 News reports have attributed the extreme air pollution levels that we've seen over Sumatra and Singapore in June 2013 and the earlier part of 2014 to the burning of forests or to the slash and burn forest clearance for agricultural development. Now we've found something different. We knew from the satellite imagery that over 80 percent of the areas that have actually burned we've mapped that's about 160,000 hectares of burn so 80% of 160,000 hectares were actually non-forest lands ranging from shrubs exposed soils to plantations oil palm or acacia plantations but we went to the field to find out what these non-forest lands were actually made of sorry we flew a drone over seven burn sites in the in the in the areas where the burning had been more than the most severe and we were able to conclude that much of the burning happened in what we called forest cemeteries in other words areas of land that had already been deforested before fire and which were where you could see scattered wood debris everywhere the remnants of you know of forests decapitated, stems, branches lying about, downed trunks but these areas had not yet been converted to agriculture so this is rather different from the slash and burn forest clearance. What burned last year and in 2014 was not so much forest these were areas that were already deforested but that had not yet been converted to agriculture and these areas that burned were on peatlands. Now peatlands in their natural states are extremely fire resistant why because they are wet all year round I mean they're they're they're essentially a bog or you know a swamp and they are covered in lush tropical rainforest and so the lush tropical the canopy cover above ground keeps the below ground cool and wet all year round because there's always water. Now what happens is that when these systems get become deforested when you strip the forest of these lands the peat becomes exposed to soil becomes exposed to air and peat in itself is a type of soil which is extremely flammable it's it's a type of fuel it's a type of young coal decayed organic matter so here what's happening is that we're having these extremely fire resistant ecosystems in their pristine state turned into extremely fire prone systems in virtue of the fact that the peatlands becomes exposed to the air there is no longer the the protection from the vegetation cover because the forest has been removed and on top of this these lands are drained because they are swamps and for anybody to grow anything on them for agriculture they need to remove the water so now all it takes is you you know just a few days if you want of little to no rain for these lands to burn so what we what's happening is that it's it's not just that it's the combination of the fact that many many people migrants are seeking land in those extremely fire prone systems which creates this mess these systems stay once they've become deforested they stay they can stay idle for a few years so from the from the time the forest is being removed to the time this same plot of land is being converted to agriculture it might take a few years and that's something that struck us because we thought that it would normally take up to six months to a year between the time it gets the forest becomes removed and the agricultural area becomes established but what we're seeing is that a lot of these areas stay idle in this fire prone system for a good number of years before they get converted to agriculture we don't understand why there are probably constraints associated to this that we don't know of but what that means is that the same area repeatedly burns over time it can burn multiple times it keeps burning burning and burning and that's obviously bad news because it means that every time there's burning there's haze there's another episode of of of pollution and what it also means is that you no longer need to have these extreme drought years for these fires to start all you need is to have just a few consecutive days of no rain in a regular or wetter than average year for these fires to start so that means that these fires are going to keep recurring more and more often and and and it's going to be more and more difficult for anybody to predict them so that thing that's the novelty of our research this research is really telling us that the main problem is is really the destruction of peatlands and what really what we really advocate is to actually stop the conversion of peatlands and the drainage of peatlands further conversion of these peatlands because what we're seeing is that the destruction of these peatlands is a lose lose situation wherever you look at it it's peatlands are not deemed suitable for agriculture in fact for you know farmers would like to would tend to avoid farming on peatlands they would prefer to farm on mineral soils but what's happened with the growth of population you know there's less and less good land available then people have started developing techniques with the technology as well to develop those peatlands for agricultural development and it really started in the in the early 1990s so this is pretty recent we're talking like 20 years or 25 years ago when it really started and but the development of peatlands is really really costly you need to drain them so you need to have you need to use excavators heavy machineries and in themselves peatlands are also really not really they're not very suitable for agriculture they're very acidic soil so you can't grow anything you like you have to often bring topsoil if you want to grow crops that are not really suitable for these systems so they're very costly very expensive secondly they create a lot of pollution you know every time you burn there's a haze event they emit a lot of greenhouse gases and they and they emit a lot of aerosols which are particularly noxious for people you know for this particular matter this pollution this haze that people will inhale either in cities or in the neighborhood or in the vicinity of the fires so really what we advocate is the the to stop the development of the further development and drainage or of peatlands. Peatlands are when they burn they release far more greenhouse gases and aerosols per unit area of burning than any other land use and we have to we have to realize that these fires are not your typical fire that you'll find in Southern Europe or in California or in Australia where we're having these wild flaming fires you know these gigantic flames destroying homes and you really have to run away for your life because otherwise the fire will kill you now in this case we're not talking about flaming fires we're talking about smoldering fires and smoldering fire fires are almost flameless and they generate far more smoke and far more you know greenhouse gases CO2 methane and and CO than the flaming fires and so we need to understand what is the level of toxicity generated by these fires both from the point of view of greenhouse emissions but also from the point of view of your health so understanding how much aerosols particulate matter these systems are emitting it will also if we know better if we can quantify better what's being emitted by those smoldering fires then we will also it will help the Indonesian government to better establish a baseline against which it could then start to you know sell carbon credits the Singaporean government ratified a law which essentially enables gives the legal right to prosecute anybody who's found guilty to create haze over Singapore which but which would mean that any executive of a company involved in burning somewhere in Sumatra stepping foot on Singaporean soil could be arrested or questioned detained and eventually be fined for wrong doing if found guilty I think this is a step in the right direction because it really sends a strong signal to those who are creating this mess that they will face consequences if they go to Singapore. However we the Singaporean government doesn't fully realise that the situation on the ground is a lot more complex than what they think this law is primarily going to target the large companies the conglomerates the oil palm and acacia companies who operate in Sumatra and the executive who work for these companies. Now our research tends to suggest that if companies are involved in burning they are not the only ones and in some cases the companies thinking of the acacia companies in particular might actually be the victim of the fires more than the culprits and so this law will does not yet I think have the tools to tackle this complexity on the ground I mean for example the Singaporean government is thinking of prosecuting companies based on the evidence that there's fire being found inside the concessions of the companies but our research tends to show that if there's burning inside the company it might not necessarily be the company who's starting the fire and there's two main reasons for that one is because well the fire might actually start outside and you know spread uncontrolled in about within the concession because of wind for example and secondly the concession might be occupied parts of the concessions might be occupied by land users who are unrelated to the concessions communities whether local people or migrants or maybe small-scale companies who operate illegally in the sense within the concessions but who have backup from maybe the local elites you know maybe from a village head for example and who have also financial backup from mid-level investors who might be living in cities like in Medan or in Jakarta who are investing in oil palm so this complexity really must be understood through research by going in the field doing ethnographic studies I think we've gone as far as we could using the remote sensing tools that we have you know the drone the satellites and so on but now it's time to go in the field and really understand what's going on and because by understanding what's going on you understand who is burning who's responsible who's gaining and who's losing from these fires