Category Archives: Forest Fires

PEKANBARU: Indonesia is battling forest fires causing toxic haze across southeast Asia with aircraft, artificial rain and even prayer, President Joko Widodo said during a visit to a hard-hit area. Forest fires are raging on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, sending a choking fug across the region – including towards neighbours Malaysia and Singapore. During a visit to Riau province in central Sumatra on Tuesday, Widodo said nearly 6,000 troops had been sent to hot spots to help put out fires. “We have made every effort,” he said. …The toxic smoke caused by deliberate burning to clear land for plantations is an annual problem for Indonesia and its neighbours, but has been worsened this year by particularly dry weather.

PEKANBARU, Indonesia: Thousands of Indonesian firefighters are locked in an around-the-clock game of Whack-a-Mole as they battle to extinguish an invisible enemy – underground fires that aggravate global warming. Vast blazes are ripping across the archipelago’s rainforests, unleashing a toxic haze over Southeast Asia that has triggered health fears and sent diplomatic tensions with Indonesia’s neighbours soaring. Jakarta deployed more than 9,000 personnel to battle fires turning land into charred landscapes and consuming forests in hard-hit Sumatra and Borneo island. But many of the blazes smoulder deep underground in once-swampy areas known as peatlands, where they can last for months and release eye-watering amounts of thick, acrid smoke. “It’s so much harder to fight fires on peatlands,” a dirty and exhausted Hendri Kusnardi told AFP outside smog-hit Pekanbaru city in Sumatra.

JAKARTA – Thousands of Indonesians prayed for rain in haze-hit towns on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo on Wednesday, as forest fires raged at the height of the dry season, the state Antara news agency reported. Fires have burnt through parts of Sumatra and Borneo island for more than a month and the government has sent 9,000 military, police and disaster agency personnel to fight the flames. Indonesia’s neighbors regularly complain about smog caused by its forest blazes, which are often started to clear land for palm oil and pulp plantations. But Indonesia said this week it was not to blame and fires had been spotted by satellites in several neighboring countries. Several parts of Southeast Asia have seen unusually dry conditions in recent months including Indonesia, which has seen very little rain because of an El Nino weather pattern, its meteorological department has said.

The fires raging in the Brazilian Amazon are likely to intensify over the coming weeks, a leading environmental expert has warned, despite government claims the situation had been controlled. …“The worst of the fire is still to come,” wrote Tasso Azevedo, a forest engineer and environmentalist who coordinates the deforestation monitoring group MapBiomas. Azevedo said many of the areas currently being consumed by flames were stretches of Amazon rainforest that had been torn down in the months of April, May and June. But areas deforested in July and August – when government monitoring systems detected a major surge in destruction – had yet to be torched. …Bolsonaro confirmed …he would attend a meeting …to draw up a plan to protect the Amazon rainforest, which straddles Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana and Suriname. On Wednesday 18 global fashion brands … were reported to have suspended leather purchases from Brazil over the crisis.

While global attention has been focused on fires burning across the Brazilian Amazon, neighbouring Bolivia is battling its own vast blazes, which have charred an area nearly as extensive as the nation of Lebanon. At least 20,000 fires were burning across the country as of the Tuesday, and a total of 950,000 hectares had been burned so far this year — most of that in weeks — according to Cliver Rocha, director of the national Forests and Lands Authority. While some of the fires were burning in Bolivia’s share of the Amazon, the largest blazes were in the Chiquitania region of southeastern Bolivia, a zone of dry forest, farmland and open prairies that has seen an expansion of farming and ranching in recent years. The College of Biologists in the capital, La Paz, has estimated that the fires have destroyed $1.1 billion US worth of timber.

Fires in the Amazon rainforest have captured attention worldwide in recent days. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in 2019, pledged in his campaign to reduce environmental protection and increase agricultural development in the Amazon, and he appears to have followed through on that promise. The resurgence of forest clearing in the Amazon, which had decreased more than 80% following a peak in 2004, is alarming for many reasons. …The oft-repeated claim that the Amazon rainforest produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen is based on a misunderstanding. In fact nearly all of Earth’s breathable oxygen originated in the oceans, and there is enough of it to last for millions of years. …In sum, Brazil’s reversal on protecting the Amazon does not meaningfully threaten atmospheric oxygen. Even a huge increase in forest fires would produce changes in oxygen that are difficult to measure. 

The wildfires burning in the Amazon rainforest have prompted a public outcry on social media, with many accusing news organizations of either ignoring the crisis or being slow to report on it. …a number of photos have gone viral, purportedly depicting the devastation wrought in the area. But how accurate are those pictures, and just how bad is the situation? CBC News answers those questions. …But news outlets have found that some of these photos are of different fires at different time periods from different geographic locations. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio reposted a picture on his Instagram, with more than three million likes, but CNN reported that it found the same picture on a website published in 2018. As for four photos shared by actor David  Licauco, none are of the current fires, CNN reported.  Instead, it discovered that one is of a 2018 wildfire in Sweden and another was from Montana in 2000.

