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Burning Weather Island

Guest WriterJuly 15, 2024July 15, 2024Cultural fireBorneo, Indonesia, Kalimantan, peat fires2 Comments

by Michael Hill
This feature originally ran in Wildfire Magazine.

The peatland ecosystems of Central Kalimantan are transitioning from wildfire resistant to wildfire prone; with the potential huge release of carbon from burning peat stocks, it’s time for local and global actions to better protect these lands and communities.

As someone who has visited and observed wildfires in Indonesia for more than 20 years, I’ve witnessed the increasing loss of forest ecosystems and I recognize the potential for constructive international assistance.

Sebangau National Park firefighters moving fire equipment on the fire ground. Photos courtesy of Sebangau National Park

In the Indonesian language, Kalimantan refers to the whole island of Borneo (the third largest in the world), while in English it describes just the 73 percent of the land mass located in Indonesia, containing about 70 percent of the island’s population.

Kalimantan covers 554,150 kilometers divided into five provinces and the non-Indonesian territories of Borneo, Brunei, and East Malaysia.

The meaning of the name Kalimantan — originally Kalamanthana — is burning weather island, referring to the very hot and humid climate.

Kalimantan is home to many cultures; the Dayak, or people of the interior, are Indigenous and have long used landscape fire in their agricultural practices to clean up land for slash-and-burn farming.

The smoke produced by burning peat is particularly hazardous. Besides its climate-warming carbon content, peat smoke contains toxins and other particulate matter, and in Indonesia, it is now being measured during times of wildfires as air pollution.

A volunteer firefighter with firefighting patrol boats on a fire in the Sebangau National Park, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. District level volunteer firefighting brigades in Central Kalimantan are locally known as Masyarakat Peduli Api, or MPA firefighters.

This system of using fire to clear farming plots in the rotating system of land use allows for conservation; preselected areas or fields are used for a predetermined number of years before they’re allowed to go back to nature to recover fertility, while another field is cleared by cutting and burning to be ready for planting until its fertile cycle is complete. Then another field is cleared, and the small scale of slash-and-burn continues as the land recovers after farming.

This system of rotating agriculture and wildfires to clear land has been culturally important. The Dayak use of fire for cleaning and clearing was extremely controlled historically, with organized groups using pre-constructed fire breaks and advance planning to consider predicted winds and fuel conditions.

The Dayak have been masters of using fire as their tool to clear their forest lands. However, cultural, modernizing, and competitive economic forces have brought changes which, during a severe dry season, can quickly transform some areas of the Indonesian part of this island into a thick smoke-filled hazard, lasting months and impacting the surrounding islands and even the cities of Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Recent changes in vegetation and culture have swung the Dayaks’ historic mastery of fire in Kalimantan out of balance. The Dayak people are no longer the only Indonesians who live in the interior of Kalimantan, where the rainforests long acted as a moist blanket to keep out fires or retard fire growth. Also, within Dayak culture, changes are taking place as the people join the wave of progress brought by globalism sweeping the world which, as a byproduct, disconnects us from the natural world and our hands-on, sustainable practices. The landscape is being modified and fire use has fallen outside of its traditional Dayak checks and balances.

While most of the fires in Kalimantan are human-caused, the fire origins are complex. Many past fires arose from the fact that land ownership claims in Kalimantan historically have been legally proven with the use of applying fire to land for clearing, thus establishing legal usage. Other blazes are ignited by accident — or by fishermen to attract more fish or drive away mosquitos — or fires are lit by hunters to attract wildlife, and myriad other reasons.

Sebangau National Park firefighter moving hose across fire ground. Photos courtesy of Sebangau National Park

But in recent years, during extra hot and dry seasons, when fires do get started in what may now be often lighter fuels, they can spread quicker and carry flames into forest areas, or even into the swamp peat forests. And once the peat layer below ground is lit, it will burn underground down to the water table and then move laterally beneath the surface, consuming important thick layers of organic decaying peat matter.

