 We have David Gavel today, and he's going to tell us the story about fire and haze, as you may all know that last year was not an El Nino year, but fire was raging again in the center part of Sumatra, especially Rio province. We flew there and David is going to tell us what has happened and how much has been burned, and what is the implication for health and emission of greenhouse gases. So David, time's yours. I think it's working. Thank you Daniel. So I think I'll try to improvise today because I just found out today that there's no public presentation, so it's just me talking and you guys listening and giving me feedback and questions. Last year when fire and haze hit the headlines in June 2013, Agus and I decided to jump on the occasion to take the opportunity to actually try to map and understand the problem. So we looked at satellite imagery and we started mapping the areas that had been burned. And what was the vegetation that had burned and we've looked at the influence of rainfall and so on. And so eventually we submitted a paper together with Daniel and other co-authors. And so now I think what you've probably read in the newspapers is that you've probably read about forest fires. And when we think about forest fires, we think about these huge fires, crown fires, gigantic flames, life-threatening fires, like the sorts you'll see in places like in the Mediterranean or in California, maybe Australia, where we've got these really life-threatening fires that threaten to destroy houses and kill people. Now last year's fires are nothing like this. They're actually, it's actually quite safe. You can actually drive through or walk through these fires. And you see the occasional flame here and there, but really these fires are really smoldering fires. They're actually fires on those peatlands where they generate a lot of smoke, but they don't really threaten your life directly. In fact, we've seen fires coming all the way up to the roadside and we could drive through them. We've seen these fires also burning all the way up to, you know, in villages and people, you know, running about their business, daily lives and not feeling threatened about it, at least in a directly. So these are the fires that we're seeing now in Ria, what we've seen last year in 2013 and what we've seen also at the early part of 2014. So they're very different from the fires you might be thinking of, you know, of these huge flames. Oh, we've got to run away because, you know, it's about to kill us. Now this is very different. However, it doesn't mean that they're not a problem. They generate an enormous amount of smoke, an enormous amount of greenhouse gases. We've started to put some figures, but they are huge uncertainties. We don't know how much methane really is being released from these fires. We don't really know how much aerosols are being released that are more threatening for the health of people over the long term. So, yeah, I've lost my thread here. So these fires are an important problem and they create also a lot of diplomatic problems between the countries that are involved, between Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and so on. And so in the research that we did, we've looked at, we've tried to understand the causes of these fires. So first we map them, we look at what's burned and we find that actually it's not forest that's burning. It's areas that's already been deforested. We find that it's primarily peatlands that are burning. But we also find that there is a climatic element that these fires are only occurring during periods of drought or during periods of where we're actually experiencing less rain. I'm not necessarily talking of severe droughts, but I'm talking of months during the year where there's less rain than usual. However, these are not really the causes of the fire. What the causes are, it's people. People are actually setting fire to the land. And we know why because of agricultural development, but we don't know the full story. We think that a lot of the problem is overlapping claims over land ownership, over a given area. We think that if several, many groups of people claim an area as their own, then there will be more fires because they will be using fires to claim ownership over this land or to use it as a weapon against the other group that's also claiming that piece of land. We know that there are cases of this, but we don't really know whether this is really the whole story, whether they are the major cause of fires. So we're hoping to be able to do research in the future to be able to understand who is driving fires. Are they primarily local communities or migrants coming in with the backing of communities or the large companies or perhaps a group in between that's what people call the mid-level investors, who are people who have got capital and who are ready to invest in land clearing for agricultural development. So we still don't know these things. But what we know for sure is that there are problems of overlapping claims over land ownership and what that brings is that it brings confusion. It creates a problem is when you try to understand with the maps who is burning, when you look at the land use maps and you overlay them with the burned areas, you don't know for sure who's doing the burning. Even though say you find that a lot of the burning is in a concession controlled by a company, well you don't really know whether the company has been doing the burning. Maybe there's a conflict with the community or anything else that we don't know of. So yeah, I mean that's pretty much the story so far. We don't know who is actually doing the burning. We think that everyone's doing it at a different time, but we still need to understand the complexity of the relationships amongst all the land use actors to really understand who is more responsible than others. Now what's happened last year is, as Daniel said, is that last year was unusual in the sense that we started seeing huge fires outside of an earlier year. Now I told you before that the fires are actually occurring during periods of drought and they worked last year when the fires hit in June and also in February of 2013-14. The month during which time the fires occurred was a dry month, there was a drought. But this was not an El Nino year in the sense that overall the year was wet but we had like this one single month of drought which was sufficient to start the fires. And if we look back 20 or 30 years ago this was not the case. When the forest, when the environment was more pristine and those peatlands that we're