Forest fires in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, September, 2015. Demotix/ Indra Kusuma. All rights reserved.When I landed in Palangkaraya, the capital of the Indonesian province of central Borneo, in early September the smoke was already fairly thick. I was surprised they hadn't cancelled the flight on seeing the ground suddenly come into view what seemed like a few seconds before landing.
The smoky smell and thick warm air was something I recognised from 2011, the last El Niño year to hit the region (causing an extended dry season). There was definitely something of a "here we go again" sentiment from the locals I knew there too. My friend Yuyus texted: "selamat datang di kota asap" when I told him I'd arrived - welcome to smoke town. Within the next two days, all flights to and from the town had been grounded.
I think at that point the smoke was mainly coming from the east and south of Palangkaraya. This is the region in which lie the 1.4 million hectares of peatland known today as the "ex-Mega Rice" area. Having previously been nearly entirely composed of swamp forest like the Sabangau (more on the latter below), it was drained by an extensive canal system and largely felled in the mid-1990s, as part of the Mega Rice Project. The peat there was left dry and extremely flammable.
