Sharjah24 – Reuters: Indonesia's devastating forest fires in 2019 burned nearly twice as much land as was officially reported, according to a recent study, raising concerns among environmental campaigners over the government's transparency regarding deforestation.
The Southeast Asian country, which has the largest rainforests outside of the Amazon and Congo, has razed large swathes of land to accommodate its palm, pulp and paper industries.
The fires in 2019 blanketed Indonesia and the region with haze, causing 900,000 people to report respiratory illnesses and costing $5.2 billion in losses, the World Bank said.
The study published in the Earth System Science Data journal in November found 3.1 million hectares (7.7 million acres) were burned in 2019 - an area bigger than Belgium - compared to 1.6 million hectares reported by the forestry ministry.
"We observed a larger damaged area than official estimates because ground-breaking technology enabled us to detect more small burns and more very large ones," one of the study's authors, David Gaveau, told Reuters.
"We used better satellite data, machine learning and Google's super-computers."
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