History of Wildfires in Kalimantan, Home to New Capital City

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo finally announced the capital city move from Jakarta in the Java Island to its future location in North Penajam Paser and Kutai Kartanegara Districts, which are both in East Kalimantan.

One of the reasons the capital city will rest over the two areas is due to the lack of natural disasters, or so the president claims.

“The natural disaster risk is at the minimum from flooding, earthquake, tsunami, wildfire, volcanic eruptions, and landslides,” said the president in a press conference at the State Palace in Central Jakarta on Monday, August 26.

However, the data collected by the National Mitigation Agency (BNPB) reveals several facts such as the number of forest fires in the first six months in 2019 happened across 28 provinces with a total of 135,749 hectares in the end of July. From this total number, Kalimantan contributed to 12.4 percent of forest wildfires across 16,892 hectares of land.

East Kalimantan ranks second with the vastness of affected land reaching 4,430 hectares, while South Kalimantan has seen wildfires affect 4,670 hectares of its land. Third goes to Central Kalimantan with 3,618 hectares, West Kalimantan with 3,315 hectares and North Kalimantan with the least among Kalimantan regions of 859 hectares.

However, the national wildfire data from the Environmental and Forestry Ministry’s monitoring system gave out a different result with West Kalimantan ranking the highest with 2,578 hectares affected areas followed by Central Kalimantan with 1,103 hectares. The ministry’s data ranks East Kalimantan fourth with 136 hectares of wildfire-affected areas.

Although the cases in Kalimantan remains behind Riau that saw 5,345 hectares affected by wildfires in 2015.

FAJAR PEBRIANTO