Indonesia's Wildfire Crisis: Volunteers Risking Lives to Defuse 'Carbon Bombs'
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The volunteers risking their lives to defuse Indonesia's wildfire 'carbon bombs'
Image source: Ahmad Dhani for BBC
Image caption: Fahrin Ramadhianto has been fighting Borneo's wildfires for a month - and noticing the impacts on his body.
By Gavin Butler and Ahmad Dhani, Reporting from Banjarbaru, Kalimantan
Published 1 hour ago
The sky grows heavy in Borneo, though not with rain. The air, amber-hued and treacle-thick, is smudged under a blanket of smog that has spilled across international borders – to Singapore, Manila, Kuala Lumpur.
Down on the ground, smoke steams from the soil.
"It hits your nose straight away, your eyes burn – that's more or less what it's like," Dwi Sujatmoko says, describing the experience of breathing toxic millennia-old microparticles of carbon as he toils against a seemingly inextinguishable fire front.
The 35-year-old volunteer firefighter has spent more than a month enveloped in this haze, using hand tools, carts, and portable fire pumps to battle an inferno that has carbonised some 200,000 hectares of forest and farmland across Indonesian Borneo since early July.
Underground and out of sight, giant subterranean peat fires continue to smoulder, choking the air with poisonous fumes.
"Once a fire becomes uncontrolled, it harms many people. Not just humans, but also animals and plants," Sujatmoko says. "If underground fire spreads and can no longer be controlled, the losses are enormous."
Image source: Ahmad Dhani for BBC
Image caption: Fires have torched some 200,000 hectares across Indonesian Borneo since early July.
Indonesia is in the throes of a wildfire catastrophe. Amid a so-called "Super El Niño" that has supercharged local drought conditions, thousands of active fire hotspots are spreading and multiplying across the country, fuelling a transnational haze crisis that is the region's worst in more than a decade.
But what makes Borneo's fires particularly worrying is the fact that they are burning through one of the world's largest tropical peatland ecosystems.
This 4.5-million-hectare swathe of forest and swamp, under normal conditions, serves as a valuable reservoir for ancient carbon.
When these peatlands catch fire, they risk releasing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane into the atmosphere – a "pulse" of greenhouse gas emissions that has earned them the sobriquet of "carbon bomb".
"Peatlands are incredibly effective carbon stores because their waterlogged conditions slow decomposition, allowing carbon to accumulate underground for thousands of years," explains Dr Nisa Novita, a peatland researcher at Indonesian conservation NGO Yayasan Konservasi Alam Nusantara (YKAN).
"But this also means they can become a 'carbon bomb' when they are drained or burned, because that carbon can be rapidly released into the atmosphere."
A peatland that deep has been known to harbour more than 6,000 tonnes of carbon – roughly equivalent to the annual CO₂ emissions of 4,800 cars – per hectare. And when it burns, says Dr Nisa, that fossilised carbon can...