The fires in Central Kalimantan are real. In 2023, the fire engulfed around 1 million hectares. Since the late 1990s, the magnitude of forest fires and haze disasters have increased. The 2015 crisis, with 2.6 million hectares burned, was a significant event that urged the government to acknowledge and respond to these disasters. The fires destroy flora and fauna and impact people’s health, everyday life, and sense of self and community. Beyond those who are directly affected by the disaster, wider community engagement with these problems is limited. This is due not only to lack of media attention, but also to the nature of conventional news reporting in the ‘(c)old’ print and broadcast media, which tend to situate the fires in geographically and emotionally faraway places.

On 24 December 2023, Sri Mulyani, the Indonesian minister of finance looked optimistic. In her address to the high-level round table on the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) initiated by the COP28 Presidency and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), she conveyed that Indonesia had successfully contributed 15 per cent of the total Asian VCM. With a carbon offsetting transaction value amounting up to US$163 million for the period 2016 to 2020, and with 464,843 tonnes of CO2 sold at the Indonesian Carbon Exchange, she declared that the carbon market ‘shows a promising future potential.’

In the last decade, locals in Pulau Hanaut subdistrict, Central Kalimantan, have gradually become entangled in wildfire protection through a set of government regulations, ranging from presidential instructions, to provincial, regency, and even sub-district regulations. The Ecosystem Restoration project through PT Rimba Makmur Utama is tasked with protecting the forest area surrounding Pulau Hanaut, and invites locals to take on these responsibilities, especially when confronted by wildfires. This project has disrupted fire practices for agricultural purposes. For locals in this region the options for alternative livelihoods are limited, as is the compensation offered to them by authorities.

One morning in September 2023, my breakfast was interrupted suddenly by news of the arrest of a villager suspected of starting a fire in the nearby forest. A few days later I met the Mendawai chief of police, who told me that the suspect was discovered by a patrol team near a newly burnt area. The officers chased him through a peat swamp, while five other suspects escaped. Later that night, family members of the suspect come to the police station, begging for the case to be resolved out of court. The chief of police explained that there was nothing he could do, as forest fires are a major concern for the national government.

‘Miss, it will be better if you find a shaded place to stand. Let your male colleague take the pictures if you need documentation.’ This is the instruction Pak Rahim, leader of the community fire brigade in Tumbang Bulan village, gave to researcher, Hanina. It was a scorching hot afternoon and Hanina and her colleague Hafiz had accompanied the team to this fire site in Mendawai sub-district, Central Kalimantan, to observe their operations.

Following a seemingly fire-free period of more than three years, major fires yet again raged across the Indonesian archipelago in 2023, wiping out at least 1.16 million hectares of forest areas, mostly in Kalimantan and Sumatra. While considered ‘milder’ than previous fire disasters in 2019 and 2015, the 2023 conflagration still caused massive health, economic, and ecological impacts to people in Indonesia and also neighbouring countries. In Indonesian society these recent devastating fires also reignited a debate that accords disproportionate blame on Indigenous Peoples and their traditional agricultural practices.