article by David Fogarty at HuffPost Green
Sumatra’s forests are on fire again, less than a year after blazes burned large areas and covered Singapore and parts of Malaysia in thick smoke.
While the fires in Indonesia might seem far away for many people, they are everyone’s problem. Many of the blazes are on deep peat lands, producing huge plumes of smoke and large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are stoking climate change. This year’s fires are just as intense and threaten a far worse fire emergency because of unusually dry weather that is set to continue for some months. Worse still, there are increasing signs of an El Nino weather pattern for later this year.
El Nino events usually bring drier weather to Indonesia and a spike in forest fires, with the intense 1997-98 El Nino triggering some of the worst fires in living memory in Indonesia.
This excerpt from a news article appeared in and is courtesy of HuffPost Green and can be read in its entirety here.
