MUARO JAMBI, Indonesia — Pineapples rattled around in the basket on the back of Tahang’s motorcycle as he drove through the cracked and dried out peatland in eastern Sumatra’s Muaro Jambi district. Tahang later pulled up beside local residents Ali and Haidir, as smoke drifted in the distance over a grove of areca palms, which are grown for their betel nuts. “Did you see that fire earlier?” Tahang asked. “Yes, but it was only small,” Haidir replied. A few hours later, as Tahang rested in Muara Medak village and Ali returned to collect pineapples, the fire spread through dry grass and reached the carbon-rich peat. “It exploded,” Tahang said. Tahang picked up his water pump and raced to the field by motorcycle. By the time he arrived, he told Mongabay Indonesia, state firefighters and disaster agency staff were already battling the blaze, with little water available. A dry canal in the Air Merah community forest area. Image by Teguh Suprayitno/Mongabay Indonesia. Wildfire crisis across Indonesia Indonesia is facing its worst wildfire crisis in years, as months of drought across much of Borneo and Sumatra are compounded by a strong El Niño, which is delaying the onset of the archipelago’s main rainy season. In Sumatra’s Jambi province, fires have burned in Bukit Tigapuluh National Park and across extensive peatland areas in Berbak-Sembilang National Park, a major wetland adjacent to the subdistrict of Sungai Gelam designated as a UNESCO biosphere reserve. Peat in Jambi’s Sungai Gelam reaches depths of up to 11 meters…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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