These burns can become huge subsurface peat fires with their flames not visible until they occasionally climb up to the surface to consume vegetation. But the heavy smoke from these peat fires, referred to locally as smog/haze, will have local, regional, and global impacts. The Dayak historically did not apply fire to the forest where there were peat layers beneath it, as they were burning for their agricultural fields and they knew their crops would not grow in the peat region.

Peat swamp fires on Borneo are unique for wildfires because the peat itself, created from countless generations of falling and then decaying organic forest matter, has been built up into massive locked-up carbon stores — and these peat stores burn underground as a slow smolder, releasing heat and smoke to the surface. The thick carbon stockpiles begin to release their carbon when the peat swamplands they are part of are dried by drainage canals created to open lands for timber harvest, home building, and other uses. If this dried peat is then consumed by fires, the huge pool of stored carbon that had been safely locked away will be released into the atmosphere, causing global concerns for air pollution and climate change.

The smoke produced by burning peat is particularly hazardous. Besides its climate-warming carbon content, peat smoke contains toxins and other particulate matter, and in Indonesia, it is now being measured as air pollution during times of wildfires.

Kalimantan fires became an international concern in 1997 when a massive man-made ecological disaster burned in the peat forests, and since then, because of that disaster’s compounding effects, additional new dryseason peat fires have created an accelerating cycle of fires, peat loss, and flooding.

Peat’s organic matter, lying below the surface in a swamp forest, has long functioned as a natural sponge; the small percent of its decaying matter is able to soak up as much as nine times its volume in water. This layer of peat acts as an absorber to dampen the effects of seasonal flooding river systems. However, now with large areas of peat lost to wildfire seasons in 1997, 2015 and 2019, the summer dry seasons are followed by rainy seasons and large flows of water are draining from the burned peat lands into Borneo’s river systems and to the sea, leading to much human property loss and misery along the way.

Protecting the remaining peat beneath the swamp forests has become a priority in Central Kalimantan for those understanding the issue, and over the last 20 years, people have been adapting to the situation. Groups of people in Central Kalimantan have been organizing into both volunteer fire militia and paid fire forces, ready during dry seasons to fight fire. With the help of Japanese, Indonesian, and English scientists, new tactics and techniques are explored, and in 2015, there arose an international effort to assist in fighting wildfires. Indonesian law enforcement has also been activated to target illegal burners with stiff penalties of up to 15 years in prison and 15 million Indonesian Rupiah (about $930 USD) in fines.

Internationally, an agreement among Southeast Asian nations has been developed to assist during times of high fire activity, though there are still very real needs for which international assistance would be greatly appreciated and valued globally — by reducing the peat fires and their massive carbon releases.

Indonesia is still adapting to the emerging wildfire issues in Kalimantan, and as such, has so far developed only limited capabilities, with a particular need for shared technology in fire detection and wildfire response equipment. Many other fire-prone areas of the world have developed and routinely share these types of technologies, and Indonesia should be added to this group. Indonesia has unique firefighting technology advances to share, such as locally developed fire response systems and cloud seeding.

Aircraft dropping water on vegetation has been found to have limited effectiveness on peat fires, and therefore the fires are fought from beneath the ground. The priority is to find a water source on a peat bed nearby; this water source must be safely away from the fire to prevent its burning, and it’s usually found by drilling down as if through the ice on a frozen lake.

Using an augur to bore beneath the peat to find the water table, crews will tap into the water with a firefighting water pump and install a series of pipes and hose to carry water to firefighters, who spray it where needed to cool the flames. These firefighting pumps and their draft drill holes are strategically laid out and are manned with crews across the path of wildfire or in its wake, depending on the responding agency to act as anchor points, working outward with the cooling water while supporting each other. This is hard work, Kalimantan style, but necessary.

