Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: Wildfires are burning vast swaths of rainforest and peatland in Indonesia, Southeast Asian leaders address the U.N. General Assembly, and Bangkok floods displace thousands of people.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: Wildfires are burning vast swaths of rainforest and peatland in Indonesia, Southeast Asian leaders address the U.N. General Assembly, and Bangkok floods displace thousands of people.

Indonesia’s Worst-Ever Fires?

Indonesia may be on track for its worst-ever year of fires.

Wildfires have burned vast swaths of rainforest and peatland in Indonesia in September. The smoke has grown so thick as to drift across borders and oceans to Singapore; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and even Manila, Philippines.

The fire season will likely continue until November, according to Suharyanto, the head of Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB). The dry season this year is particularly long thanks to the advent of El Niño.

From January to August, nearly 900,000 hectares of land burned, according to data from Nusantara Atlas, an open-access mapping platform that uses peer review satellite data to survey the damage. This is more than in August 2019, the worst year recorded by that organization.

It is possible that 2015 was even worse than 2019, but that’s hard to say definitively. For that year, we have to rely on government estimates, which are hard to compare directly with Nusantara Atlas due to different methodologies. And for 2026, government data so far only goes up to July, so we lack up-to-date estimates.

Regardless, this is clearly an extremely bad year. So, what’s causing it?

Plantation agriculture is the fundamental underlying cause of the catastrophic forest fires of modern days. As Indonesia’s Kompas newspaper cleverly made clear in its reports this month, fire hotspots overlap almost perfectly with the density of plantations.

Plantations worsen the situation in a variety of ways. Clearing and logging build up debris that then serves as fuel. Waterlogged peatland is drained to create plantation land, turning fire-resistant areas into tinderboxes where flames can smolder long underground. And during the dry season, companies and small farmers alike often use fire to clear land to prepare it for planting. But these can easily spiral out of control.

Making matters worse this year is the current El Niño, which BNPB head Suharyanto described as particularly severe, causing a longer and hotter dry season. Research has found that this climatic phenomenon was the biggest factor behind annual variation in fire size in Indonesia. A one-degree Celsius increase in the sea surface temperature anomaly in the central Pacific corresponded with a 50 percent increase in hotspot........

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