Indonesia is having its worst wildfire season in a decade, with smoke spreading to neighbouring countries and the dry conditions of the ongoing super El Niño likely to make the fires harder to control, Down To Earth reported.
Nusantara Atlas, an independent platform that tracks fires in Indonesia, had recorded 1,061,746 wildfire hotspots as of 14 October 2026, already more than the 885,037 recorded in 2019, the previous worst year in its comparison. The area burned had reached 895,657 hectares by August, against 2,631,469 hectares over the whole of 2019.
Smoke carrying polluting gases and fine particles has reached residential areas in Indonesia and neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore, worsening air quality and raising public health concerns, according to a BBC report cited by Down To Earth. Local experts, non-governmental organisations and officials quoted by the BBC blamed slash-and-burn land clearing by major companies, along with the unusually dry El Niño conditions. Slash-and-burn clearing is banned in Indonesia, but enforcement has proved difficult.
Aerosol maps on the weather visualisation platform Windy showed high concentrations of airborne particles over the fire areas, with smoke drifting toward the Indian Ocean. Down To Earth wrote that it remains to be seen whether the smoke could cross the Bay of Bengal to reach India.
Fires on peat and plantation land in Indonesia tie together land use, farm expansion and climate; a dry El Niño year turns cleared land into fuel, with costs for health and for the farmers who live with the haze. The story was reported by Akshit Sangomla.
Photo: NASA Earth Observatory, Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Source: Down To Earth
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