Since the beginning of 2026, various parties and environmentalists have suspected that this year will be a ‘hot’ year, where this year the prediction of El Nino Godzilla which makes Indonesia drier than the usual dry season. This has been predicted and supported by science. Sure enough, until September 2026, which is usually the month when rain starts to fall, this time the rain is completely away. This condition triggers lands, be it land managed for agriculture, plantations or forest land, to be it vulnerable to fire. If at the beginning of the year we recorded 67.45 thousand hectares of burned area in the January-March period, now the situation has shifted to a much more massive crisis. The latest data as of August 20, 2026 shows that the accumulation of indicative area burned in Indonesia has touched 667,133 hectares. The months of August and September are very worrying, where in just 20 days in August, there was a surge of 465,174 hectares of fires. This means that almost 70% of the total fires throughout 2026 occurred in less than three weeks in August. (madani berkelanjutan.id)