This time around, the entire burned area is peatland, all of it in the single district of Pesisir Selatan, prompting environmental activists to call for an investigation. Also in 2019, only 858 hectares (2,120 acres) of the burned land in West Sumatra was peatland. The area burned so far this year is already triple the total from the particularly intense fire season of 2019, when 2,133 hectares (5,271 acres) of land was torched in West Sumatra, out of a total of 1.65 million hectares (4.08 million acres) nationwide, according to official data. While the island of Sumatra is a hotspot for fires in Indonesia, with provinces like South Sumatra, Riau and Jambi routinely having some of the largest fires in the country - set deliberately to clear land ahead of planting - West Sumatra has historically had fewer and smaller fires. Most of the burning occurred between March 24 and April 20. 28 and April 23, according to satellite data from forest monitoring platform Nusantara Atlas. The fires burned 6,168 hectares (15,241 acres) of peatlands - an area 18 times the size of New York City’s Central Park - in the district of Pesisir Selatan, West Sumatra province, between Jan. JAKARTA - Fires in areas of carbon-intense peatland forest on the island of Sumatra appear to have been set in and around oil palm plantation concessions and could signal the start of another season of forest-razing burns in Indonesia.
Fires have swept through large swaths of peatland forest in the western part of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island since the start of the year, an area that usually sees much smaller, controlled fires.
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