Up in smoke

The brownish haze, sometimes more than a mile thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. During the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan. Sometimes the cloud drifts as far east as California.

-- U.N. Report Sees New Pollution Threat.

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Even if they escape the chainsaw, Indonesia's embattled tropical forests face a serious threat from drought-induced fires. That's the conclusion of researchers who have been monitoring fire-damaged plots in the south of Sumatra.

By studying the year-by-year recovery of [ fire-damaged plots in the south of Sumatra] - some of which had also been burned in an earlier El Niño in 1982 - Margaret Kinnaird of the Wildlife Conservation Society and her colleagues developed a model describing how the forest regenerates. This shows that if El Niños matching the 1997 event occur twice a decade, the prospects are dim: a 46 per cent loss of forest cover over the next century..

Unfortunately, El Niños seem to be getting more frequent and severe, so this is plausible. Protecting the forests is possible, says Kinnaird. "But you've got to have good fire management. Indonesia doesn't have that."

-- from Indonesia's forests could go up in smoke.

How to destroy a planet

From the drainage of its peatlands alone Indonesia is producing 632 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. But from its annual forest fires, it produces another 1,400 million tonnes. That's a total of 2,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The Netherlands emits 80 million.

-- Marcel Silvius, a senior programme manager for Wetlands International, speaking to Lucy Williamson (Smoking out the world's lungs).

If these figures are accurate it means that per capita emissions for Indonesia (220 million people), not including combustion of fossil fuels, are nearly twice those of the Netherlands (15 million), including fossil fuels and all other sources.