Indonesian Wildfires Are Pumping Out a Third of the World's Fire Emissions

So here's a wild stat: for one week in early September, Indonesia's wildfires were pumping out more planet-warming carbon dioxide than any other country on Earth — including Russia, which is a much bigger country. According to Reuters, fire emissions from Indonesia between September 1-7 hit 19.7 million metric tons, which is more than a third of all fire emissions on the planet during that stretch, based on data from Fire Emissions Watch, a monitoring tool built by the EU's Copernicus climate service.

Why is this happening now? Indonesia is dealing with what officials are calling its worst fire season in 11 years, fueled by a "super El Niño" — a stronger-than-usual version of the weather pattern that brings hotter temperatures and brutal droughts to Southeast Asia. The fires are tearing through forests and peatland (soil made of partially decomposed plant matter that's basically a carbon time bomb when it burns) on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

The numbers were 273% above the seasonal average, but — and this matters — still below the 21.7 million tons emitted during the same week in 2015, the last time Indonesia had a comparably intense El Niño. So this is bad, but not (yet) the worst-ever bad.

On the ground, it's genuinely rough. The city of Pontianak in West Kalimantan hit an air quality index of 394 — anything over 300 is considered hazardous to breathe. Indonesia's environment ministry told Reuters it's watching the situation "with concern," though it also pushed back a bit, noting the satellite data "does not directly reflect air quality conditions in a specific area."

Here's why this isn't just a far-away problem: fires like these have burned around 202,000 hectares of Indonesian land from January through July — and an environmental researcher told Reuters that August numbers are expected to show a much bigger jump, roughly 600,000 hectares, especially in Kalimantan, Sumatra, and South Papua. For comparison, the catastrophic 2015 fire season torched 2.6 million hectares total — an area bigger than the entire country of Wales. These aren't just wildfires burning trees; they're releasing carbon that's been locked in the ground for thousands of years, which adds directly to global warming everyone on the planet experiences. And the smoke doesn't stay put — it drifts into Malaysia and Singapore, and past haze crises like 2015 have been linked to serious respiratory illness across the region. If you care about climate change, air quality, or just live downwind in Southeast Asia, this is one of those stories that quietly connects to your daily life more than it seems.