Abstract
Forest and land fires are among the major catastrophic events that occur in Indonesia. They are a major cause of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. Their multiple sources are most diverse and root in nature and society. The immediate fire effects directly and the long-term landscape ecosystem degradations indirectly cause major and persisting and serious problems of public health and ecosystem service. Smoke haze from the forest and land fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan in 2015 caused significant environmental and economic losses in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. We describe the different types of land uses and land cover where fires and smoke haze took place, and how local politics have affected fire use from 2001 to 2017. We calculated hot spots from satellite imageries as proxies for fire occurrences and applied regression analysis to understand the link between fire and local politics in Sumatra and Kalimantan. The results show that the greatest frequency of hot spots occurred in wood and oil palm plantations and logging concessions (47%), followed by conservation areas (31%) and community land (22%). Local elections involve land transactions, and fires were used as a cheap way to increase the land value. The use of fire as means of land clearing was strongly influenced by local politics. Their frequency and abundance obviously increased about a year prior to local elections. The reasons behind the correlation need to be understood so that appropriate incentives and sanctions can be put in place and deter political leaders from using fire as an incentive to their advantage.
Highlights
The smoldering of burning peat, open land-surface fires, and the gaseous and particulate haze they create have affected the health of many people in Southeast Asia
The research questions are as follows: (a) How were land and forest fires distributed over different land uses? (b) How were local politics connected to forest and land fires? (c) What are the future policy options to reduce land and forest fires? As such, the research method is comprised of the following steps: (a) data collection of spatial maps and hot spots and descriptive analysis between hot spots and land uses by various actors; (b) analysis on the links between hot spots and local elections (PILKADA) in terms of the number of hot spots; and (c) social– ecological system (SES) analysis
While hot spots were identified throughout the islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan, most of the hot spots were found in southern Sumatra and Central Kalimantan
Summary
The smoldering of burning peat, open land-surface fires, and the gaseous and particulate haze they create have affected the health of many people in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, the National Disaster Management Agency recorded that the fire disaster of 2015 caused the recorded death of 24 children and adults by December 2015 (Fitri and Putri 2015). In Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua, it caused environmental damage and substantial losses in terms of assets and economic and social activities. The rate of premature death was much higher than previously, estimated at 100,300 people (Koplitz et al 2016). The provinces in Indonesia that were severely affected by haze were: Riau, Jambi, South Sumatra, West Kalimantan and Central Kalimantan (Kementerian Kesehatan 2015). Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines were affected by the haze (Heilmann 2015)
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