https://bezerocarbon.com/insights/tracking-indonesia-s-fires-as-el-nino-intensifies
BeZero has produced a useful and timely analysis on the situation for many conservation projects in Indonesia right now.
Fire season always poses a challenge for projects like the Katingan Mentaya Project, but this year’s El Niño conditions have tested the protections to the extreme. That those protections have largely held, bar breaches at particularly vulnerable boundary points, demonstrates the importance of the fire mitigation investment that is enabled by carbon finance.
As BeZero makes clear, the hotspot alerts identified here do not translate directly into fires on the ground nor emissions from fire damage. They do not correlate directly with burnt area. The alerts are satellite-derived detections of heat concentrations, or thermal anomalies, which may indicate fire activity. However, they can also be associated with other sources of heat, including residual heat from previous fires and smouldering, particularly in peatland ecosystems.
With rains forecast in the region in the coming days, we are expecting that the fire threats will lessen rapidly.
Field analysis will start immediately so we can assess the impact of fire on the project area. For complete transparency, we will publish the results as soon as they are ready.
Our current assessment is that the project has been affected less than it was under the El Niño conditions of 2015. The project has meaningfully greater monitoring and field capacity a decade on, which has meant that hotspots have been addressed more rapidly than in previous years, enabling the project to better combat incidents of fire immediately as they occur. However, any emissions caused by fires will be calculated and deducted from the 2026 monitoring period, which will be audited and verified next year, as required under the reporting standard.
Credits that have already been issued, sold or retired are entirely unaffected.
As well as assessing the damage, our project team are already preparing for active restoration through the planting of seedlings in the burned areas.
We are also collecting evidence on the fire prevention measures that worked well and what needs to be improved going forward so that we can further invest in strategies that will restore the zero-fire status in the project area.