Add Category
Kalimantan, Indonesia (CNN) — Deep within the jungles of Indonesian Borneo, illegal fires rage, creating apocalyptic red skies and smoke that has spread as far as Malaysia and Singapore.
People are choking. Animals are dying.
This is no ordinary fire. It was lit for you.
Farmers are clearing land the fastest way they know how to cash in on growing demand for palm oil, which is used in half of all supermarket products, from chocolate to shampoo.
They’re not only burning the forest, they’re destroying the peatlands that lie beneath it -- the world’s largest natural terrestrial carbon sink.
Experts say the annual infernos have ignited a climate bomb with disastrous consequences for the world in years to come.
And the fires will keep burning, they say, until Western consumers say no.
Firefighters work in tropical heat, breathing toxic air, for as little as $8 a day.
Some fires are so remote they must travel more than an hour in wooden boats loaded with equipment, then hike several miles through the jungle.
At the fire front, they dig makeshift wells and rig up generators to pump water to douse the flames.
“We are fighting here almost two weeks already ... stay in here, sleep in here,” Krisyoyo, leader of a patrol team with the Center for International Sustainable Tropical Peatland (CIMTROP) says, as he hoses down flames. “The fire (is) coming I think from humans,” says Krisyoyo, who like many Indonesians only goes by one name.
About 9,000 firefighters were deployed to fight the fires on the ground this summer.
Helicopters are bombing them from above.
CNN boarded a Soviet-designed Mi-8 helicopter for a water-bombing mission near the epicenter of the fires over Central Kalimantan.
Ukrainian pilot Ivan Kravchenko hovered his aircraft over the Kahayan River and scooped up 4,000 liters of water in a giant bucket hanging from a hole in the floor of the chopper. It was then dumped on the flames -- a process repeated dozens of times during our flight.
Kravchenko is one of a team of specialist pilots, many of whom have been brought in from Kazakhstan and Ukraine, who fly up to three missions a day.
“Whole time dangerous,” says Kravchenko. “Because it’s all flight at low altitude and sometimes in bad visibility, so we need to be very careful.”
They can never be sure if the fire is out.
Fires smolder deep underground in thick layers of dead plant matter –- peatlands -- and can reignite almost as soon as they’re extinguished.
“When they start burning, it feels like a losing battle,” says Alpius Patanan, head of the local emergency operations division.
These fires were ignited by humans, but can only be put out by nature.
“My hope is rain will be coming faster, and rain hard,” Krisyoyo says. “Hopefully our forest (will) still (be) standing, for the future.”
At the peak of the fires in September, the sky turned orange.
“It was just like science fiction,” says Dr Kevin Sutrapura from Palangkaraya Hospital, the main hospital in Central Kalimantan.
“It’s always like an orange filter, everything is orange … it was dark here, like 12 o’clock in the afternoon, it feels like 5 p.m.”
This summer, nearly 920,000 people were treated for acute respiratory problems caused by the fires, according to the Indonesia’s disaster agency.
“People were coming, panicking,” says Sutrapura.
“We decided to open an oxygen house, where people could start to use oxygen, in there we could screen which ones are the patients who need another type of advanced medical care.”
Many of the people who needed treatment came from small villages.
Palm oil may be exposing many in this developing country of 264 million people to severe health risks.
Yet it’s also bringing wealth.
“Before I grew palm fruit, I couldn’t afford to often feed chicken to my children,” says Talan, an oil palm farmer from Berau, East Kalimantan. “(Now) I can feed them different foods including chicken. I can also afford to buy appliances like a TV and a refrigerator.”
Talan is one of the smallholders that make up around 40% of Indonesia’s palm oil producers.
He farms two hectares of land with a total of 400 oil palm trees, which he harvests twice a month.
He says he has quadrupled his monthly earnings to $400, compared to when he farmed rice or rubber a decade ago.
Village chief Surya Emi Susianthi says palm oil has transformed the entire community.
“Years ago, many here did not have cars and their children did not go to school because they couldn’t afford to pay school fees,” Susianthi says.
