Thousands of arson fires are devastating Indonesia. The air is unbreathable and the sky is red: “Like on Mars.” Unicef: 10 million children at risk.
The sky above the province of Jambi, on the eastern coast of the island of Sumatra, in Indonesia, is red. And has been for days. "It feels like being on Mars", say local residents. Everything is enveloped in thick smoke and fine particulate matter released by the enormous fires that have been devastating the area for weeks.
Not since 2015 has Indonesia been forced to confront an emergency of this scale. From January to the present day, the blazes have multiplied and destroyed 380,000 hectares of forest. The consequences have also been enormous from a public health standpoint, both for the population and for animals.
The phenomenon of fires is recurrent in the region and continually causes tensions with Malaysia and Singapore, which bear the consequences of the fires in Sumatra and in Borneo. On Thursday 19 September, the closure of more than two thousand Malaysian schools was ordered to protect public health, while in the Asian city-state skyscrapers are invisible: shrouded for days in a cloud of smoke.
The fires are caused, as is often the case, by human activity — and in particular the overexploitation of forests driven by palm oil production. To grasp the scale of the phenomenon, consider that since 1950 Borneo — a territory divided between Indonesia, Malaysia and the Sultanate of Brunei — has lost more than half of its primary forest.
Farmers and landowners use fire as an unpunished and cheap means of clearing the land they intend to cultivate. This is illegal in Indonesia, but is often tolerated. This year, however, the drought that has struck the region has enormously worsened the situation. As a result, despite the efforts of numerous teams of firefighters (Jakarta has deployed 9,000), volunteers and environmentalists, containing the blazes has proved particularly difficult.
So much so that on 17 September, during a visit to the devastated areas, Indonesian president Joko Widodo was also compelled to admit: "We have been negligent. We had the means to prevent the fires, but we did not use them effectively."
The outcome is devastating. The toxic fumes are causing serious respiratory problems for the population, with a surge in respiratory conditions. In some provinces people can only go outside wearing masks. According to Unicef, the fires are endangering the lives of nearly 10 million children.
