Indonesia haze crisis: 1.9 million hectares burned as Jakarta protests demand disaster status

For months, smouldering peatlands and forest fires across Sumatra and Kalimantan have wrapped Indonesia in a toxic haze that has drifted into Malaysia and Singapore, shut schools, grounded aircraft and sent hundreds of thousands of people to clinics with breathing difficulties. The 2026 dry season, intensified by El Nino conditions that critics say were flagged as early as February, has become the country's worst fire episode since 2015, and it has turned air quality into a political confrontation between citizens, provincial authorities and Jakarta.

The scale of the burn is now coming into focus. Satellite monitor Nusantara Atlas estimated that fires burned 1,916,588 hectares between January and the end of September 2026, an area nearly 12 times the size of London, and its founder says even that figure is too low. The haze has become a transport crisis, a public health emergency and a test of how Indonesia's centralised system of land licensing handles a disaster that crosses provincial borders.

On October 20, 2026, the crisis spilled onto the streets. Demonstrations called by students took place in Jakarta, Bandung and Yogyakarta on Java, Pekanbaru in Sumatra and Makassar in South Sulawesi, coinciding with the second anniversary of President Prabowo Subianto's government. Banners read "If we burn, you burn with us!" and "I have the right to breathe. Extinguish the fires immediately." Police detained six Greenpeace activists who had draped banners from the Bundaran HI monument in central Jakarta, one of which read "Haze & Prabowo's Regime = National Disaster."

Jakarta has so far refused calls to declare the fires a national disaster, and that refusal has become the focus of public anger. Residents in Palangkaraya, the Central Kalimantan city at the epicentre of the burning, described lost income and family members coughing for a month. The National Disaster Mitigation Agency says more than 60,000 firefighters and 49 aircraft are already committed to the response.

Key Facts

AFP reported on October 19, 2026 that Nusantara Atlas put the January to September burned area at 1,916,588 hectares, 38 percent higher than at the same point in 2019, another severe fire year. Founder David Gaveau said the estimate is conservative because the monitor excludes individual burn scars smaller than 6.25 hectares and prioritises avoiding false detections, and because heavy haze obscured satellite imagery at times. "The total reported burned area therefore underestimates the true area burned," he said. Comparable satellite data for 2015 is unavailable because the satellites used then were not operating, but Gaveau said hotspot counts were still trending upward and that this season was probably as bad as 2015.

The official accounting lags far behind. Indonesia's government has not published an updated official burned-area figure since announcing that 202,000 hectares had been razed by the end of July, and a Forestry Ministry spokesman said the Nusantara Atlas number could not be readily confirmed while the government was still calculating the total.

Channel NewsAsia reported on October 20, 2026 that the Transportation Ministry counted 2,604 disrupted domestic flights between August 11 and October 19. Director-general of air transportation Lukman F. Laisa said 1,420 flights were cancelled or postponed, 1,129 were delayed, 23 were diverted to other airports, six returned to their departure airports and 26 were rescheduled to leave earlier. Twelve round-trip flights between Singapore and Pontianak in West Kalimantan were cancelled between September 12 and 23, and two between Singapore and Palembang in South Sumatra were cancelled on October 15, making 14 international services in total. Affected airports included Palu's Mutiara SIS Al-Jufrie Airport in Central Sulawesi, Ternate's Sultan Babullah airport in North Maluku, and airports in Pontianak, Pekanbaru and Palembang. "Flight schedule adjustments can be made if conditions on the ground do not allow operations to proceed safely," Laisa said, quoted by state news agency Antara.

The health toll is the largest single number in the crisis. The Straits Times reported on October 16, 2026 that the Health Ministry recorded 283,270 cases of acute respiratory infection linked to the fires across seven provinces between August 18 and October 13, more than double the 113,336 reported as of September 9. Ministry data as of October 12 put the cumulative count at 277,075, including 62,400 cases, or 22.5 percent, among children aged five and under. The ministry deployed 2,106 medical and health personnel and distributed more than 2.8 million masks along with oxygen concentrators, medicines and protective equipment. Monitoring stations recorded hazardous air in 13 areas, very unhealthy readings in 11 and unhealthy readings in 13.

