POLICY
JAKARTA (FORESTHINTS.NEWS) - As wildfires continue to ravage Canada to a degree never seen before, Indonesia provides a contrasting outlook as indicated by data up until early August this year.
Since March 2023, Canada has been grappling with an unprecedented series of wildfires, intensifying significantly in June. This wildfire season has surpassed all previous records in Canadian and North American history.
The Canadian wildfires have led to a vast expanse of burned area, surpassing 13 million hectares as reported by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC). This exceeds the land area of the island of Java.
The fires have also generated suffocating transboundary haze, extending to the US and spanning across the Atlantic to Europe.
The chart presented below, taken from the CIFFC, provides a time-series of the total area burned in Canada per year (as of Aug 7 for 2023).
Based on data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring System (CAMS), cumulative carbon emissions resulting from wildfires across Canada amounted to 290 megatonnes between January 1 and July 31.
This figure already exceeds the previous annual record by more than double and accounts for over 25% of the global total carbon emissions for 2023 to date.
Stark contrast
Meanwhile, the management of Indonesia's forest and land fires has recently demonstrated notable progress, despite the looming threat of El Nino. As of early August 2023, Indonesia had reported no significant fires capable of causing haze in different regions, including those with the potential for transboundary haze.
In fact, Indonesia's forest and land fires had affected only around 50 thousand hectares of forest by mid-year according to satellite images and ground-based evidence. This impressively low figure stands in stark contrast to the scale of the Canadian wildfires.
It is hoped that the positive forest and land fire trend in Indonesia up to early August will continue, especially through August and September during which the BMKG expects El Nino to peak in the country.
Daily update reports on forest and land fire management provided by the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry indicate that intensive fire-prevention efforts on the ground are ongoing.
These efforts encompass extinguishing fires in specific locations, maintaining vigilance in high-risk areas, and implementing additional measures like cloud-seeding aimed at weather modification.
If the present trend is maintained, Indonesia will record a fourth consecutive year of relatively low areas of land burned by forest and land fires.
Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya has, thus far this year, successfully upheld the commitment she made last year, as reported by FORESTHINTS.NEWS in late October.
“We are aiming to prolong the success we have achieved from 2020 to 2022. As such, the threat of El Nino must be addressed by mobilizing all of our resources throughout 2023 to make absolutely sure that there will be no substantial haze-causing fires,” the Minister urged at the time.
Consistent with her earlier statement, at the start of August, Minister Nurbaya expressed her optimism, based on the data trend from January to early August, that there would be no significant haze-causing fires this year.
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POLICY
JAKARTA (FORESTHINTS.NEWS) - As wildfires continue to ravage Canada to a degree never seen before, Indonesia provides a contrasting outlook as indicated by data up until early August this year.
Since March 2023, Canada has been grappling with an unprecedented series of wildfires, intensifying significantly in June. This wildfire season has surpassed all previous records in Canadian and North American history.
The Canadian wildfires have led to a vast expanse of burned area, surpassing 13 million hectares as reported by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC). This exceeds the land area of the island of Java.
The fires have also generated suffocating transboundary haze, extending to the US and spanning across the Atlantic to Europe.
The chart presented below, taken from the CIFFC, provides a time-series of the total area burned in Canada per year (as of Aug 7 for 2023).
Based on data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring System (CAMS), cumulative carbon emissions resulting from wildfires across Canada amounted to 290 megatonnes between January 1 and July 31.
This figure already exceeds the previous annual record by more than double and accounts for over 25% of the global total carbon emissions for 2023 to date.
Stark contrast
Meanwhile, the management of Indonesia's forest and land fires has recently demonstrated notable progress, despite the looming threat of El Nino. As of early August 2023, Indonesia had reported no significant fires capable of causing haze in different regions, including those with the potential for transboundary haze.
In fact, Indonesia's forest and land fires had affected only around 50 thousand hectares of forest by mid-year according to satellite images and ground-based evidence. This impressively low figure stands in stark contrast to the scale of the Canadian wildfires.
It is hoped that the positive forest and land fire trend in Indonesia up to early August will continue, especially through August and September during which the BMKG expects El Nino to peak in the country.
Daily update reports on forest and land fire management provided by the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry indicate that intensive fire-prevention efforts on the ground are ongoing.
These efforts encompass extinguishing fires in specific locations, maintaining vigilance in high-risk areas, and implementing additional measures like cloud-seeding aimed at weather modification.
If the present trend is maintained, Indonesia will record a fourth consecutive year of relatively low areas of land burned by forest and land fires.
Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya has, thus far this year, successfully upheld the commitment she made last year, as reported by FORESTHINTS.NEWS in late October.
“We are aiming to prolong the success we have achieved from 2020 to 2022. As such, the threat of El Nino must be addressed by mobilizing all of our resources throughout 2023 to make absolutely sure that there will be no substantial haze-causing fires,” the Minister urged at the time.
Consistent with her earlier statement, at the start of August, Minister Nurbaya expressed her optimism, based on the data trend from January to early August, that there would be no significant haze-causing fires this year.
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