The wildfires have been burning in the peatlands for weeks, belching acrid smoke over Jakarta in Indonesian [ADDRESS]. In the capital, everyone in Alfian [PERSON_NAME]’s family has developed coughs. The thick haze has forced schools to temporarily suspend classes, including for Mr. [PERSON_NAME]’s four children, whose noses are running from the smoke. Local officials have distributed masks and urged people to stay indoors, but Mr. [PERSON_NAME], 37, the owner of a chicken slaughterhouse, said he does not have that luxury. "We all have to work to earn a living, right?" he said in a phone interview. "We know we are risking our health, but what choice do we have?"

Wildfires are a seasonal occurrence in many parts of [ADDRESS], so this trade-off is nothing new for Mr. [PERSON_NAME]. But there is reason to fear that this year may be especially bad, according to experts. [ADDRESS] is in the grip of a "super" [PERSON_NAME] that will likely suppress the rains that would otherwise extinguish the fires. And the fire season has yet to peak.

"The question now is whether the current acceleration continues through September and October and first two weeks of November," said [PERSON_NAME], a landscape ecologist and the founder of Nusantara Atlas, a website that tracks fires and deforestation in the region. "New mega fires may appear in southern [ADDRESS] in September," he added, referring to [ADDRESS]’s third-largest island. As of Aug. 20, there were more than 224,000 hot spots suggesting fire activity across [ADDRESS], according to Nusantara Atlas’s satellite data. Mr. [PERSON_NAME] said that this was an unusually high number that resembled the trend in 2019, one of [ADDRESS]’s worst fire seasons, in which as much as 7.7 million acres of land burned.

Many of [ADDRESS]’s most devastating fire seasons have developed during strong El Niño events, in which the warming of the central [ADDRESS] shifts rain patterns, drenching some areas while drying out others. In 2015, another El Niño year, the government said about 6.4 million acres burned, sending smoke beyond [ADDRESS]’s borders. A study by researchers from Harvard and Columbia universities later estimated that the haze from the fires contributed to around 100,000 premature deaths across [ADDRESS], [ADDRESS] and [ADDRESS].

Though El Niño has historically been a major accelerant for fires, experts point to the widespread degradation of [ADDRESS]’s peatlands as the underlying reason for the country’s growing fire risk over the past few decades. In their natural state, peatlands, a type of spongy wetland that makes up around 10 percent of the country’s total land mass, are resistant to fire because they are composed of waterlogged decaying organic matter. But decades of industrialized agriculture, such as those used for palm oil, one of [ADDRESS]’s biggest exports, have led to the mass draining of them. "The exposed, dry peat becomes combustible fuel," said [PERSON_NAME], a tropical peatland researcher at the University of Leeds. "And once ignited, fires can spread below the surface, where they’re hard to detect and can burn for a long time during prolonged drought, l...