts of Malaysia have worsened in recent days, with the national environmental department recording unhealthy air quality in […]

JAKARTA — Swaths of tropical peatland that were supposed to have been restored and protected from burning are among the fire-hit areas in Indonesia’s ongoing dry season, raising questions about the government’s claims of success in peat restoration. The Ministry of Environment and Forestry said more than 300 companies had restored some 3.7 million hectares […]

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s land and forest fires burned a greater area this year than in 2020, with most of the fires occurring in West Nusa Tenggara and East Nusa Tenggara, two provinces that were until recently not major sites of burning. As of the end of November, fires had burned 353,222 hectares (872,831 acres) of […]

In recent weeks, nine major fires have ignited in the Brazilian Amazon, heralding the start of another fire season which, after a particularly dry year, experts say could be a bad one. “The rainy season is already finished and it was a bad [dry] rainy season,” Marcelo Seluchi, a meteorologist in Brazil’s national space research […]