“But after growing palm trees, they can buy cars, build good houses and put their children in school.”
Borneo is home to one of the world’s oldest rainforests.
It’s a living, breathing natural history museum filled with 15,000 plants, 420 types of bird and 222 mammals -- many of them unique to Borneo.
The known inhabitants include pygmy elephants, clouded leopards, sun bears, mouse deer, flying fox bats, pangolins, and most famous of all, the Bornean orangutan.
One of the closest genetic relatives to humans, these great apes share 97% of our DNA.
Orangutan even translates to ‘man of the forest’ in Indonesian.
“Orangutans are incredible animals in many ways, they’re very human-like,” says Mark Harrison, a Co-Director for the Borneo Nature Foundation who studied orangutans for a PhD.
“They have very complicated social lives and they’re really intelligent animals.”
But these precious mammals are now one of the most critically endangered species on the planet.
Popi arrived at the Center for Orangutan Protection (COP) when she was a few weeks old.
The charity, in Berau, East Kalimantan, is Indonesia’s only orangutan rehabilitation center founded and run by local staff.
Many of the rescued animals are victims of deforestation, including Popi.
“Popi is too lazy today. She just wants to play with the human,” release handler Nursanti says, as she nudges the baby orangutan up a tree trunk in the forest.
Almost every day, the staff escort the orangutans into the jungle for what they term “forest school,” so they can learn how to climb trees, find food and make nests.
The aim is for successful pupils to graduate to “college” -- COP’s orangutan island on the nearby Kelay River.
There, they are left alone, but regularly fed and monitored, and if they adapt well, they will eventually be released into the wild.
CNN takes a trip to orangutan island on a long, narrow, motorized canoe.
There, we find Michelle, an eight-year-old female who was released onto the island in May. She is not doing well.
She lumbers towards our boat when we come near, and appears to want to interact with us. But orangutans don’t like water, so she quickly edges away from the shoreline.
Later, we see her swinging in the trees. Her handlers say she usually spends too much time on the ground for an arboreal species, and she relies mostly on them to bring her food.
It’s dangerous for orangutans to be too tame.
“The predator is not only the animal but also the human,” Nursanti says. “Sometimes we try to make them afraid, then they can survive.”
"Last year we found an orangutan hit with 130 bullets,” says COP Director Ramadhani, who goes by one name.
The orangutan was found by villagers in East Kutai, in East Kalimantan. It was taken for treatment to the Kutai National Park in nearby Bontang, but died of its injuries.
At the local district court, authorities say the four accused in the case were each found guilty and sentenced to seven months in prison and fines of 50 million rupiah (about US$ 3,500). But then the fine was replaced by two months in jail, making a total sentence of nine months each.
In Indonesia, it’s illegal to kill orangutans -- punishable by up to five years in prison and a 100 million rupiah fine ($7,100). But Ramadhani says the penalties are too weak to act as a deterrent.
He says the orangutans’ real enemy is palm oil.
“Please no more. Just stop it,” Ramadhani says of the forest-clearing operations. “I think it’s enough palm oil in here.”
“My dream is in 20 years, I bring my daughter, (and) go to the forest,” he says, his eyes welling up with tears. “Real forest where they can eat fruit, they can see the animals, real animals, not in a zoo. I want my daughter to see that.”
A different sort of human threat to the orangutan habitat may also be on the horizon: the planned move of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta -- the fastest-sinking city on earth, due to rising sea levels -- to a largely unsettled part of Borneo in East Kalimantan.
The government says the development will not harm the environment, but campaigners are concerned.
“There needs to be a very clear policy and implementation (on) how to reduce the impact of having that new capital,” says Annisa Rahmawati, a forest campaigner for Greenpeace Indonesia. “There is a potential natural reserve in there, (which) will be destroyed and damaged.”
Indonesia is in the midst of a modern-day gold rush.
In less than 20 years, the country’s palm oil exports have surged almost 1,500% to $20.7 billion in 2017. It’s now the country’s number one export.
Indonesia supplies more than half of the world’s palm oil.