Article source: Carbon Brief
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Indonesia's wildfires are tracking toward emissions levels that match the century's worst year on record. The scale matters because Indonesia's fire-driven carbon releases dwarf most national emission inventories – the 2015 El Niño-driven fires released roughly 1.5 gigatonnes of CO2, briefly making Indonesia the world's third-largest emitter that year. We're now seeing similar conditions emerge in 2026, driven by the current El Niño cycle and drought conditions that leave peatlands and forests tinder-dry.
This isn't a footnote in global climate accounts. Indonesia's peatland fires are disproportionately carbon-dense because peat stores centuries of accumulated vegetation – burning it releases both current biomass and prehistoric carbon in rapid succession. Yet these emissions sit in an awkward policy space: they're not consistently counted in national carbon accounting frameworks, they're episodic (El Niño-dependent), and they fall outside most corporate scope 3 supply-chain protocols unless a company sources palm oil or timber directly from fire-affected zones.
The real problem is predictability and prevention. If 2026 emissions replicate 2015 levels, Indonesia will have released as much carbon in a single year as many nations emit over a decade – but through a mechanism that policy frameworks treat as a natural disaster rather than a governance failure. Land-use and forest management standards exist; enforcement and early-warning systems do not operate at the scale needed. For companies with Indonesian supply chains, this matters immediately: fire risk is now a material climate scenario, not a marginal one.