Indonesia Tries New Tactics to Douse Annual Firestorms

Late last month, a fire patrol here was hard at work battling small blazes on the dried-out bogs that make eastern Sumatra island infamous as a major source of Southeast Asia’s perennial, choking haze. Half a million people in Indonesia alone were treated for respiratory infections. Wetter weather this year helped bring the number of fires down dramatically, according to early data. But thousands of acres of cleared and drained swampland still burned, and the resulting smog triggered pollution alerts across the Strait of Malacca in Singapore. David Gaveau, a scientist at the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research, said that because so much land here is extremely combustible, it doesn’t take a weather anomaly like last year’s El Niño drought to cause fires.