Firefighting capacity is enormous but constrained. AFP reported on October 20, 2026 that National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Berton Panjaitan said more than 60,000 firefighters, including volunteers, were deployed nationwide and 49 aircraft were available for water bombing and cloud seeding, though many had been grounded intermittently by the haze. The same day, the Forestry Ministry said it had imposed administrative sanctions on 32 companies over 12,926 hectares of burnt land across seven provinces and was handling suspected criminal cases against 125 individuals and corporations. In September it revoked the permits of five companies in West, South and Central Kalimantan covering 92,464 hectares.

Analysis

The most striking feature of this crisis is not the size of the burn but the width of the gap between independent monitoring and official accounting. A private satellite initiative has produced a figure of 1,916,588 hectares while the last published government total, 202,000 hectares, dates from the end of July. The bigger picture here is that Indonesia is trying to manage a nationwide emergency without a shared, timely number for what is actually on fire, and every other response, from health staffing to flight scheduling to prosecution of companies, depends on that number existing.

The second judgement concerns federalism in practice. The Straits Times reported on October 20, 2026 that Jakarta and provincial authorities traded blame over the fire response, with Central Kalimantan's administration under Governor Agustiar Sabran complaining that forest concession permits are issued by the central government while provinces and residents are left to deal with the fires, a division reinforced by the 2020 Job Creation Law. Central Kalimantan environment agency head Joni Harta said no forest permits were issued by the province and that its budget was insufficient, while the ministry said prevention, environmental approvals and supervision are shared responsibilities. What this really means is that the licensing power and the firefighting burden sit in different buildings, and neither level of government has an incentive to claim ownership of a failure.

Third, the refusal to declare a national disaster is a decision with practical consequences rather than a purely symbolic one. Students outside the Central Kalimantan governor's office in Palangka Raya on October 19 demanded that status and the power for provinces to revoke concession permits. That status is not a magic fix, but it changes who pays, who coordinates and which budget lines open. The National Disaster Mitigation Agency has said it would assess whether to classify the fires as a national disaster while stressing that the priority was an effective response.

Fourth, the enforcement record suggests sanctions are real but slow relative to the burn rate. Thirty-two companies sanctioned over 12,926 hectares, and five permits revoked covering 92,464 hectares, are meaningful actions, yet they are dwarfed by more than 1.9 million hectares of estimated burned area and arrive months into a season that critics say both levels of government were warned about since February. That pattern of late, partial enforcement is what turns an annual dry-season hazard into a recurring regional crisis.

Why It Matters

The regional cost is not hypothetical. BBC News reported on October 20, 2026 that the 2015 haze episode cost the region around 20 billion dollars, and that schools in neighbouring Malaysia had been closed during the current episode. Its correspondents in Palangkaraya described smouldering peatland lining the roads and smoke turning the air yellow, with PM2.5 levels at points reportedly passing 3,000 micrograms per cubic metre, more than 200 times what the World Health Organization considers acceptable. Law student Naomi Artika Simamora told the BBC: "It feels like we need astronaut equipment just to survive, as if we aren't even living on Earth anymore."

Peat is what makes this season so hard to end. Firefighter Fauzi Rahman, 27, told the BBC that peat fires have to be put out all the way down and can take one to two months, sometimes longer, and may still not be completely out. A single ignition can therefore outlast any political news cycle, and the respiratory caseload of 283,270, with 22.5 percent of cases in children aged five and under, will keep growing unless the ground itself is extinguished.

The diplomatic dimension is also live. Singapore has warned companies blamed for the haze that its determination to act should not be underestimated. Meanwhile in Malaysia, low-cost carrier Firefly resumed flights between Subang and Singapore after suspending the service for about a week, a reminder that the disruption is commercial as well as environmental.

Next Up

Attention now turns to whether Jakarta will move from assessment to declaration. Police deployed more than 9,000 security personnel across the capital, where 26 protest actions were scheduled on October 20, 2026. If the hotspot trend Gaveau described continues, and if the government's own burned-area calculation finally lands, the pressure to grant national disaster status will only intensify.

Watch three indicators in the coming weeks: the next official burned-area figure and whether it narrows the gap with Nusantara Atlas, the outcome of the disaster agency's assessment, and whether the 125 criminal cases and 32 administrative sanctions produce consequences for companies before the rains arrive. Until then, the practical measure of the crisis will remain flight schedules, clinic visits and what residents of Palangkaraya can see when they look out of the window.