Smoke for the people, profits for the few: Forest and land fires in Indonesia’s extractive concessions

For this factsheet, I worked alongside my colleagues at Trend Asia to examine who bears the cost and who reaps the benefit of Indonesia’s recurring forest and land fires (karhutla). By overlaying high-confidence hotspot data with concession maps, our analysis recorded 34,933 hotspots across Indonesia between January 2024 and August 2026, most of them located inside mining (9,553), palm oil (7,150), and forestry (5,082) concessions. The resulting haze has been linked to an estimated 1,700 premature deaths in August 2026 alone and 50,891 cases of acute respiratory infection, 12,600 of them among children under five. Meanwhile, commodities from these three sectors generated US$221.4 billion in exports to 169 countries, with 75.4% flowing to G20 nations. Through this research, we aimed to show that the smoke is borne by ordinary people while the profits are captured by a few.

Recommended citation: Trend Asia. (2026). Asap untuk rakyat, untung buat segelintir [Smoke for the people, profits for the few]. https://trendasia.org/asap-untuk-rakyat-untung-buat-segelintir/
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