In May of this year, New York extended its ban on public smoking to include outdoor spaces. How ironic that every year millions of Indonesians are forced to breathe air thick with the smoke from fires set to clear peatland for plantations. The current victims are people living along the west coast of Aceh, from Aceh Jaya to Aceh Barat Daya districts, where numerous fires have been raging on peatland during the last week; and not only on land being cleared for planting but also spreading onto existing plantations.

This is in spite of government regulations forbidding the use of fire for land clearing. In short: burning land is illegal! Yet fires are even raging in areas that have been designated as areas of national importance for environmental protection, such as the Tripa peatland that lies in the Leuser ecosystem. Further up the coast, areas are also burning that have been designated for protection according to the recent Presidential Instruction No. 10/2011: the so-called moratorium ordering the suspension of issuing new licenses for the conversion of primary forests and peatland.

These days, it is relatively easy to detect and document serious fires. Since late 2000, the US Terra and Aqua satellites carrying the MODIS fire detection sensor, have been detecting and publishing precise coordinates of fires all over the world. These data are freely available to anyone interested and can be easily downloaded from the Internet.

Between late 2000 and June 21, 2011, a total of more than 21,600 fires have been recorded in Aceh and North Sumatra provinces; nearly 42 percent of these fires were on peatland, despite peatland comprising only 4.8 percent of the total land area of the two provinces. Thus peatland was 14.4 times more likely to be burned than non-peatland during this period.

Full Article: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/07/10/when-will-stupidity-burnin...

This article  also appeared on The Jakarta Post as headline article on the Opinion page, Sunday, July 10, 2011.