Indonesians are also experimenting with Japanese-developed soap agents that can be injected underground into the peat to extinguish flames, and the Air Force is using weather modification by cloud seeding to create rain. It is truly a fascinating time of change and adaptation for wildfires in Kalimantan.

While these changes are internal, the funding and support for Indonesia’s efforts can come from beyond the region’s borders. Indonesia’s emerging wildfire issues are global issues, considering the potential climate impacts of the massive carbon releases from the peat.

Better protection of the peat reserves could be accomplished by a change of local land ownership laws to allow for proof of ownership to be legally established in new ways, thereby supporting long-term management, conservation, and restoration. Instead of the historic local use of fire to clean property, incentives could be created toward fire prevention. Tree planting instead of clearing could be transformed into legal proof of land ownership. Indonesia has huge stockpiles of reforestation funds at the government level, and some of these funds could be invested into bank loans to assist in these efforts and for program development (and local hiring and training for landowners).

Water-canal damming is undertaken to allow the saturation of dried-out peat soils; these efforts could be greatly assisted by the international community, and as an essential byproduct of healing these soils could begin to return more of Kalimantan’s fire-resistant blanket of forest with the added benefit of assisting in the fire protection of its peat lands.

The damage to the peat lands over the past 20-some years is immense; however, to protect the remaining peat lands and their carbon sinks would require only strategic forest replanting above the damaged areas, such as along waterways after the area’s water levels are again raised from canal damming.

Kalimantan’s El Niño dry season fires, especially in the peat swamp areas, have the potential to affect the world’s climate with their associated huge carbon releases. For this reason alone, Kalimantan and Indonesia should be offered more support internationally in their efforts to help to protect the remaining peat swamp forests.

Kalimantan may be an island that seems isolated and far away, yet when the peat fires burn they impact us all with carbon releases, whether we can see the smog or not.

Learn more about Kalimantan’s wildfires, nature, and the Dayak culture on Michael Hill’s YouTube channel, Talking Wildfires with Michael Hill.

Fires around the world “have grown weirder”

Bill GabbertFebruary 6, 2022Uncategorizedclimate, climate change, Indonesia10 Comments

Williams Fork Fire southwest of Fraser, CO — Smoke column from the Williams Fork Fire southwest of Fraser, Colorado, Aug. 15, 2020. USFS photo by Lauren Demos.

The Guardian has an excellent long-form article about wildland fires, titled ‘A deranged pyroscape’: how fires across the world have grown weirder. Author Daniel Immerwahr writes that in banishing fire from sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable. He writes about fires around the world, pyrophobia, indigenous fire, and how hundreds of thousands die each year from such smoke-related maladies as strokes, heart failure and asthma.

Toward the end of the article he writes about fires in Indonesia where forests have been drained, burned, or clear cut, then summarizes.

Here is an excerpt:

…No single one of Indonesia’s many fires in recent decades has been especially noteworthy. But altogether they’ve been cataclysmic. In 1997, a dense haze of airborne particulates from Indonesia’s fires was perceptible as far as the Philippines and Thailand. That year, on Sumatra – centre of Indonesia’s fires – a commercial plane crashed due to poor visibility and killed all 234 aboard. The next day, two ships collided off the coast of Malaysia for the same reason, and 29 crew members died.

The economist Maria Lo Bue found that Indonesians who were toddlers during the 1997 haze grew less tall, entered school six months later and completed almost a year less of education than their peers. Another economist, Seema Jayachandran, found that the fires “led to over 15,600 child, infant and fetal deaths”, hitting the poor especially hard.

Picture a dangerous fire and you’re likely to imagine a thicket of tall trees blazing in a drought-stricken climate. But a more accurate image is smoldering peat or scrub burning by a tropical logging road. The real threat isn’t catching fire, but the slow violence of breathing bad air. You’ve got a hacking cough, your father suffers a stroke and you watch your daughter – short for her age – leave school a year early.

