JAKARTA — Activists have reported four companies — two industrial forest firms and two palm oil firms — to the local police over fires in their concessions in Central Kalimantan as Indonesia is grappling with its worst fire episode since 2019.
Most of the fires are in concessions that haven’t been cultivated yet, according to environmental NGO Save Our Borneo director Muhammad Habibi. However, these companies have never been prosecuted for the repeat burning in their concessions, he said. “If these four companies have preventive , then there’s no way the burning could reach thousands of hectares,” Aryo said., regardless of whether their negligence can be shown to have caused the burning — given that such evidence is difficult to produce.
Aryo said in 2015, the local police had actually named three companies as suspect, but it eventually dropped the case under the argument that the fires were located outside their concession boundaries. From January to September 2023, Walhi identified 184,223 fire spots in 642,099 hectares of land in Indonesia. Most of the fire spots are located within the concessions of 194 companies, and 38 of these concessions have a history of fires between 2015 and 2020.