The Indonesian forest fires of 1997 resulted in over USD 3 billion in damages, according to a study partly funded by Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and released today in Singapore by the Economy and Environment Program for South East Asia (EEPSEA) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). When added to EEPSEA/WWF's February estimate of haze damage, the total costs exceed $4.4 billion.

According to David Glover, Director of EEPSEA housed at IDRC's office in Singapore, "This is more than the damages assessed for the Exxon Valdez oil spill and India's Bhopal chemical spill combined. The resources lost would have been more than enough to provide basic sanitation, water and sewage services for Indonesia's 120 million rural poor." The authors point out that the figures are conservative, and do not take into account loss of life, possible long-term health effects, or the full value of lost biodiversity.

The principal damages include $493 million in timber losses; $470 million in foregone agricultural production; $1.8 billion in ecological services provided to people by forests (foods and medicine, water supply, erosion control, and others); and $272 million for the contribution to global warming from release of carbon. While global warming will be felt by the rest of the world, the other fire damages were suffered mainly by Indonesia itself. Estimates for area burned were derived from satellite mapping studies of Sumatra and Kalimantan by the National University of Singapore's Centre for Remote Imaging, Sensing and Processing (CRISP), with adjustments by EEPSEA and WWF for areas burned outside those provinces. These were then combined with per hectare values for various vegetation types and land uses.

"The tragedy is that these fires were largely preventable," said WWF Forest Conservation Advisor Togu Manurung. "Tropical rainforests don't burn easily, even under drought conditions. Indonesian forests have been degraded by years of poor forestry practices – that's why they are so susceptible to fires set by people."

According to Timothy Jessup, WWF's Senior Policy Advisor in Jakarta, the fires were promoted by a series of poorly designed policies including:

a program to drain and convert 1 million hectares of peat forest to rice cultivation. Fires on these former wetlands have been the most difficult to extinguish and created haze laden with sulphuric acid.

unclear land ownership laws that encourage people and companies to clear land as a way of staking a claim. These are combined with weak enforcement of laws to regulate the use of fire for land clearing. policies that keep the prices of wood to processing mills low, providing little incentive to protect standing timber or to sell scrap wood rather than burn it.

short term leases of forest land to timber companies, which leave them with little incentive to manage forests sustainably.

"Changing these policies should be front and center in the new government's reform program," said Jessup.

Land clearing by fire for planting of oil palm and timber caused up to 80 percent of the 1997 fires. Another recent WWF study shows that no-burn methods for land clearing are a promising option, although their environmental impacts also need to be assessed.

The EEPSEA/WWF report does not predict damages from fires in 1998. By taking action now, it says, the Indonesian government could avoid a disaster on the scale of 1997.