Two Volunteers Die Fighting Borneo's 'Carbon Bomb' Peat Fires — SkimNews
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- Volunteer firefighters from indigenous Dayak and Banjar communities have spent more than a month battling subterranean peat fires across Indonesian Borneo using hand tools, carts and portable pumps, with the blazes carbonizing roughly 200,000 hectares of forest and farmland since early July.
- Two volunteer firefighters in Central Kalimantan died in recent days after their health deteriorated from fighting the peat fires, which release millennia-old carbon as they smoulder underground and can reignite even after ground is saturated "like porridge".
- Indonesia's 4.5-million-hectare tropical peatland in Kalimantan holds more than 6,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare — equivalent to the annual CO₂ output of 4,800 cars — with peat deposits exceeding 20 metres in depth, according to YKAN peatland researcher Dr Nisa Novita.
- Indonesia's Health Ministry recorded more than 50,000 cases of respiratory infections linked to land and forest fires between July and August, including over 12,000 children under five, while air pollution indices across Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines reached roughly 75 times the WHO-recommended level.
- Decades of peatland drainage for plantations and large-scale development projects dating back to the Suharto era have left Borneo's peat swamps fire-prone, with Kalimantan losing almost 160,000 hectares of forest in 2025 — more than a third of Indonesia's nationwide deforestation figure.
- Dayak Kanayatn representative Tono says indigenous communities are being scapegoated as the cause of the fires despite their traditional uma bukit "hill farming" practices being rooted in maintaining balance with nature, while University of Leicester's Prof Susan Page notes drained peatlands emit CO₂ "all of the time" — fires are "the worst expression" of an ongoing carbon leak.
Why it matters: Two firefighters have already died and more than 50,000 people — including 12,000 young children — have been sickened by a disaster whose root cause is structural: decades of draining Borneo's peatlands for plantations has turned a 4,500-year-old carbon sink into a continuous emitter. Until the peat is rewetted, every dry season now detonates another carbon pulse that no amount of volunteer firefighting can prevent.
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