Indonesia Has Improved, But the Haze Is Back
Firefighters in South Kalimantan are once again water-bombing fires from helicopters while ground volunteers work with garden hoses and, in at least one case, a motorcycle helmet for protection. The scenes are familiar, yet the numbers tell a more complicated story than simple repetition of the past.
By late August 2026, roughly 900,000 hectares had burned across Indonesia, according to independent forest monitoring platform Nusantara Atlas. That figure is serious, but it sits well below the 2.6 million hectares that burned in 2015 and the 1.65 million hectares lost in 2019. Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni warned on September 16 that the fire season could extend into early November, with a later-than-expected rainy season.
The Straits Times, which first reported these details, found that the gap between 2015 and 2026 reflects a decade of genuine, if incomplete, reform.
Why Burning Still Makes Financial Sense
The core problem has not changed: fire is cheap. A village head in South Kalimantan's Syamsudin Noor told The Straits Times that hiring an excavator runs between 1.25 million and 1.5 million rupiah per day, clearing roughly one hectare. A 2021 World Bank study found that small-scale operators spent about 3.5 million rupiah per hectare clearing land with fire, compared with 7.7 million rupiah using mechanical methods. Until that cost gap closes, the incentive to burn persists.
Authorities also suspect deliberate fire-setting for profit. The National Disaster Management Agency chief said on September 7 that a suspect in Jambi had allegedly been paid 500,000 rupiah to ignite forest land, and officials in West Kalimantan found recently burned land already being prepared for oil palm planting.
President Prabowo Subianto has called for licence revocations and criminal investigations, and has suggested classifying deliberate burning as ecological terrorism. Yet the Environment and Forestry Ministry's own figures show only three licences were revoked over fires between 2015 and 2017, all in 2015.
Prevention Infrastructure Has Weakened
After 2015, Indonesia created the Peatland Restoration Agency, later expanded into the Peatland and Mangrove Restoration Agency, which mapped vulnerable peatlands, installed hundreds of monitoring stations across seven provinces, and coordinated early detection across ministries and local governments. That agency's mandate ended in 2024.
Former agency head Nazir Foead told The Straits Times he did not know how much of that coordination infrastructure remained functional. Environmental group Pantau Gambut reported in July that 70 percent of canal blocks it observed were damaged and 52 percent of intervention sites still had groundwater below the safe threshold.
Budget cuts compound the problem. The disaster-resilience programme received 250 billion rupiah in the 2026 state budget, down from a 1.77 trillion rupiah outlook for the same programme in 2025.
The human cost is already visible. Health Ministry data showed 113,336 wildfire-related respiratory infections across seven provinces as of September 9, more than double the figure recorded just eight days earlier. An estimated 12.5 million people had been exposed to haze. Think-tank CELIOS estimated economic and health losses between January and August at between 39.29 trillion and 123.1 trillion rupiah.
Nazir's prescription is straightforward: identify what failed this year, assign clear leadership over dry-season preparation, and give that person enough authority to coordinate ministries and regional governors. "Someone has to lead from the palace," he said.
Why It Matters for Hosts
Independent accommodation operators across Kalimantan, Sumatra, and other fire-prone islands face a recurring seasonal risk to bookings, air quality, and guest safety. The 2026 season is a reminder to build haze contingency language into cancellation policies before each dry season, monitor air-quality indices actively from June onward, and communicate proactively with guests about conditions. Hosts in areas with idle neighboring land should also consider engaging local village councils, since community cultivation of vacant plots has demonstrably reduced fire spread in affected villages.
Details in this post were first reported by The Straits Times correspondents Arlina Arshad and Wahyudi Soeriaatmadja. This analysis is published by the Qontaktly travel blog.
First reported by straitstimes.com.