Indonesia Fires Devastate 3 Million Hectares of Forest
11/25/98
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Title: Indonesia Fires Devastate 3 Million Hectares of Forest
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 11/25/98
Byline: Nick Edwards
SINGAPORE - Three million hectares of Indonesian tropical forest have been
destroyed by fire so far this year, an environmental disaster on the same
scale as 1997's smog crisis, an expert said on Monday.
"Our estimate for fire damage in 1998 is three million hectares (7.5
million acres)," Emmanuel Nabet, managing director of satellite operator
Spot Asia, told Reuters.
"More than five million hectares were burnt in 1997, so in 1998 we have
burning in the same order of magnitude," he said.
Wetter conditions brought by the La Nina weather phenomenon have helped
spare the region much of last year's smog, but they were insufficient to
douse all the fires, which caused extensive damage to endangered forest
land.
The devastation is well above initial estimates for this year, which
environmentalists had hoped would be a fraction of the area damaged by
fire in 1997.
No estimate has been put on the cost of this year's fires. But in 1997
blazes aggravated by drought caused by the El Nino weather system spewed
smog into the atmosphere across much of Southeast Asia, causing $4.4
billion worth of actual and consequential losses.
It had been hoped that better preparation, more precise fire fighting
efforts and wet weather brought by La Nina would reduce the risk of
extensive destruction of the endangered forest land.
But Nabet is hopeful a new satellite monitoring scheme expected to get the
green light in January from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) could boost
fire fighting efforts in 1999.
Spot Asia - which operates earth observation satellites - is one of
several companies bidding for the ADB project, now at the feasibility
study stage.
Among Spot Asia's fleet of satellites is the bus-sized Spot-4, launched in
March and able to take images of the entire globe every 24 hours.
"We hope to provide images not only of the area burnt, but overlay it with
images of the land cover burnt to help focus fire fighting resources on
the most at-risk vegetation," Nabet said.
Lim Hock, director of the National University of Singapore's Centre for
Remote Imaging, Sensing and Processing (CRISP) agreed more effort must go
into damage analysis.
CRISP's contract to provide monitoring services for Singapore's Ministry
of Environment as part of a regional haze action plan drawn up by
Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia comes up for renewal in 1999. The three
countries were the worst hit by the 1997 crisis.
"We are doing more than just monitoring the fires. We are doing a land
cover analysis and we are starting to look at the regneration process,
what is growing back first, what species of tree and plant. Just saying
the land is burnt is only half the information," Lim told Reuters.
(C) Reuters Limited 1998.