Many living in Southeast Asia – and even those outside the region – will remember the 2015 transboundary haze crisis. The World Bank put the economic cost to Indonesia at more than $16 billion. Simultaneously, researchers from Harvard and Columbia universities estimated that the smoke caused upwards of 100,000 premature deaths across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.

These fires – which were lit to prepare the land for agriculture and then burned out of control – were exacerbated by lower than average rainfall during the dry season, resulting from the El Niño.

Scientists predict that extreme El Niño and La Niña events will become more frequent in the 21st century, intensifying existing hazards such as forest fires. While neither El Niño nor La Niña conditions are currently prevailing, many fear that in the wake of Covid-19, this dry season will be just as deadly.

Understanding Forest Fires

For millennia, hunter-gatherers have used fires in slash-and-burn agriculture with few detrimental effects on biological diversity. The threat we face today is largely a result of land-use policies that encourage logging, plantation establishment, and large-scale ranching, underpinned by weak governance.

People light forest fires for many reasons. Some are started for practical and beneficial purposes (seed germination and regeneration, for example), some are accidental, and others are deliberately lit to damage. All have the potential to harm forest ecosystems and surrounding communities.

In Indonesia and Malaysia – the source of 85 percent of the world’s palm oil – fire is often used as a cheap and simple land management tool. For poorer people, it is often the only option. This year, as farmers struggle to make up financial shortfalls, there is a real risk that many will resort to land clearance by burning.

These fires are particularly dangerous because many of them occur on drained peatlands. Dry peat ignites easily and can smolder underground long after flames on the surface have been extinguished.

Moreover, damaged peatlands are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. The fires in Indonesia released between 15-20 million tonnes of CO2 per day over September and October 2015 – more than the entire US economy's emissions over the same timeframe.

Technology Shows Promise

Over the last few years, however, several technological innovations have emerged to help us prevent and respond to these fires more effectively.

• Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensors

IoT devices and sensors measure environmental changes – such as atmospheric temperature, relative humidity, and carbon dioxide levels – allowing for early-stage detection and warning. They also provide valuable forest and climate parameters for fire propagation models.

Wilmar adopts remote sensing technologies to monitor practices on-the-ground and identify fire spots. They also provide concession maps to the World Resources Institute for inclusion in their Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform. GFW uses satellite imagery and data analytics to identify fires to the precision of one square kilometer, allowing Wilmar to mobilize follow-up action on the ground.

• Drones

When it comes to halting the spread of fires and limiting damage, timing is critical. There’s only a small containment window between the fire starting and raging out of control. Drones give firefighters a bird’s eye view of the terrain and real-time information on the transmission path. Quick to launch and more cost-effective than helicopters, they help emergency services develop plans to contain the blaze.

Many palm oil growers are now integrating drones into their fire-fighting arsenal. Golden Agri-Resources (GAR), for example, deploys drones across all its plantations. With satellite surveillance, they enable faster detection and confirmation and, in turn, the faster response by GAR’s emergency response team.

• Machine-Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Machine-learning and AI are increasingly being applied to large datasets to identify environmental threats, such as deforestation, which increase the risk of major fires.

Deforestation by illegal logging is a perennial problem in the industry - not least because these areas are where fires burn at the highest severity and highest rate of spread. To date, producers and consumers have relied upon monitoring tools that use satellite imagery, but detection can be delayed when clouds obstruct plantations' view.

A new, publicly-available radar-based forest monitoring system represents a significant breakthrough. Funded by a coalition of ten major palm oil producers and buyers, Radar Alerts for Detecting Deforestation (RADD) uses advances in radar and machine-learning methods to help companies and other stakeholders detect deforestation happening in near real-time and with greater accuracy. Preliminary results from pilots in Indonesia and Malaysia indicate that the system can identify tropical deforestation several weeks earlier than optical-based systems.

AI also opens up the possibility of mining social media for insights that inform haze disaster management at different emergency stages. Artificial Intelligence for Digital Response (AIDR) is an open-source software platform that uses supervised machine learning and artificial intelligence to filter and classify thousands of social media messages per minute.

Although humanitarian agencies have mainly used this during natural disasters, it’s easy to see how it could be used to prioritize haze disaster response activities by public authorities.

• GIS

The use of fire to clear land is completely banned within all Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) member concessions. To keep our members accountable, we use monitoring tools, such as Global Forest Watch Fire, ESRI ArcGIS GIS Software Suite, PlanetScope High-Resolution satellite imagery, and NASA Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS). These allow us to identify potential non-compliance quickly.

When a hotspot is detected, we contact the member to encourage them to conduct a field verification and take appropriate action.

Since January 2018, we have made information about members’ concessions, land cover, and active hotspots publicly available on our website through our interactive map application GeoRSPO. This further strengthens supply chain traceability and transparency.

Last year, we detected 1,403 hotspots within RSPO member concessions from a total of 463,952 hotspots across Malaysia and Indonesia. Hotspots in RSPO concessions, therefore, represent approximately 0.30 percent of all hotspots detected. This is encouraging but also signals the need for stronger national monitoring and investigation frameworks.

Good Governance 

In 2015, Indonesia’s National Agency for Aviation and Space calculated that 500,000 hectares of palm oil concessions were burnt between June to October,  representing 20 percent of the total burnt area. Technology can go some way to reducing the incidence of these fires. Still, ultimately, it must be coupled with a long-term commitment to sustainable land management and good governance of natural resources.

For the palm oil sector, we need a coherent governance architecture that fosters complementarities and resolves disconnects between public regulations and private standards. Governments have the coercive power to mandate sustainable production practices through national policies and regulations. Simultaneously, private standards, such as the RSPO, can influence behavior through market access and premium pricing incentives.

To truly eliminate forest fires and haze, we need both governance and technology – and public and private actors – working together in harmony.

Tiur Rumondang is the director of Indonesia operation at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)