It’s barely been a month since the devastating earthquake tore through East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), exposing Indonesia’s vulnerable emergency architecture. Yet here we are again, watching the sky painted in choking hues of orange and grey as the country battles forest fires across Sumatra and Kalimantan, while four active volcanoes — Mount Anak Krakatau, Mount Semeru, Mount Ili Lewotolok, and Mount Ibu — erupt and spew ash across Java and Nusa Tenggara.
While volcanic eruptions are natural geological events, forest fires are human-made catastrophes. Extreme weather shifts resulting from the cyclical climate phenomenon El Niño may have catalyzed the spread of these forest fires, but calling them “natural disasters” is lazy and absolves human actors of accountability.
The reality is that people in Kalimantan and Sumatra, even those in Malaysia and Singapore, now breathe hazardous air because the government failed to curb the spread of forest fires despite the crisis being entirely foreseeable.
As early as April, the Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) issued a warning that this year’s El Niño would trigger severe dry spells, turning our dense forests and fragile peatlands into tinderboxes. BMKG’s climatologists even correctly predicted that forest fires would spread in Kalimantan around July and August. Yet, despite this research, the government failed to prepare, and the people paid for it.
The contested ‘local wisdom’ provision
The root cause of these fires has remained unchanged since 1997: the persistent, illegal use of fire by plantation companies (and others) for land clearing. Although the government regulates the practice, Article 69 Section 2 of Law No. 32/2009 on Environmental Protection and Management allows exemptions for indigenous communities, limited to two hectares per household and only if done to grow local plant varieties.
As environmental advocates have pointed out for years, massive palm oil and timber corporate entities have allegedly been involved in land clearing by burning that caused the forest fires.
Last month, Kompas overlaid a map of Kalimantan forest fire hotspots on a Kalimantan land concession map. The result shows that over 50 percent of fires happened on concession lands, such as oil palm plantations, mining, and logging.
A provision meant to protect traditional farmers has become a legal blanket enabling widespread environmental destruction. Decades of drainage and deforestation have turned Indonesia’s peatlands (gambut) into dry, underground fuse networks. On dry peat, a controlled fire on a two-hectare plot cannot be contained to its boundary. It seeps beneath the surface, spreading invisibly across miles and igniting uncontrollable blazes.
On 7 September 2026, after the haze spread uncontrollably, the government finally announced a Presidential Instruction prohibiting all forest land burning, including practices rooted in local wisdom.
Once again, the state’s response reveals a troubling pattern: reactive, disjointed, and reliant on last-minute notifications. Those affected by the burning forests had to wait weeks before the president said anything, while fires didn’t stop destroying their lands and haze polluted their air. The multiple volcanic eruptions show a similar pattern. Communities near these volcanic zones received warnings only when ash was already settling on their roofs.
Why are predictive systems, early-warning alerts, and quick disaster response consistently treated as an afterthought?
The oil palm companies… benefit?
However, the most surreal and damning indictment of this entire tragedy lies not on the ground, but on the trading floors of the stock exchange.
When the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred in 2010, BP’s stock crashed by over 50 percent within weeks. Investors fled because they anticipated the inevitable corporate accountability: aggressive state prosecution, billions in regulatory fines, and massive operational sanctions.
In Indonesia, the market behaves in the opposite way. As fires destroy thousands of hectares and smoke darkens the skies, the stock prices of major palm oil and agribusiness firms do not crash. They surge. Crude palm oil futures near record highs, and market valuations rise as investors anticipate constrained supply and higher commodity prices.
How can a corporate sector facing widespread environmental destruction see its equity rise? Because global and local investors have already priced in government impunity. The market understands a cynical truth: there will be no massive corporate fines, no revoking of major concessions, and no structural consequences.
This moral and institutional failure cannot continue. We cannot claim to be a modern state while relying on reactionary crisis management and outdated legal frameworks.
What the government must do
We call on the government to act decisively: (1) evaluate the land-clearing exemption and its enforcement; (2) hold corporate actors — including their beneficial owners — accountable; and (3) prioritize disaster response preparedness by taking early warnings seriously.
Law enforcement must aggressively target the beneficial owners of land concessions where hotspots emerge. Fines must be set at levels that hit balance sheets hard enough to alter corporate behavior, alongside real civil liability and concession cancellations.
The smoke will eventually clear, as it always does when the monsoon rains arrive. But until the state aligns its laws with ecological reality and proves to the market that environmental destruction carries a ruinous price tag, the fires will return year after year.
How about making the companies with the concessions responsible for fire management on their concessions. Failure to control and extinguish a fire will result in a fine equal to the amount the government spends in controlling it. Failure to control two or more fires results in the removal of the concession.