A crime against mother earth and we are all responsible as consumers.
I was informed last night via email change.org:
Dear Nina
As we speak, Indonesia’s forests are burning out of control. A state of emergency has already been declared in one province.
The worst part? The fires were deliberately lit to make way for palm oil and other plantations, clearing out swathes of forests and carbon-rich peatlands. While the forest burns, critically endangered orangutans, elephants, and rhinos are swallowed up.
This palm oil is in almost everything we consume…
Startling facts:
CARBON BOMB:
Indonesia’s small country palm oil fires are emitting more greenhouse gases every day than the entire United States.
It happens every year, but this year is shaping up as one of the worst ever. During Indonesia’s dry season, certain people—rarely identified, much less punished—set fires to make land suitable for the palm oil and paper-and-pulp industries. Those fires generate huge amounts of smoke, and the toxic haze often reaches neighboring countries, including Singapore and Malaysia. But this year the El Niño weather phenomenon has created extremely dry conditions, leading to an unusually intense, long-lasting “smoke-out” for the region, affecting everything from travel to sporting events to respiratory health.
So far this year, Indonesia’s fires have produced more pollution than Germany or Japan does in a year. On 26 days from the period of Sept. 1 to Oct. 14, their daily emissions surpassed those of the entire US (the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China), according to researchers led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam. They calculated that the 100,000-plus fires in Indonesia detected so far this year (as of Oct. 21) have emitted about 1.4 billion metric tons (1.5 billion tons) of carbon dioxide equivalents. That puts the country on track for its worst fire year since 1997. On Oct. 14 alone there were more than 4,700 fire alerts—that’s more than on any single day in the past two years.
So why are these fires so potent? More than half of them this year have occurred on peatland areas, concentrated mainly in south Sumatra, south and central Kalimantan (on Borneo), and Papua, according to the World Resources Institute, citing data from Global Forest Watch Fires.
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Nina
