Monitor: Fires in Indonesia engulfed 1.9 million hectares — Asharq Al-Awsat

In Indonesia, fires from January through the end of September 2026 engulfed more than 1.9 million hectares, according to the Nusantara Atlas monitoring project, which analyzes satellite imagery. This was reported by Asharq Al-Awsat.

Nusantara Atlas founder David Gaveau said the project recorded 1,916,588 hectares of burned land. This is nearly 12 times the area of London. He stressed that the estimate is conservative because smoke and haze made it difficult to verify satellite images.

Why the area may be larger

According to Gaveau, the system does not count individual burn scars smaller than 6.25 hectares and is primarily designed to avoid false detections. Heavy smoke also periodically obscured areas in satellite imagery.

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Therefore, the total burned area recorded by Nusantara Atlas may be smaller than the actual area affected by fires, the project’s founder said.

Comparison with 2019

Nusantara Atlas data show that by the end of September, the fire-affected area was 38% larger than during the same period in 2019. The Indonesian government did not release new official data after reporting 202,000 hectares of burned land at the end of July.

Gaveau noted that the satellites used by the monitoring project were not available during the large-scale fires of 2015, so comparable data do not exist. At the same time, he pointed to a continued increase in the number of hotspots.