El Niño drove drought, but climate change intensified Indonesia’s fire crisis: Study
A new study by World Weather Attribution reveals that human-caused climate change significantly intensified the heat during Indonesia's 2026 fire season. While El Niño caused the initial drought, global warming made the extreme heat and fire conditions significantly more likely and severe.
Why it matters
This research underscores the increasing role of anthropogenic climate change in exacerbating natural weather phenomena, leading to severe public health crises.
Human-caused climate change significantly amplified extreme heat during Indonesia’s 2026 fire season, turning an El Niño-driven drought into a severe regional crisis, according to a recent rapid analysis .
The report was released by World Weather Attribution (WWA), a global network of researchers who analyze the influence of climate change in extreme weather events.
The researchers analyzed weather conditions across western Indonesia during the dry season between August and October 2026, when fires burned approximately 1.9 million hectares (4.7 million acres) of peatland and rainforest. The resulting toxic haze exposed 12.5 million people across Southeast Asia to hazardous air pollution and caused more than 400,000 respiratory infections in Indonesia alone, according to findings from the WWA report.
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