About 1.9 million hectares of forests burned in Indonesia

Cerca of 1.9 million hectares of forests burned in Indonesia between January and the end of September this year, today declared a monitoring body that analyzes satellite images.

This number is a conservative estimate because smoking made satellite verification difficult, according to the founder of Nusantara Atlas deforestation monitoring platform, David Gaveau.

The Indonesian Government has not provided any more official figures on the burning areas since its announcement in late July on the devastation by fire in 202,000 hectares of forest.

According to Gaveau, the actual extent of the fires is probably much higher than the 1,916,588 hectares burned estimated to date by its organization.

“ Our estimates of burned areas are conservative for two reasons. First, we excluded fire scars with less than 6.25 hectares (...) Second, we tried to avoid false detections ", explained.

This year, the calculation was also affected by dense smoke that sometimes obscured satellite images.

“ Therefore, the total burning area registered underestimates the real area that was consumed by fire ", clarified.

Still, Nusantara's data Atlas shows that the area burned until the end of September this year was 38% higher than that recorded in the same period of 2019.

The satellites used by the monitoring system were not available during the 2015 serious fires; therefore, there are no data comparable with that period.

However, according to Gaveau, “the situation is probably as serious as it is. If we look at the gross number of fires, the trend continues to rise.”.