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Preventing recurrence of forest, land fires in the new era of 'global boiling'
The hotter temperatures and prolonged drought could still dry out vegetation, providing highly combustible fuel for fires, allowing them to spread faster and further.
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Inferno: A firefighter battles a forest fire in Pekanbaru, Riau on Sept. 16, 2019. Indonesia is on alert for more forest and land fires partly as a result of the searing dry season. (AFP/Wahyudi)
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housands of people fled disastrous wildfires on the island of Rhodes in Greece recently. A few weeks earlier, Canadian cross-border haze created doomsday-like scenes in New York. The question amid the forecast of an extreme El Niño within the next few weeks in Indonesia is how we prevent recurring forest and land fires despite the reported hottest days in history.
The era of global warming has ended and “the era of global boiling has arrived”, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has said after scientists confirmed July was on track to be the world’s hottest month on record (The Guardian, July 27, 2023). It is a record that will be broken again and again.
In July, the average global temperature reached just over 17 degrees Celsius. This is already over 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial level, which the world has committed to prevent. The UN World Meteorological Organization stressed that this would not mark a permanent breach of the 1.5-degree limit set out in the Paris Agreement, which refers to long-term warming (The Jakarta Post, July 29, 2023).
In Indonesia, the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) forecast of a hotter El Niño in the second half of this year has raised the fear of a recurrence of the 2015 forest and land fire disaster that destroyed an estimated 2.6 million hectares of forests in Sumatra and Kalimantan.
The World Bank estimates that the 2015 fires crisis cost Indonesia US$16 billion in losses to forestry, agriculture, tourism and other industries. The haze caused respiratory and other illnesses in hundreds of thousands of people across the region and, according to one study, likely led to over 100,000 premature deaths.
Although meteorologists have said this year’s El Niño will not be as severe as the one in 2015, the hotter temperatures and prolonged drought could still dry out vegetation, providing highly combustible fuel for fires, allowing them to spread faster and further.
Hence, the specter of the 2015 fire disaster should alert the central government, local administrations, big plantation companies and the local community to a steely determination to cooperate in fire prevention, detection and mitigation. During that time, land fires extensively occurred in palm oil-producing regions leading to allegations against palm oil companies as the chief culprits of forest and land fires.
