Indonesia's fire emissions are on track to match this century's record: what an El Nino fire season means for palm oil and pulp supply chains

Indonesia's 2026 fire season had released 76 million tonnes of carbon by 7 September and is on track to match the 2015 season, the most intense of this century, according to Carbon Brief analysis of the Global Fire Emissions Database published on Friday. The 2015 fires burned 2.6 million hectares, emitted 333 million tonnes of carbon in total and produced a haze episode linked to more than 100,000 premature deaths across Southeast Asia. The fire season typically peaks in September and October, so the final 2026 figure depends on the coming weeks.

The driver is El Nino. The current event began in June 2026, is forecast to become one of the most intense on record and is expected to persist into 2027. Copernicus reported on Thursday that August was the joint hottest month ever recorded globally, and El Nino conditions amplify fire risk in Indonesia by creating hotter and drier conditions that make fires easier to ignite, faster to spread and much harder to control. The geography this year is different from 2015: Sumatra has had a quiet season so far, while Papua and neighbouring Papua New Guinea are seeing record burning.

Peat is what turns an Indonesian fire season into a global emissions event. Nisa Novita of Yayasan Konservasi Alam Nusantara told Carbon Brief that when peatlands are drained through canal development for agriculture the water table drops, and the dried peat then burns for weeks and releases carbon stored over millennia. Guido van der Werf of Wageningen University and Mark Parrington of the Copernicus Climate Change Service both cautioned that it is not yet clear how far restoration work since 2015 has reduced fire impacts. The dedicated peatland restoration agency set up after 2015 was dissolved in 2025.

For companies buying palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber or cocoa from Indonesia, this is a supply chain emissions and compliance story as much as a climate one. Fire on or near concessions feeds directly into land use change emissions under the GHG Protocol's land sector guidance and SBTi's FLAG pathway, and it is the kind of event that deforestation free sourcing commitments and the EU Deforestation Regulation, which applies to large operators from December 2026, are designed to surface. Sourcing teams should be checking hotspot alerts against supplier concession maps now rather than after the haze reaches the news.

The practical asks for ESG managers are concrete: identify which suppliers operate on peat, ask for their fire management and canal blocking plans, and expect questions from auditors and buyers about how fire related land emissions are reflected in Scope 3 reporting. A record fire year in a strong El Nino will also raise scrutiny of nature based credits from the region, including the soil and forest projects that corporate buyers have been contracting at scale.