looking now, that are burning now were not degraded, one month of drought was not enough to start fires. But now what we're seeing is that because of all this degradation these lands have been degraded and if you walk there at noon it will be very very hot and because peatlands are this kind of young coal, they're easily flammable. All it takes is a few weeks of no rain or little rain for fires to start. And so we think that we're actually going to see more and more fires in the future. And when we think of Riau and everybody says oh Riau is an area where there's always been fires but actually it's not true. If you look at 97, 98 which is the reference year for fires in Indonesia, Riau did not experience a lot of fires. At the time peatlands were not as degraded as they are now. At the time in 97 the fires were in southern Sumatra, in central Kalimantan, east Kalimantan and now we're also seeing Riau becoming an area where we're seeing more and more fires. So we think that the problem is actually going to get worse because there's a lot of degraded peatlands. By degraded peatlands I mean areas that have no vegetation cover anymore that have been drained so they're dry. And all it takes now is a few weeks of no rain and you've got the fires starting also there's on the other side people coming in, migrants coming in, people seeking land and so they're using fire to clear the land for agriculture but also perhaps as a weapon to clear land in areas where the land use is not sure. So I think I'll stop here. Do you want to tell us about the emission of greenhouse gases especially relative to the national emission? People have the idea how much has been burned and how much has been burned. So we did the calculations. So we found last year in 2013 in June that within one week an area of about 160,000 hectares had burned and 90% above 90% of that was on peatlands. And then we worked out the emissions, we found 171 teragrams emitted by those 160,000 hectares of land that had burned in Riyadh within one week. And 170 teragrams is equivalent to 5 to 10% of Indonesia's annual emissions, overall emissions. So that was that's pretty huge because we're seeing one week event, one week event in just, it was like less than 1% of the area of Indonesia emitting 5 to 10% of Indonesia's overall annual emissions. So this is huge, this is a huge event. In 2013 which in climatological terms sounds like an anomaly, El Nino is anomaly but it was not an El Nino year but such a scale of devastation in term of emission happened in the non-El Nino year as well. So what's going to happen if it is an El Nino? Is it because the substance which was burned was peat? Was it because something else? Suddenly people are flocking to this province to develop the land. So to perhaps explore further issues I would like you to ask David any question related to your work maybe or anything you are curious about. Jacob? Whether using time series there's any opportunity to look at the 2013 event and think about whether these were, any indication that these were lots of individual incidences of fire versus just a few that then spread. Is there any scope to look at that even those few short weeks to look at the kind of fire emerging from lots of distinct points versus coming from two or three main ones and then spreading across the landscape? We are actually, August and I were thinking of a new kind of analysis where we've also got fire data. So we have these burned areas mapped but within these burned areas we've got data on a daily basis. So we could look at the progression of fire on a day to day basis. And so the idea would be to see where is it starting from. Whether it's for example starting outside of concession and moving in the concession or whether there's a wind element. Whether it's a wind pattern and if the winds were flowing to the east are we also seeing the fires kind of spreading to the east which would indicate that fires were also being made worse by winds. So we're exploring this now but we've just started, I'm actually just starting doing this weekend. We've looked at the fires for 2014 looking at the same method as last year over the same area. Also in an attempt to build a time series to gather more information on these fires over time and to be able to try to better understand who's doing the burning. So what idea that we had for example is the companies are saying well we're not using fires even within their concessions but a year on are we seeing development by the companies. The areas that burned last year are they now being planted by the industry and with the satellite image we can see it because they are using these grid like patterns that smallholders do not use. But in the 2014 I was just doing this this weekend. I was really amazed because we found massive fires within the acacia plantations where we were last year. I mean compared to last year what we've seen the fires in 2014 were like destroyed a lot of productive acacia. To the point that I emailed one of the guys from Sinanum as forestry who is responsible for these plantations he hasn't replied and we said you know what's happening there because now this is not just, this is huge. Essentially the whole concession has burned. So by building these time series and we're also trying to go back and obviously we have a limitation for the imagery but we found some really good imagery for year 2005 over the area where we're working now. And 2005 is a key date because there was a push for more acacia plantations. There was a push for more clearing of forest for acacia plantations. And so we're trying to expand the time series to try to better understand the situation on the ground. It's really trying to understand the who question because I don't think that any legislation enforcement will actually work before we actually can answer who's responsible and they're all blaming each other. Companies say well it's the small does and the small does well it's the company so we're like we don't really know. It's more difficult but we can get clues, we can get clues. Are you able to tell on your scale about swidden agriculture and the contribution that that might play? Like proper swidden agriculture like Slash and Burn. I don't think it exists in Riau in the sense that the land is already claimed pretty much by somebody. There's a lot of migrants coming from other provinces and there's a lot of industrial development. There's you know there's infrastructures being built, there's oil and gas there as well. Originally it was a region that was like the local communities were more, they