Human-induced climate change added about 1.6 degrees Celsius of heat to Indonesia’s fire season, turning an El Niño-driven drought into a regional crisis that burned roughly 1.9 million hectares of peatland and rainforest between August and October 2026, according to a rapid analysis released by World Weather Attribution.
A very strong El Niño served as the primary driver behind an extreme lack of rainfall that cut seasonal precipitation by roughly 50 percent over the three-month dry period, but record-breaking temperatures were overwhelmingly fueled by global warming, the research group found.
The conditions that we saw this year would simply just not have happened in a world without the human contribution to climate change, even with the very strong El Niño that we’re seeing, said Theodore Keeping, an extreme weather and wildfire researcher at Imperial College London.
September 2026 ranked as Indonesia’s fifth-driest September since 1991, with precipitation dropping below normal levels across 84 percent of the country, The Jakarta Post reported. El Niño contributed an additional 0.3 degrees Celsius of warming to the season.
“Especially on the temperature effects of El Niño, we have already seen in past years … that the effect of climate change is surpassing the effect of El Niño in many cases,” said Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London, according to Conservation news.
Decades of intensive alterations compounded the weather extremes. Between 1990 and 2010, peat swamp forest cover dropped by 45 percent in Borneo and 63 percent in Sumatra as a result of industrial agricultural drainage and logging operations.
“Indonesian lands have changed dramatically over the last 30 years, with extensive peatland drainage and deforestation creating a setting that is extremely vulnerable to ignition,” said Pramudhian Firdaus, a wildfire researcher at Melbourne University.
The Indonesian government is prioritizing the rewetting of degraded peatland, repairing canal blocks, and implementing revegetation projects, according to Satyawan Pudyatmoko, Head of the National Peatland and Mangrove Management Agency (BPGMN), ANTARA News reported. Authorities plan to establish water-management coordination with local communities and introduce wetland farming methods, such as cultivating pineapples, aloe vera, and sago, to generate economic output without draining local water tables.
Smoke from the fires extended across national boundaries, affecting Malaysia and Singapore. Nusantara Atlas satellite data cited by Reuters showed that by the end of September, approximately 1.92 million hectares had burned across the country.
Data released by the independent geo-monitoring platform indicated that the total affected territory reached almost 2.88 million hectares from January to October 2026, surging by nearly 1 million hectares during October alone. The amount of fire-damaged land in the first three quarters of the year was 35 percent higher than in the same period of 2019, the last year Indonesia faced strong “super-El Niño” conditions, Nusantara Atlas said.
Demonstrations emerged in Indonesia and Malaysia as communities demanded stronger action. The transboundary smoke disrupted daily activities, schools, and flights in Malaysia and Singapore.