As of Thursday, there are more than 165,000 fires burning in the Amazon rainforest — and a significant number of them, more than 75,000, are burning in Brazil. …And it is in crisis, experts say. And what’s making it worse, say some, are some of the economic and environmental policies put in place by the Brazilian government under the leadership of President Jair Bolsonaro… While some of the fires are naturally occurring, Amnesty International has also documented a number of arson attacks, allegedly by illegal loggers, miners and cattle ranchers, in Indigenous territories in the Amazon this year, including in Rondonia state, said Kumi Naidoo, Amnesty’s secretary general. …On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron took to Twitter to call the Amazon fires an “international crisis” that should be discussed by the G7 summit that will begin on Saturday in Biarritz, France. …Bolsonaro responded angrily to what he regarded as meddling.

Huge tracts of the Amazon…are ablaze. Smoke from the widespread fires has turned day into night in Sao Paulo, and intensified a controversy over the Brazilian government’s land use policies. The Brazilian Amazon has experienced 74,155 fires since January… The Brazilian Amazon has experienced 74,155 fires since January, according to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, known by the acronym INPE. That’s an 85 percent increase from last year…”There is nothing abnormal about the climate this year or the rainfall in the Amazon region, which is just a little below average,” INPE researcher Alberto Setzer told Reuters. Speaking of the fires, he said, “The dry season creates the favorable conditions for the use and spread of fire, but starting a fire is the work of humans, either deliberately or by accident.” …INPE tracks deforestation in Brazil, and its data has shown a huge increase in the Amazon this year. 

Wildfires raging in the Amazon rainforest have hit a record number this year, with 72,843 fires detected so far by Brazil’s space research centre, as concerns grow over right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro’s environmental policy. The surge marks an 83 per cent increase over the same period of 2018, the agency said on Tuesday, and is the highest since records began in 2013. …The unprecedented surge in wildfires has occurred since Bolsonaro took office in January vowing to develop the Amazon region for farming and mining, ignoring international concern over increased deforestation. Brazilian President said on a Facebook Live session that non-governmental organizations could be burning down the Amazon rainforest to bring shame on his government after he cut their funding.

An out-of-control wildfire in Spain’s Canary Islands was throwing flames 50 metres (160 feet) into the air on Monday, forcing emergency workers to evacuate more than 9,000 people, authorities said. The blaze — described by the local fire department as “a monster” — was racing across parched woodlands into Tamadaba Natural Park, regarded as one of the jewels on Gran Canaria, a mountainous volcanic island in the Atlantic Ocean archipelago off northwest Africa. …Canary Islands President Angel Victor Torres said 1,100 firefighters were being deployed in shifts along with 16 water-dropping aircraft to battle the blaze that started Saturday afternoon. The local government said around 6,000 hectares (14,800 acres) had been charred in just 48 hours, villages were evacuated and two dozen roads were closed.

Greek firefighters backed by water-dropping planes and helicopters were battling a wildfire burning through a protected nature reserve on the island of Evia for a second day Wednesday, where hundreds of people had been evacuated from four villages and a monastery. The six planes and five helicopters were concentrating on areas where access to the island’s dense pine forest, which includes canyons, was difficult by land. More than 250 firefighters, dozens of soldiers and volunteers were battling the wildfire that broke out at 3 a.m. Tuesday. A state of emergency was declared for the area on Tuesday, when strong winds had hampered firefighting and carried smoke from Greece’s second-largest island as far as the capital, Athens, some 75 kilometres (47 miles) to the south.

More than 500 firefighters have been called out to battle a blaze that has already destroyed hundreds of hectares of pine forest in southern France. Some 900 hectares have been destroyed since the fire broke out on Wednesday afternoon in the rugged hills of the Aude department, about 100 kilometres southeast of Toulouse. Commander Philippe Fabre of the Aude fire service told AFP there had been a “slight letup” early on Thursday, with firefighters able to halt the fire’s advance. But he said winds were expected to gust at up to 60 km/h later in the day, and efforts would be focused on “extinguishing the fiercest hotspots and preventing flare-ups in hard-to-reach areas”.

Large fires are a yearly ubiquity in Siberia. However, this summer, the smoke has enveloped a few of its largest cities, including Krasnoyarsk, and locals are offended at what they perceive as government inaction. Though authorities have now elevated efforts to place out the blazes, the burning area is continuing to expand. On Tuesday, Russia’s Aerial Forest Protection Service stated it’s battling 161 fires on 140,000 hectares of the forest. It has yielded on 295 fires over 2.4 million hectares of “remote or hard-to-reach territories” and merely is monitoring them from space, the service mentioned.

MOSCOW – Russian prosecutors said on Tuesday that some of the vast Siberian wildfires that environmentalists have dubbed a climate emergency were started on purpose by arsonists trying to conceal illegal logging activity. President Vladimir Putin called in the army last week to help firefighters battle fires raging in remote Siberian forestland that had spread to an area larger than Belgium and blanketed hundreds of villages and towns in smoke. The Emergencies Ministry said on Monday that the fires, which have prompted states of emergency to be declared in some regions, had been reduced by a quarter, while the Federal Forestry Agency put the affected area at 2.5 million hectares. …The General Prosecutor said it had identified cases in which forest fires in the Irkutsk region of Siberia had been deliberately started in order to conceal illegal wood felling, RIA news agency reported.