Severe drought across Indonesia’s peatlands caused an outbreak of wildfires encroaching on the site of the country’s new capital city on the island of Borneo, the emissions of which surged to global highs and triggered a widespread spike in respiratory infections.

Over 36% of the world’s tropical peatlands are contained within Indonesia’s borders, and the country’s ongoing drought has made the normally wet landscapes dry enough to ignite, according to NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Droughts have repeatedly produced long-lasting fires that blanket large areas in smoke over the past three decades. The ongoing “super El Niño” has made conditions this year even worse.

“Wildfires occur in Indonesia every year, but some of the most destructive seasons in recent decades came during El Niño, particularly in 1997 and 2015,” NASA’s Earth Observatory said in a recent press release. “The strong El Niño is making the dry season drier over the fire-prone parts of the country and exacerbating burning — just as we anticipated it would.”

Emissions from Indonesia’s wildfires reached 19.7 million metric tons between Sept. 1 and 7, surpassing Russia as the top fire emissions-producing country in the world, according to the European Union’s Fire Emissions Watch portal. Indonesia’s fire emissions made up more than a third of the global total during that time.

The ongoing emissions have also caused widespread impacts on public health. Indonesia’s Health Ministry recorded more than 50,000 associated respiratory infections, including over 12,000 among children under the age of five, between July and August. Schools across the country have also shut down due to the lingering smoke.

“People tend to focus on these fires during an El Niño and then forget about them,” Mark Cochrane, an ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who has conducted field research on peat fires in Indonesia for nearly a decade, said in a NASA press release. “We need sustained focus, even during the years when they aren’t as bad, to solve this.”