Some 175,000 people in Indonesia have suffered from respiratory illness since August, its health ministry said, as it continues to battle wildfires that have raged for weeks. More than 40,000 cases – which range from coughs to bronchitis and more serious conditions like pneumonia – involve toddlers. Forest fires have blanketed parts of the country as well as neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore in toxic smog, pushing air quality indices into “unhealthy” territory. Indonesia has deployed more than 54,000 officials and dozens of jets to the islands of Borneo and Sumatra for water bombing, but the vast territory and challenging peatland conditions make it hard to put out the fires, authorities say.
“From the air to the ground, all forces continue to move,” Indonesia’s Cabinet Secretary Teddy Indra Wijaya said on Monday. “Everything is being done to extinguish the fires, reduce the impact of the smoke, and, most importantly, protect the public from the threat of forest and land fires.” Indonesia regularly battles wildfires during its annual dry season, which usually runs from July through October. This year, however, the fires and haze have been turbocharged by a so-called “Godzilla” El Nino, which has fuelled extremely dry conditions. The independent forest monitoring platform Nusantara Atlas has detected around 734,000 hotspots across the country as of Wednesday – a figure that is more than 30% higher than that of 2019, one of Indonesia’s worst wildfire seasons.
Since January, at least 895,657 hectares of land – nearly six times the size of Greater London – have been burned. The wildfires have led to school closures and a surge in hospital admissions across Indonesia. The number of people suffering wildfire-related respiratory illnesses had more than doubled to 113,336 by 9 September, up from 50,891 on 1 September, according to figures from the health ministry. The toxic smog has also taken a toll on wildlife, including critically endangered orangutans.
Late last month, an Indonesia-based wildlife foundation shared footage showing an orangutan writhing on the ground on a palm oil plantation in West Kalimantan, one of Indonesia’s hardest-hit provinces. The great ape, which was discovered by a farmer, was rescued and given emergency treatment for hypoxia, but later died. Indigenous and civil society groups in West Kalimantan filed a class action suit last week against the central government and local administrations, accusing them of deliberate negligence for failing to properly tackle the wildfires scorching the province. “This is a disaster that occurs every year.
This recurring pattern proves our view that the defendants knew about the potential haze disaster and the risks of disaster from forest and land fires,” the group’s lawyer Glorio Sanen said in a statement at the time. Indonesia has carried out several rounds of cloud-seeding operations in recent weeks, some conducted together with members of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces who arrived in Borneo earlier this month to help with firefighting efforts. Cloud seeding involves manipulating existing clouds, such as by dropping salt crystals or silver iodide into them, to help produce more rain. Meteorologists, however, are divided over the effectiveness of the practice.
In the Malaysian state of Sarawak, one of the worst-affected areas outside Indonesia, authorities launched a five-day cloud-seeding operation earlier this month. Apart from tackling the ongoing haze, this exercise was aimed at boosting declining water levels at several hydropower dams ahead of a severe dry spell forecast for October. “October might be hotter and drier,” Sarawak’s Deputy Premier Douglas Uggah Embas told reporters. “We want to increase the water levels as much as possible while we still can.” The haze has reached as far as parts of the Philippines, where local officials have urged residents to stay indoors as much as possible, and Singapore, where authorities have begun issuing daily haze advisories.
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