Indonesia's fire and haze problem is increasingly being ascribed to large-scale forest conversion and land clearing activities making way for pulpwood, rubber and oil palm plantations. Fire is the cheapest tool available to small holders and plantation owners to reduce vegetation cover and prepare and fertilize extremely poor soils. Fires that escaped from agricultural burns have ravaged East Kalimantan forests on the island of Borneo during extreme drought periods in 1982-1983, 1987, 1991, 1994 and 1997-1998. Estimates based on satellite data and ground observations are that more than five million hectares were burned in East Kalimantan during the 1997/1998 dry season. Not only were the economic losses and ecological damage from these surface fires enormous, they ignited coal seams exposed at the ground surface along their outcrops. Coal fires now threaten Indonesia's shrinking ecological resources in Kutai National Park and Sungai Wain Nature Reserve. Sungai Wain has one of the last areas of unburned primary rainforest in the Balikpapan-Samarinda area with an extremely rich biodiversity. Although fires in 1997/1998 damaged nearly 50% of this Reserve and ignited 76 coal fires, it remains the most valuable water catchment area in the region and it has been used as a reintroduction site for the endangered orangutan. The Office of Surface Mining provided Indonesia with the capability to take quick action on coal fires that presented threats to public health and safety, infrastructure or the environment. The US Department of State's Southeast Asia Environmental Protection Initiative through the US Agency for International Development funded the project. Technical assistance and training transferred skills in coal fire management through the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resource's Training Agency to the regional offices; giving the regions the long-term capability to manage coal fires. Funding was also included to extinguish coal fires as demonstrations to the Indonesian Government. Successful demonstrations obtained visible benefits for a large number of local interests and received overwhelmingly favorable public response. This built the public and political support needed to continue this work. These successes encouraged the Ministry to officially assume the responsibility for coal fire management by Decree 1539/20/MPE/1999. The Ministry reallocated internal funds to support portions of the immediate suppression projects and committed a portion of the Coal Royalty Fund to provide long-term support for coal fire suppression activities. Coal fires continue to present a serious risk to Indonesia's ecosystems, population and forest resources. The Ministry and local governments in East Kalimantan are still working on the coal fire inventory. It presently contains 164 coal fires, but it is far from complete. Unless these coal fires are managed or extinguished, they will add to the already catastrophic cycle of anthropogenic forest fires that further reduce Indonesia's forest resources and endangered species while contributing unnecessarily to global carbon emissions. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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