Vast Forest Fires Spawn Ecological Disaster

The fires have also sent enormous amounts of greenhouse-gas emissions into the air. Much of the forests lost were peatland, which stores a particularly large amount of carbon. Research by the Center for International Forestry Research, or CIFOR, found that in 2012, forest fires in Riau province alone released between 1.5 billion and 2 billion tons of carbon emissions in just one week — up to 10 percent of Indonesia's total annual emissions, said Sofyan Kurnianto, a scientist with the group and the lead author of the study.