Indonesia’s burned area 38pc higher than 2019 as hotspots continue to rise

JAKARTA, Oct 19 —  Fires in Indonesia burned through more than 1.9 million hectares between January and the end of September this year, a monitor analysing satellite imagery said today. 

The figure, covering an area nearly 12 times larger than London, is a conservative estimate partly because haze has complicated satellite verification, said David Gaveau, founder of deforestation monitoring site Nusantara Atlas.

Indonesia’s government has not provided official figures for areas burned since announcing that 202,000 hectares had been razed by the end of July.

Gaveau said the true scale of the burning was likely to be even higher than the 1,916,588 hectares his organisation had detected so far.

“Our burned-area estimates are conservative for two reasons. First, we exclude individual burn scars smaller than 6.25 hectares… Second, we prioritise avoiding false detections,” he said.

This year, the calculations have also been affected by heavy haze, which has obscured satellite images at times.

“The total reported burned area therefore underestimates the true area burned,” he said.

Even so, Nusantara Atlas data shows that the area burned by the end of September this year was 38 per cent higher than at the same point in 2019.

The satellites used by the monitor were not available during the severe fires in 2015, so comparable data is unavailable.

But Gaveau said this year was likely to be similarly bad.

“My intuition is that it probably is as bad. If you look at the sheer number of hotspots, it’s still trending up and up,” he said. — AFP