Palangkaraya

Monitoring platform Nusantara Atlas says nearly two million hectares have been ravaged by fires this year.

I'm in Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan, one of the worst affected areas.

Firefighters I've spoken to here told me it takes months to put out underground peat fires.

Even then, it may not be completely extinguished and reignite into open flames.

The government has vowed to take stricter actions.

Meanwhile, people here are breathing in polluted air.

In Palangkaraya alone, there's been a twenty-five percent spike in respiratory cases because of the haze.

Officials told me that they're doing their best to mitigate the impact, but the toxic smoke continues to linger, and there's not much they can do but pray for the rain to fall.

I'm standing in one of the most polluted places in the world right now.

I'm just outside of Palangkaraya in central Kalimantan, where fires have been burning for months.

If you can look around me, the haze is so thick, blanketing this area.

Air quality levels have plunged to hazardous numbers because of peatland fires.

Um, you ...

I mean, one of the worst hit areas really is around Indonesia in Central Kalimantan, um, Palangkaraya, um, and you are seeing those, those post-apocalyptic pictures of the yellow skies.

This is not a filter.

This is ...

Naina Rao reports from the capital city of Jakarta on what all that smoke is doing to people's health.

Nida Najibahanu moved from Jakarta to Palangkaraya on the island of Kalimantan 10 years ago.

She's a librarian at an elementary school where her own child is a student.

In late August, smoke made her

The rainy season, which generally runs from either October or November to March or April, usually puts these fires out.

This year, Indonesia's weather agency says the rain may not reach most of central Kalimantan until December.

As of this week, the air in Palangkaraya is still rated hazardous, and the city's elementary and middle schools are still teaching online.

Hanum says the smoke has already lasted two months.

This gave a lot of them pretty much free will to alter the land as they see fit for, a lot of times it's logging, it's palm oil concessions, it's also gold mines.

More directly, you can pull the string of events to 1995, which was when a one million hectare program to convert the peatlands of Central Kalimantan near Palangkaraya into rice cultivation.

Mm-hmm.

It's the food estate project, but more than 30 years ago now That's what was underway.