FIRES driven partly by a strong El Nino have burned through 2.88 million hectares across Indonesia so far in 2026, a monitor analysing satellite imagery said.
The burned area figure – 18 times the size of London – has increased nearly a million hectares since deforestation monitoring site Nusantara Atlas’s last update in September.
Indonesia’s government has not provided official figures for areas burned since announcing 202,000ha had been razed by the end of July.
The burning detected in analysis through the end of October is a conservative estimate, warned Nusantara Atlas founder David Gaveau, in part because smoke has obscured satellite images.
But it already exceeds the full-year figure for 2019, previously the worst year on record in Nusantara Atlas data.
Indonesia also experienced devastating fires in 2015, but the satellite imagery used then was different, making a direct comparison difficult.
Still, the scale of destruction is clear, said Gaveau: “Basically, it’s a really bad year.” — AFP