—

Fire is not in itself a bad thing. Many landscapes, built to burn, simply couldn’t exist without regular fires, either natural or intentional. Though foresters once sought to tamp blazes out everywhere, we now recognise that as a grave mistake. A fireproof planet isn’t something we can get, or should even want.

We badly need a healthier relationship to combustion. Rather than erratic, runaway fires, we need regular, restorative ones, like we used to have. Our forebears didn’t shun flame – they were relentless fire-setters. But they adhered to two important limits. First, they fed their fires with living vegetation, which reclaims lost carbon as it regrows. Second, they were guided by long-acquired experience with fire’s complex paths and consequences.

We’ve blasted far past both of those limits. We’re now burning fossilized vegetation, which sends carbon on a one-way trip to the warming atmosphere. And we’re kindling fires that bear little resemblance to the ones we’re used to. There’s no generational wisdom telling us what to do when we drain the peatlands of Central Kalimantan or let dry fuel pile up precariously in the California countryside, all while raising the temperature to hitherto unrecorded heights.

Books about fire typically end with prescriptions: we must invest in science, reclaim lost cultural knowledge, burn intentionally, build resiliently, and power our grids renewably. All that is true, surely. But given how complex fire is, and how unprecedented nearly everything we’re doing with it is, the best advice would seem to be: slow down. We have scrambled our landscape, changed our energy diet, altered the climate and revised our relationship to flame, all in a very short time. It’s not a surprise that fire, once a useful if obstinate companion to our species, has now slipped our grasp.

The world won’t burn up, as we sometimes imagine. But the fires of tomorrow will be different from those of yesterday, and we’re racing headlong into that unsettling future, burning tankfuls of gas as we go.

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Tom.

Economic impact of Indonesia’s fires were double that of 2004 tsunami

Bill GabbertDecember 15, 2015December 23, 2015UncategorizedIndonesia1 Comment

A study by the World Bank determined that the impact of the vegetation fires this year on Indonesia’s economy was double that of the 2004 tsunami that required rebuilding many of buildings and much of the infrastructure in the province of Aceh.

Most of the fires were started intentionally, and illegally, by landowners who want to increase the value of their property before they sell it to companies who will produce palm oil or pulp. Fees from the sale of the land go to several different groups — the term “land mafia” has been used.

Below is an excerpt from an article in the Guardian:

…In a quarterly update on the Indonesian economy, the World Bank said the fires had devastated 2.6 million hectares (6.4m acres) of forest and farmland across the archipelago from June to October.

The cost to south-east Asia’s biggest economy is estimated at 221 trillion rupiah ($16.1bn), equivalent to 1.9% of predicted GDP this year, it said.

In contrast, it cost $7bn to rebuild Indonesia’s westernmost province of Aceh after it was engulfed 11 years ago by a quake-triggered tsunami, with the loss of tens of thousands of lives, the bank said.

“The economic impact of the fires has been immense,” said World Bank Indonesia country director Rodrigo Chaves.

The estimated costs are based on an analysis of the types of land burned and take into account the impact on agriculture, forestry, trade, tourism and transportation, as well as short-term effects of the haze such as school closures and on health.

More than half a million people suffered acute respiratory infections in Indonesia, while many in neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia also fell ill.

On November 2 the United States sent more than 21 metric tons of wildland firefighting equipment to Indonesia to assist the local firefighters.

After 10 weeks, Indonesia fires halted by rain

Bill GabbertNovember 16, 2015August 25, 2019UncategorizedIndonesia

After creating hellish air quality conditions for ten weeks, the wildland fires in Indonesia have been knocked down by heavy monsoon rains. Some residents said they had not seen the sun during that time while the fires burned 5.1 million acres (8,063 square miles), caused 21 deaths, sickened more than half a million people with respiratory problems, and caused $9 billion in economic losses including damaged crops and hundreds of cancelled flights.

