El Niño consequences | Extreme forest fire season is overwhelming helpers in Indonesia

Fire departments and volunteers are only able to get the fires under control locally. Photo: AFP/HERIBERTUS Sometimes there are up to three alarms in one day, reports Rahmat Hadi Wijaya. The 48-year-old firefighter on Indonesia's largest island of Sumatra told reporters from the news portal Channel News Asia that he and his colleagues sometimes had to decide whether to complete the extinguishing work that had begun in one place or to quickly rush to a new location because the effects there could be even worse.

The Southeast Asian island state has 2,000 firefighters like Rahmat regularly deployed to fight forest and bush fires. Their exhaustion, as other snapshots also show, is noticeable - for weeks they have been doing more than their usual shifts, toiling from early in the morning until shortly before midnight with only a few hours of sleep. Because their work is no longer sufficient given the increasing number of fires, thousands upon thousands of police officers and soldiers have now been deployed to provide support; we are talking about around 18,000 such additional forces. There are also around 10,000 volunteers. In the first half of the year, 200,000 hectares of land burned in Indonesia.

It was announced early on that things would be significantly worse in 2026 than in previous years. Although there are fires in the kingdom of 17,000 islands every year at this time, this time the particularly strong El Niño, an irregularly recurring climatic phenomenon, has caused the landscape to dry out more than usual. As a result, it's not just the forests and peat bogs that are burning like tinder. Firefighters are increasingly having to contend with water shortages when extinguishing fires. A river may be nearby, but it's currently more of a muddy trickle.

Deforestation is particularly advanced in Sumatra - the area has shrunk to just 30 percent.

While the number and intensity of the fires are now at the level of the disaster year 2015, the neighboring countries are complaining about the worst smog crisis since 2019. Unfavorable southerly winds are driving the clouds of smoke into Malaysia and the city state of Singapore, where the measured values ​​for the concentration of fine dust in the air have been above the official limits for a classification as "unhealthy" for some time. Even in Hat Yai, the largest city in southern Thailand, the air is dull-gray due to smoke-related smog. In Indonesia itself, the number of those affected with respiratory diseases rose to almost 175,000, including 40,000 small children. This was announced by a representative of the Ministry of Health. Two weeks earlier, the authorities had registered 113,000 cases.

Some fires are caused simply by carelessness. But the many arsons, especially new palm oil plantations, threaten the remains of unique, species-rich primary rainforests and thus the habitat of numerous rare species. There are only 2,000 to 3,000 Sumatran elephants left. Just recently a mother cow and her calf were found dead.

Deforestation is particularly advanced in Sumatra - the area has shrunk to just 30 percent. The environmental foundation WWF and partners achieved a remarkable success by placing the Tesso Nilo forest area under protection and declaring it a national park. The original 38,000 hectares, home to the Sumatran tiger, rhinos and orangutans, were expanded by 83,000 hectares in 2009. However, slash-and-burn agriculture continues to eat away at even such protected areas. The sixth largest island in the world is already largely bare - primarily the work of the last 30 years.

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