Climate change and El Niño drove Indonesia's worst fires in a decade, study finds
Scientists say global heating and El Niño fuelled blazes that have burned almost 3m hectares and sent toxic smoke across South-East Asia.
An international team of scientists, including a Melbourne University meteorologist, has found that global heating and El Niño together drove Indonesia's fiercest fires in at least a decade, The Guardian reported.
The World Weather Attribution analysis covered Java, Kalimantan and Sumatra during the peak fire season from August to October. It found global heating, driven mainly by the burning of oil, gas and coal, raised temperatures by 1.6C over those three months and dried out land and vegetation. El Niño, which The Guardian said is on course to break all records, added another 0.3C and cut rainfall by about 50 per cent.
The researchers found climate change made the hot, dry conditions three times more likely and El Niño made them five times more likely. "El Niño turned off the taps, but fossil fuel emissions turned up the heat," said Professor Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
Land use also contributed. Decades of logging, agroforestry expansion and the draining of peatlands left the country primed to burn. Pramudhian Firdaus, a meteorologist at Melbourne University who also works with the Indonesian meteorological service, said drainage and deforestation over the past 30 years had left the country "extremely vulnerable to ignition".
The Guardian reported that almost 3m hectares had burned this year. It said the latest local reports put the figure at 2.88m hectares. If that is confirmed, it would pass the record for this century, set in 2015, when 2.6m hectares burned and produced 333m tonnes of carbon emissions. The Japan Times called it Indonesia's worst fire season in years.
Indonesia's health ministry has recorded at least 400,000 respiratory infections linked to the smoke, including 180,000 among children. The Guardian reported the smog had reached Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. The Japan Times said it had cloaked local towns as well as neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia.
Maja Vahlberg, a technical adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said children, older adults and people with pre-existing conditions were hit hardest by the smoke. She said El Niño conditions were "highly predictable", which gave governments a chance to act early to prevent damage on this scale in future years.
In Jakarta, protesters have called on the government to declare the fires a national emergency.
The fires are still burning. Indonesia's Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) says El Niño has pushed back the rainy season by 20 to 30 days.
Sources: The Guardian, ‘El Niño turned off the taps’: factors behind Indonesia’s wildfires revealed; The Japan Times, El Nino, climate change supercharged Indonesia fires, study says.
