Indonesia Has Been Fighting Forest Fires for Decades. Why Are We Still Not Better at It?
In 2026, Kalimantan is burning again. Indonesia has the technology to detect fires, the manpower to fight them and decades of experience to understand how they start. So why does the country still appear to be fighting the consequences rather than addressing the conditions that make these fires possible?
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with an environmental disaster that is no longer unexpected.
Indonesia knows its forests burn. It knows where they are most vulnerable. It knows that peatlands can become extraordinarily combustible when drained and dried. It knows that land clearing is one of the major human factors behind the problem. It knows that once peat catches fire, putting it out is considerably more complicated than extinguishing a conventional surface fire.
And yet, in 2026, Indonesia is still confronting large-scale fires across Kalimantan and Sumatra, with smoke spreading beyond national borders.
The scale of this year’s crisis makes the question harder to avoid. Reuters reported that more than 107,000 hectares of land had burned across Indonesia between January and June 2026, more than double the area recorded during the same period in 2023. Officials attributed the fires largely to human activity, including peatland burning and land clearing, while an unusually severe El Niño has created the dry conditions in which fires can spread rapidly. (Reuters)
Climate undoubtedly matters. But it cannot become the convenient explanation for everything. A dry landscape does not spontaneously explain why a particular piece of land catches fire. Human decisions are still involved. And here is where Indonesia’s complicated relationship with fire becomes particularly uncomfortable.
Under Indonesia’s environmental framework, land clearing by burning is generally prohibited, including for commercial plantation development. But there is a specific legal exception for indigenous and local communities: under certain conditions, they may use controlled burning to clear up to two hectares per household for planting local varieties, subject to procedures including notification of village authorities. (Unismuh Palu Journals)
The distinction matters enormously. The two-hectare provision is not a legal loophole allowing palm-oil companies to burn hundreds or thousands of hectares. Commercial plantation operators are not supposed to use fire as a land-clearing method.
But once fire is permitted under a limited traditional-use framework, the challenge becomes one of monitoring. How effectively can authorities distinguish controlled small-scale burning from fires that have escaped, been expanded, or been deliberately started for broader land clearance?
That question becomes even more significant in regions where plantation development and forest conversion overlap.
And perhaps Indonesia should look more closely at what its neighbour Malaysia is doing—not because Malaysia has solved the problem, but because it offers a useful case study in what a forest-fire strategy can look like when prevention is treated as seriously as suppression.
Malaysia faces many of the same environmental challenges, particularly in Borneo. Peatlands, prolonged dry periods and agricultural land use can all create conditions in which fire spreads quickly. The difference worth examining is not simply the number of aircraft available when a fire breaks out, but the infrastructure and planning put in place before that moment arrives.
One of Malaysia’s approaches has been to treat peatland management as a fire-prevention measure rather than simply an environmental programme. Its Peatland Fire Prevention Programme includes efforts to restore and manage degraded peat areas, such as the Raja Musa Forest Reserve. The logic is straightforward: a healthy, properly managed peatland is less likely to become a highly combustible landscape during an extended dry period.
That distinction matters for Indonesia. Peat does not suddenly become a fire problem on the day a flame appears. Its vulnerability is shaped by what happens long before the fire—whether the land has been drained, how high the water table is, whether vegetation has dried out and whether authorities know which areas are becoming dangerously susceptible.
Malaysia has also invested in early-warning mechanisms, specialised task forces and community-based fire prevention. These systems are designed to identify dangerous conditions and hotspots early, rather than relying entirely on large-scale emergency mobilisation once fires have already spread.
This may sound less impressive than a fleet of helicopters. It is also considerably less photogenic.
But early detection changes the economics and the difficulty of firefighting. A fire caught while it is still small requires fewer personnel, less water, fewer aircraft and less time. A fire that has spread across thousands of hectares—particularly across peatland—is an entirely different proposition.
Malaysia’s experience also demonstrates the value of preparing aerial interventions before they become desperate measures. Cloud seeding, for example, has been incorporated into its disaster-response planning during prolonged dry conditions, with operations prepared in advance when weather patterns indicate increasing fire risk.
Cloud seeding is hardly a magic solution. It requires suitable atmospheric conditions and cannot manufacture rain from an empty sky. But the important lesson is the planning behind it: governments can prepare multiple layers of intervention before a fire reaches catastrophic proportions.
And this is where the comparison becomes uncomfortable for Indonesia.
Indonesia already has helicopters. It already has surveillance aircraft. It already has satellites, weather-modification capability and thousands of personnel. As of August 2026, BNPB reported 52 aircraft deployed across six priority provinces, including 37 helicopters, while nearly 13,000 personnel had been assigned to the three priority provinces in Kalimantan alone.
So this is not simply a story about Indonesia lacking equipment.
The more difficult question is whether those resources are being deployed as part of a sufficiently strong prevention system.
Malaysia’s approach suggests that fire management needs to begin with the landscape itself: identifying vulnerable peatlands, maintaining water levels, monitoring high-risk areas, supporting local fire brigades and establishing early-warning systems that can trigger action before a small fire becomes a major emergency.
Indonesia could adopt the same principle at a much larger scale.
That would mean treating fire prevention as permanent infrastructure rather than a seasonal emergency programme. It would mean knowing, before the dry season begins, which concession areas, peatlands and communities are most vulnerable. It would mean having equipment and personnel positioned according to that risk rather than waiting for satellite images to reveal that a crisis is already underway.
It would also mean recognising that local communities are part of the firefighting system, not simply people living around it. Community-based prevention and early reporting can make the difference between containing a fire and chasing it across an enormous landscape.
There is no reason to romanticise Malaysia’s system. Its geography is different, its scale is smaller and its own forests remain vulnerable to fire. Malaysia has not discovered a technological silver bullet.
But perhaps that is precisely why the comparison is useful.
Indonesia does not need to copy Malaysia. It needs to learn from the principle behind some of its practices: the best firefighting system is one that begins operating before there is a fire to fight.
After decades of recurring forest fires, Indonesia already knows the geography of its risk. It knows where the peatlands are. It knows the dry seasons will come. It knows which regions repeatedly become hotspots. It knows that difficult terrain and underground peat fires can overwhelm even a substantial fleet of aircraft.
What remains is turning that knowledge into a permanent system of prevention.
The lesson from Malaysia is therefore not that Indonesia needs more helicopters, more aircraft or more spectacular emergency operations.
It is that the most sophisticated firefighting strategy may begin with something far less dramatic: keeping the land wet, keeping watch, keeping communities prepared and intervening while the fire is still small enough to stop.
Because the real measure of Indonesia’s firefighting capability should not be how many helicopters it can send into the sky when Kalimantan is already burning.
It should be whether Indonesia has built a system capable of making those helicopters necessary far less often.
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