Indonesia’s Palm Oil Fires Are Emitting More Greenhouse Gases Every Day Than the Entire US
26th October 2015
It happens every year, but this year is shaping up as one of the worst ever. During Indonesia’s dry season, certain people—rarely identified, much less punished—set illegal fires to make land suitable for the palm oil and paper-and-pulp industries. Those fires generate huge amounts of smoke, and the toxic haze often reaches neighboring countries, including Singapore and Malaysia. But this year the El Niño weather phenomenon has created extremely dry conditions, leading to an unusually intense, long-lasting “smoke-out” for the region, affecting everything from travel to sporting events to respiratory health.
So far this year, Indonesia’s fires have produced more pollution than Germany or Japan does in a year. On 26 days from the period of Sept. 1 to Oct. 14, their daily emissions surpassed those of the entire US (the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China), according to researchers led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam. They calculated that the 100,000-plus fires in Indonesia detected so far this year (as of Oct. 21) have emitted about 1.4 billion metric tons (1.5 billion tons) of carbon dioxide equivalents. That puts the country on track for its worst fire year since 1997. On Oct. 14 alone there were more than 4,700 fire alerts—that’s more than on any single day in the past two years.