What you need to know about Indonesian fires that are affecting global climate change

Raging fires in Indonesia’s forests and peat lands since July this year are precipitating a climate and public-health catastrophe with repercussions across local, regional and global levels. While nobody knows the extent of loss of species and biodiversity, as much as 2 million hectares of land (about the size of Mizoram) have burned, according to David Gaveau, a scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research in Indonesia. “The ecological cost is incommensurable,” Gaveau said in an e-mail interview with IndiaSpend. “These fires are the symptom of a land-transformation process: once lush biodiversity-rich forests transforming into unproductive degraded land with poor biodiversity over time. Of course, 90 percent of fires are started by people.”