Over the past six weeks, members of the team at the Katingan Mentaya Project have been managing fire risk around the clock. They have been working in extreme heat, dense acrid smoke, and tackling flames that can shift directions as quickly as the wind changes. Despite the ferocity and extent of the fires in the region, their efforts have meant that the project has remained protected and damage to the surrounding area has been limited.
For me and other members of the team who have watched from afar throughout the summer as our colleagues have put themselves in harm’s way time and time again, it is with a mixture of awe, sympathy, and enormous gratitude at what they have achieved so far.
At the time of writing, we are perhaps halfway through what has been one of the most severe fire seasons in living memory for the region. The development of this supercharged El Niño has been well reported around the world1, but through our colleagues we have had the grim privilege of glimpsing what it is like to be in the field. Rushing to the latest hotspot alert, wearing masks against the thick coppery smoke that claws at throats and eyes; cutting paths through dried, knotted bracken and clearing fire brakes; linking hoses to pump motors to bore holes and lining out in well-practised formations to drive back the advancing fire as it tears through tinder-dry low-lying vegetation.
What is particularly evident from reading our internal reports and scrolling through the WhatsApp chats is how little of the work happening now is reactive. Almost all of it was prepared months ago.
Preparation
Fire planning at Katingan Mentaya Project begins with maps and data from previous years’ fires. Each of the six management zones is assessed for how likely it is to burn and why, drawing on biophysical conditions, land use and land cover, the history of fires and hotspots in that place, socio-economic pressures, and the knowledge of people who have lived alongside the peat their whole lives. Out of that comes a set of zone-specific protocols: who does what, in what order, under which scenario.
The teams rehearse the plans through the wetter months, run protocols and test equipment. The zone teams spend this time maintaining firebreaks, reducing surface fuel in the places the maps flag, digging wells and building water ponds, and planting fire-resistant native species such as galam and tumih as living buffers. Village fire teams, the Regu Siaga Api, patrol their own stretches of forest on plans they draw up themselves, with support from the project team.
Technology
The technology used today has changed dramatically over the lifetime of the project. In 2015, the project was working from monitoring reports and radio. By 2019 it had near real-time NASA FIRMS data and an improvised system that scraped GPS coordinates out of email alerts and texted them to field staff. Today satellite feeds from four sources are cross-checked daily against the project’s own peat water table and fire danger readings, thermal drones fly out to confirm whether a hotspot is a fire or a sun-heated roof, and predicted fire spread arrives on a team leader’s phone. What has not changed is that teams must still walk into the smoke, with hoses and water pump motors to douse flames and machetes to clear fire breaks.
Fighting fires
August proceeded roughly as the maps had suggested it might, reassuringly demonstrating the effectiveness of the modelling.
The project management raised the internal status to Fire Emergency Response on 7 August, after a fire took hold on community land near Batuah, outside the Unit II boundary. From there, the teams worked nine separate fire locations along the canal systems of Pulau Hanaut, and across Batuah and Terantang Hilir in Seranau. Every one of those fires started and were managed outside the project. At times the front was within 50 metres of our southern boundary. Crews cut a 1.4 kilometre defence line along Secondary Canal 6 and held it. In the second half of the month, while fighting fires, the Pulau Hanaut teams also built 16 new canal blocks, 69 new water reservoirs and 16 new dug wells. The lesson of every previous El Niño dry season is that you cannot have too much water in too many places.
By the end of August, 171 people were on the line in the two most exposed zones. Most of them live in the villages around the project. The people putting their lives at risk to fight these fires are protecting a forest that is also their catchment, their fishing ground, their air.
September
On 2 September we recorded an indication of fire at the south-western corner of the project. Firefighters were onsite and were pushing the fire back. It is a live issue, but as of right now, it is under control. Any fire encroachments into the project that might happen will need to be analysed and reported first to the Government of Indonesia and also to Verra, where any credit deductions are calculated2.
As for the rest of the season, BMKG expects the dry season to end nationally around the middle of October, with rain reaching western Indonesia in October and spreading in November3. Its own provincial forecast has Central Kalimantan receiving under 100 millimetres in September, and less than that in the southern districts where the deepest peat lies4.
For anyone in the region, having to breathe such poor quality air is an extreme health issue unto itself, but in-house health and safety experts are in the field with our teams and we are hugely grateful that every effort is being made to keep colleagues and the communities we are working with safe.
Credits
Canal blocks take time and resource. As do the 559 bore wells, 198 reservoirs, ten watchtowers, a CCTV tower, 251 pump engines, 1,219 rolls of hose, 19 drones, five permanent brigade teams, or 35 village fire teams funded through a dry season. All of that is recurring expenditure, and most of it has to be committed in the months when there is no fire and no news. These actions are possible because the project sells carbon credits, and it exists at this scale because it has been able to do so for a decade.
The Stockholm Environment Institute looked at six VCS-certified REDD+ projects in 2023 and found that the Katingan Mentaya Project had lost a lower share of tree cover and seen significantly fewer fires than its comparison areas, concluding that it had generated what the authors called excess fire mitigation. It was the only one of the six with statistically significant results.5
Conditions this year are harder than in any previous year for the project, including the El Niño years 2014-16, 2018-19, 2023-24. If the preparation holds and fire damage is reduced from what would have happened in the absence of the project, this tells us something real about what carbon finance buys.
Beyond carbon accounting
Undrained peat holds an extraordinary quantity of carbon; drained peat can burn which releases it; Indonesia holds around 36% of the world’s tropical peatlands; the 2015 fires put an estimated 1.75 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent into the atmosphere in about three months.6 Every hectare held this year is a very large number of tonnes not emitted.
Indonesia’s health ministry has recorded 50,891 cases of acute respiratory infection across seven provinces in July and August, 12,600 of them in children under five, and reckons that 10.6 million people have been affected by the smoke.7 Schools in Palangka Raya have been closed to under-15s for a week.8 The haze has shut schools in Sarawak and pushed Singapore’s air quality into the unhealthy band for the first time since 2023.9 A firefighter in West Kalimantan told the ABC this month that conditions in 2026 are worse than 2015, and that the water sources have begun to dry up.10
The project’s forest itself holds somewhere between 1,881 and 3,768 Bornean orangutans, a Critically Endangered species, along with five other Critically Endangered and fifteen Endangered animals recorded inside the project area.11 They have nowhere else to go.
When people ask what a forest carbon project is for, in one sense the answer is: tonnes avoided, credits issued, baselines renewed. But it is far more than that. It is hundreds of people, most of them local, standing in smoke at the edge of a peat dome in the worst dry season in living memory, holding a line they spent years preparing to hold.