Many of the fires are burning in peat, deep underground, and are extremely difficult to completely extinguish. One of the tactics employed is digging a massive trench around the perimeter and keeping it filled with water until the fire goes out. Obviously this is very labor intensive and costly, and demands an almost unlimited supply of water.

Typically the rains will stop after the first of the year and locals expect that by the third week of February fires will again become a problem. Some of the peat fires, after hibernating during the monsoon, will become more active, and landowners will resume clearing land by setting fires.

Earlier in November, in an effort to help mitigate the disaster, the United States contributed four technical experts and 5,000 sets of gloves, shirts, jeans, hand tools, and safety goggles. The shipment, organized by USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, was described by the U.S. Forest Service as “the largest US international fire supply support ever”.

Most of the fires are started intentionally, and illegally, by landowners who want to increase the value of their property before they sell it to companies who will produce palm oil or pulp. Fees from the sale of the land goes to several different groups — the term “land mafia” has been used.

Below is an excerpt from WorldPolicy.org:

…The worst part is that often, the burned area covers flammable peatlands with its ability to snare fire, subsequently festering underground for a long time making it impossible to be quenched.

Though this act of burning land is strictly allowed for up to 2 hectares only, landowners and farmers do not even care. In fact, together with local government and capitalist corporations, they are the ones who make profitable business over this hazardous fire game.

In Indonesia, there is something called “land economic fee.” Meaning, local farmers who sell their land to corporate plantations will get a much higher price if the land is already burned, since it’s considered “ready to be planted.” To put this in perspective, unburned land is worth $640 per hectare, while burned land is valued at $820 per hectare.

In fact, the sales fee is like a fresh pie. Landowners, land marketers, the farmers group, and workers each get their own piping hot slice. Local governments even reserve a 10 percent to 13 percent stake of the fee to compensate their given authorities. In reality, this seemingly eco-disaster is indeed a man-made fire game. Nothing can stop this deadly haze without switching off the source of flame: the land mafia practice.

More information: photo of elephants helping firefighters transport fire hose and portable pumps.

Map of fires in Indonesia

Bill GabbertNovember 5, 2015November 5, 2015UncategorizedIndonesia

Indonesia fires Nov 5, 2015 map — The red areas represent heat detected by a satellite over Indonesia on November 5, 2015. NASA.

The map shows heat from wildfires detected by the MODIS satellite over Indonesia on November 5, 2015.

Yesterday we wrote about the United States sending some fire equipment to Indonesia, where massive wildfires are burning across the 3,100-mile length of the country creating very serious air quality issues. Visibility in some cities has been reduced to about 100 feet.

United States sends firefighting equipment to Indonesia

Bill GabbertNovember 4, 2015November 4, 2015UncategorizedIndonesia2 Comments

US aid to Indonesia fires — US aid to Indonesian firefighters. USAID photo by Janice Laurente.

On November 2 more than 21 metric tons of wildland firefighting equipment arrived in Indonesia from the United States to assist firefighters who are dealing with what has been described as “almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st century”. Massive wildfires are burning across the 3,100-mile length of the country creating very serious air quality issues. Visibility in some cities has been reduced to about 100 feet. Children are being prepared to be evacuated in warships, deaths have been blamed on the smoke, and in Riau as of September 4 officials reported over 10,133 cases of respiratory infection.

Producers of palm oil in Indonesia frequently set fires to clear land, but the weather effects of El Niño have made the situation far worse than normal, with one estimate that the fires are producing more daily emissions than the entire US economy.

The contributions from the United States to help mitigate this disaster have amounted to four technical experts and 5,000 sets of gloves, shirts, jeans, hand tools, and safety goggles. The shipment, organized by USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, was described by the U.S. Forest Service as “the largest US international fire supply support ever”.

The USFS put the order together for USAID at their fire cache in Redding, California. It was then transported to Indonesia on a Korean Air aircraft.