lived more on the coastline. They did not live in the interior because those beatlands were never really favoured by anybody for agriculture. It's a recent phenomenon by recent I mean it really started in the 1990s. I've even heard that local or migrants and now they keep burning the peat so that they can reach the mineral soil and start growing rice. So in a sense this peatland is, no one likes these peatlands because they are too acidic. And I think I mean obviously they found a way to grow a oil palm on it because there's a lot of oil palm being grown. But by draining the soil and by also bringing extra soil from outside. Also for acacia they use one kind of acacia which is Tolerance, which is not Manjoum but Krasikapa which is a kind of a pop and paper. Which is one kind of acacia that will grow on peatlands. But for the small farmers they do oil palm or they do like pineapple because it's tolerant to acidic soils. But I don't think that there's any slashing burn in the sense that you're... Some of the fires are conflict fires which I guess are intended to escape. And other fires are for sort of more constructive purposes to use the land. And I was just wondering if you could talk a bit about are there any management practices then? Are there any methods taken for those fires to aid agriculture to stop them escaping or not? I don't know. I mean what I can tell you is that on peatlands fires are forbidden so any fires is illegal in that sense. Well they use these canals, you see they use a lot of drainage canals. So if you look at the plantations they organize plantations in grid like systems and the grids are actually these canals. And so the fire will tend to stop there. So when we see the burned areas, often we see like a rectangle that's burned. Because the fires actually stopped at the edge of the canal. But I wouldn't be able to answer your question more specifically than that. Escape the clay in the land. Any other questions? Presentation, sorry if I came quite late and I don't know whether this has been talked by you or not. But could you please describe more about the land use allocation. Not the actual but maybe the rural land use allocation within those burned 100,000 hectares areas. Thank you. Okay so we're talking the region of Riau. We've got a lot of oil palm, a lot of acacia. Acacia is primarily is actually I think 100% of the acacia plantations which is essentially for bottom paper are controlled by the companies. April, see now Mars Forest Tree and APP. And so essentially we found that half of those 160,000 hectares were within concessions allocated for oil palm and acacia. Concessions being areas given by the national government or the provincial government to companies to develop these industrial scale acacia. Or oil palm plantations. We found half of them. Half of the burning was inside. Half of the burning was outside. And outside, well this is outside, there's a lot of the land is still in what we call production forest lands. So Hutan Producsi which is controlled by the Ministry of Forestry here in Jakarta. But a lot of that land has already been cleared and has already been developed for agriculture. So this is one area of conflict or one element for conflict because it means that the local government has actually supported the development of agricultural plantations. In areas that are controlled by the Ministry of Forestry and where it's not allowed. Because Riau does not have a lot of APL land, land dedicated for agriculture. Most of it was in production land and in fact the local government or provincial government or district government. They would like to have the land use plans changed. But I think it's been going on for a few years and they have not yet reached an agreement with the national government. Now, so that's outside. For the half of the burning inside, inside the concessions, so inside concessions for oil palm and acacia. So you could say alright, so the companies are responsible for half of the burning, right? Because this is the area that they are controlling, that they have responsibility. This is the area that the companies are developing for the development of these industrial scale, monoculture, oil palm and acacia plantations. But what we found, in fact, Ellis did a lot of work on this and we found this through remote sensing. That a lot of areas in the concessions are actually not controlled by the companies themselves. Or not developed by the companies themselves. So if you have an area, you know, this is your concession, maybe half of it is planted. And the rest is not planted. But when we looked at the parcels, the arrangements of land parcels, we were able to determine that these areas that were not developed by the companies were likely to be occupied by communities or migrants or, you know, another group of people who are not the company themselves. And we found a lot of burning in those areas inside the concessions. Which made us think well perhaps it means it's not the company who is really doing the burning in the concessions but the communities. But then again we started thinking well perhaps the company is helping the community to do the burning for subsequently developing the area into an industrial. So all these dynamics we don't know and we can't really apprehend them by satellite alone. But to summarize, half of the burning in the concession date in the concessions, half outside, that half in the concessions, most of the burning was in areas that were not developed. Although we found a little bit also in the areas that were developed. And in 2014 we actually found a lot more. And outside the concessions, it's Houtan Productions land, it's Apel land, it's a mix of both. But we don't know because there's a lot of confusion, there's a lot of uncertainties, you know, and there's a lot of disagreements between the district, provincial and national governments. So fire regimes changed over time. In the late 90s, only 2000s, C4 and aircraft made a consortium looking at fire and it was obvious one of the findings was that fire is not the problem. The problem is the haze. But the haze itself is only a symptom, what would be the underlying causes, which is now growing and changing over time. That was in the early 2000s. And now we are engaging a new fire project likely in the near future. We have a big concept note for working with multiple donors. So with that, thank you very much, David, and all the questions that you raised and it's been enriching in terms of fire and knowledge and how to handle this in the future. Thank you very much.