Star Metro - Monitor says Indonesia fires have burned nearly two million hectares

The report came as Indonesian officials said they had accepted help from neighbours Malaysia and Singapore to combat the blazes.

"We've already responded to the aid proposal... they (Malaysia) will be assisting with three aircraft and 52 personnel," Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs Dudung Abdurachman told reporters in Jakarta.

Malaysia had made repeated offers of help to combat the fires that have sent air pollution levels soaring in its own capital and others in the region.

Dudung said Singapore will also provide assistance, without giving any details.

New figures from deforestation monitoring site Nusantara Atlas showed an area nearly 12 times larger than London has burned from January to the end of September, most of it as drought took hold from June, exacerbated by a strong El Nino cycle.

Indonesia's government has not provided official figures since announcing 202,000 hectares had been razed by the end of July.

Nusantara Atlas founder David Gaveau said the true scale of the burning was likely higher than the 1,916,588 hectares his organisation has detected.

The calculation had been affected by heavy haze from the fires that obscured satellite images at times, among other factors.

Even so, Nusantara Atlas data shows the area burned was 38 percent higher than at the same point in 2019, another calamitous year for wildfires.

Forestry Ministry spokesman Ristianto Pribadi told AFP the government was still calculating the total burnt area and said the Nusantara Atlas data "cannot be readily confirmed".

President Prabowo Subianto ordered on Monday a "massive deployment" of resources to tackle the blazes, according to the government.

- 'We are still capable' -

Indonesia experiences fires every dry season, but this year's blazes have been particularly severe, making hundreds of thousands of people ill.

The haze has prompted school closures in Malaysia and East Timor, with haze drifting into Singapore and as far afield as the Philippines.

Singapore's National Environment Agency (NEA) said on Monday the number of consecutive days in which air quality dipped into "unhealthy" levels has surpassed that of 2015, when the region experienced its worst haze crisis.

Singapore classes a day as "unhealthy" if the local PSI air quality measuring system tips over 100 at any point during the day.

Singapore sent warnings to three companies on Monday, urging them to take action against fires in areas they exploit, the NEA said.

That followed notices sent to seven Indonesian companies on Friday, telling them to deploy fire-fighting teams, stop burning or starting new fires, and submit action plans to the NEA.

Singapore Senior Minister K. Shanmugam warned on Monday that those responsible would be held to account.

"Some companies may deny responsibility. They may think they can escape scrutiny. But they should not underestimate the Singapore government's determination to act," Shanmugam told reporters.

Indonesia's Dudung insisted earlier on Monday that Indonesia was "still capable of handling the situation ourselves" even as another firefighter died.

The volunteer died in hospital of injuries he suffered when a team became overwhelmed while battling flames on Thursday in the Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park in East Java, park officials said.

He was the fifth member of that group to die.

Duding said later, when announcing help was coming from Malaysia, that Indonesia had 47 aircraft and 60,000 personnel deployed against the fires.

About 150 students staged a protest on Monday in Palangkaraya, a city in the severely affected Central Kalimantan province on Borneo island, to demand more government action.

The demonstrators carried a doll wrapped in white cloth, in line with Islamic burial rites.

"The government... has not been truly effective in handling forest and land fire," said one protester, identified only as Naomi.

"This warrants being designated and recorded in history as a gross human rights violation," she said.

burs-sah/mlr/pbt

K.Evans--SMC