This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Fires in Indonesia that have caused a regional haze crisis burned through over 1.9 million hectares (4.7 million acres) between January and the end of September this year, a monitor analyzing satellite imagery said on Monday. The new figures came as Indonesian officials rebuffed calls to declare the fires a national disaster and said the country was "still capable of handling the situation ourselves" after neighboring Malaysia again offered assistance.
New figures from deforestation monitoring site Nusantara Atlas showed an area nearly 12 times larger than London has burned this year in Indonesia, the bulk of it as drought took hold from June, exacerbated by a strong El Niño cycle. Indonesia's government has not provided official figures for areas burned since announcing 202,000 hectares (499,000 acres) had been razed by the end of July. Nusantara Atlas founder David Gaveau said the true scale of the burning was likely to be even higher than the 1,916,588 hectares (4.74 million acres) his organization has detected so far.
"Our burned-area estimates are conservative for two reasons. First, we exclude individual burn scars smaller than 6.25 hectares (15.4 acres)... Second, we prioritize avoiding false detections," he said.
This year, the calculation has also been impacted 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 the area burned by the end of September this year was 38% higher than at the same point in 2019.
The satellites the monitor uses were not available during severe fires in 2015, so comparable data is not available. But Gaveau said it was likely this year would be similarly bad. "My intuition is that it probably is as bad.
If you look at the sheer number of hot spots, it's still trending up and up," he said. Indonesia's forestry ministry did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment on the figures. Indonesia experiences fires every dry season, but this year's blazes have been particularly severe, sickening hundreds of thousands of people locally and spiking air pollution in neighboring countries.
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