- Greenpeace has released footage from a UAV showing burning forests and smoldering peatlands in Borneo.
- The video shows fires burning on peatlands, rainforests, and oil palm plantations surrounding Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan.
- Vast areas of Gunung Palung’s buffer zone forests and swampy peatlands have been drained and cleared for rubber, palm oil, timber, and pulp production.
Greenpeace has released dramatic drone video footage showing burning forests and smoldering peatlands in Borneo.
The video shows fires burning on peatlands, rainforests, and oil palm plantations surrounding Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan. Gunung Palung is one of the most biodiverse places in Southeast Asia, home to a large population of endangered orangutans.
The park has been hard hit by illegal logging. But outside the park the situation is even worse: vast areas of Gunung Palung’s buffer zone forests and swampy peatlands have been drained and cleared for rubber, palm oil, timber, and pulp production.
Like the fires currently raging across the island of Sumatra, fires in Indonesian Borneo are producing a choking haze — causing large-scale health problems — and releasing millions of tons of long locked-away carbon into the atmosphere. Accordingly, Greenpeace called the situation “Indonesia’s carbon bomb“.
“As governments prepare to meet in Paris to save the world from catastrophic warming, the earth in Indonesia is already on fire,” said Bustar Maitar, Indonesian Forest Project Leader for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, in a statement. “Companies destroying forests and draining peatland have made Indonesia’s landscape into a huge carbon bomb, and the drought has given it a thousand fuses. The Indonesian government can no longer turn a blind eye to this destruction when half of Asia is living with the consequences.”
“These fires are a harsh reminder of the pulp and palm oil industry’s legacy of destruction,” he added. “Unilateral no-deforestation policies are not working. Companies must eliminate the economic incentive to trash forests with an industry-wide ban on trade with anyone that clears forest.”
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