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2023 fires increase fivefold in Indonesia amid El Niño

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JAKARTA — Fires razed nearly 1 million hectares (2.47 million acres) of lands and forests in Indonesia in 2023, as the country suffered from unusually scorching weather due to El Niño and burning for new plantations. Data from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry show that as many as 994,313.18 hectares — an area 15 times the size of Jakarta — burned from January to October 2023. This means the 2023 fire season is the worst since 2019, when fires burned 1.65 million hectares (4.07 million acres). The size of the 2023 fires represents a fivefold increase from the 204,894 hectares (506,300 acres) of burned lands in 2022. But it still represents a 30.80% decline compared with the same period in 2019, when the El Niño weather phenomenon also brought a prolonged dry season. “We compared 2023 with 2019 because the El Niño is relatively the same. 2023 was even drier than 2019. But Alhamdulillah [Thank God] we can supress the fires to be significantly less than 2019,” the ministry’s climate change director-general, Laksmi Dhewanthi, said during an event at the ministry’s office in Jakarta on Dec. 27. Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar said she estimated the size of the fires would grow by the end of 2023, since the figure of 994,313.18 hectares represented fires as of October 2023. “I estimated that by the end of November 2023, the size of fires would grow by more than 200,000 hectares [494,200 acres],” she said during the event. “But…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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