Indonesia's peat fires top global emissions but slip past satellites

JAKARTA, Indonesia. The satellites that the world relies on to watch tropical fires have a blind spot, and in 2026 that blind spot is burning. Indonesia's fire season arrived early and hard, driven by a strengthening El Nino and a severe drought that dried out the country's drained peatlands. By the first week of September, fire emissions had pushed Indonesia to the top of the global wildfire emissions table, according to Fire Emissions Watch, a portal run by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, the European Union's atmospheric tracking program.

Yet the instruments that feed those estimates, and the disaster systems that issue alerts, are built to see fire from above. Peat fires do not behave that way. They smolder through dried wetland soil at relatively low temperatures, often entirely below the surface, which means the worst combustion of the season can fall beneath what the sensors register. The result is a paradox at the center of how the world monitors tropical burning: the fires that matter most are the hardest to see.

What the Satellites See, and What They Miss

Indonesia tracks its own fires using MODIS and VIIRS instruments aboard NASA and NOAA satellites, and the Ministry of Forestry's SiPongi platform counted 946 hotspots on August 31, 2026. Those thermal sensors detect a pixel that contains the heat signature of a surface fire. A single blaze can produce several detections, and a fire that produces no strong surface heat produces few or none.

That is the structural weakness. When peat burns underground, or when a fire creeps beneath a forest canopy, or when a smoke column itself blocks the sensor's view, the detection count can fall just as the real burning intensifies. Mark Cochrane, an ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who has studied Indonesian peat fires for nearly a decade, has noted that the worst smoke events can paradoxically be the hardest to observe from space.

Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, put the gap plainly when describing the September emissions figure: if fires are burning at low temperatures or underground, they fall below the detection limit of the sensors, which means the published number is likely an undercount rather than a ceiling.

Why the Ground Itself Became Fuel

Peatlands are waterlogged deposits of partially decayed organic matter that accumulate over thousands of years. Saturated, they do not burn. Dried, they become a vast subterranean fuel bed. Indonesia contains about 36 percent of the world's tropical peatlands, concentrated in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, and the eastern lowlands of Sumatra, where the bulk of the 2026 emissions originated.

Some of the country's modern vulnerability traces back decades. According to Cochrane, extensive construction of irrigation canals and drainage of peat swamps during the 1990s, undertaken in part to create large rice farms, lowered water tables across wetland areas and made the landscape far more combustible. Oil palm plantations and plantation forestry spread across the same region. After the devastating 2015 season, projects attempted to reverse some of that damage by blocking canals to rewet drained land, but the underlying fuel remained.

The 2026 weather did the rest. NOAA assessed El Nino as present and strengthening in August, a pattern that commonly reduces rainfall across Indonesia, and a positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole, which intensifies the drying, was also underway. Data from the Indonesian meteorological agency showed that about 90 percent of the country received little or no rainfall in early August. Robert Field, a Columbia University researcher who developed the Global Fire Weather Database, observed that Indonesia was only about three weeks into its fire season while activity tracked sharply upward, similar to 2015, and that underground peat fires keep burning until the rains return in October or November.

The 2015 Comparison and the Human Cost

The parallel to 2015 is the number that alarms researchers. After more than three months of burning that year, Indonesia's fires had emitted 1.75 billion tons of greenhouse gas equivalents, more than Japan produces in an entire year. By September 2, 2026, the fires had been burning for about a month and had already released roughly 10 percent of the total produced during the 2015 crisis, a pace that early-season data does not usually show.

The health toll moved faster than the emissions data. Respiratory illness cases across the worst-affected provinces more than doubled in a single week, from 50,891 on September 1 to 113,336 by September 9, according to figures attributed to Indonesia's health ministry. Schools switched to remote learning, nine national parks closed, and flights were delayed by heavy smoke. Sulfur dioxide released by the fires reacts with sunlight and moisture to form fine sulfate aerosols, the haze that drifts across Sumatra and into neighboring states.

Indonesia's environment ministry responded to the Copernicus figures by noting that the data did not directly reflect air quality conditions in a specific area, pointing to other factors that must be accounted for. That is a fair technical caution, but it does not close the gap the sensors leave open.

The Treaty With No Teeth

The regional instrument meant to govern cross-border haze is the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, signed in 2002 and in force since November 25, 2003. Indonesia was the last of the ten ASEAN states to ratify it, in 2015, more than a decade after Malaysia and Singapore. Two decades on, the agreement has no binding penalty mechanism. Disputes between member states are to be settled, in its own words, amicably by consultation or negotiation, rather than through enforcement.

Reviews of the agreement over the past twenty years have repeatedly identified that as its central weakness, and the 2026 haze season did nothing to resolve it. Malaysian prime minister Anwar Ibrahim said on September 8 that the bloc needed to strengthen its response, and Malaysia's government has since said it is open to a formal review. The ethics desk covers this recurring gap between a promise made on paper and the absence of any mechanism to enforce it.

Closing the Blind Spot

The technical fixes are moving, but slowly. A team working with NASA and MapBiomas, including University of Maryland graduate student Shi Jun Wee, is developing methods to spot understory fires that MODIS and VIIRS may miss, using shortwave infrared observations from Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellites. Shortwave infrared can see through some smoke and sense the lower-temperature signature of smoldering combustion that thermal sensors tuned for hot surface fires do not catch.

Cochrane has cautioned that attention to these fires rises during major El Nino seasons and fades once conditions improve, and that solving the problem requires sustained focus even in the quieter years. The environment desk has tracked how Indonesia's waste and land-use policy interacts with methane and emissions, and this fire season adds a sharper example of the same problem: emissions that are real, large, and only partially visible to the systems built to measure them.

For now, the honest reading of the data is not that global fire is suddenly out of control in a way every alert system can see. The disaster platforms record the season's burning largely as low-level notifications, and the headline surge belongs to a single country in a single dry season. The deeper story is a measurement gap. The satellites that are supposed to warn the region about haze are, by design, least reliable exactly when the fires burn the way peat does, underground. Follow HoneyNewspaper's environment desk, public health desk, and science desk as the season develops.

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