Support 13 villages to save the Bornean Rainforest

Upriver, the same low water does something different. In Sintang and Kapuas Hulu, several hundred kilometers inland, the rivers are the roads. When they drop too low for boats, fuel comes overland instead. It arrives late and costs more, in districts that were already the most expensive places in the province to live.

Clean water is now an official concern. On 2 September, the provincial government ordered clean water deliveries to residents in Rasau Jaya, in Kubu Raya district. In mid-September, after roughly three months of the dry season, Pontianak city prepared 1,000 tonnes of fresh water and a 30 percent discount on water bills as salinity rose at the utility's intake. Queues at filling points and rising retail prices have prompted calls for a cross-agency task force to coordinate tanker distribution.

Where local supplies run short, the same pumps bought for fire response can move clean water to households. The equipment is held and managed by the village enterprise, so what it does next is a village decision.

Much of lowland West Kalimantan sits on peat, waterlogged plant material built up over thousands of years. When wet, it does not burn at all, and it is one of the densest carbon stores on earth. Drained, it becomes something closer to fuel.

Fire on ordinary mineral soil stays on the surface and tends to stop at a plot boundary. Peat fire goes underground. It can smolder beneath the surface for weeks, spreading out of sight, and it is nearly impossible to put out by hand. You can extinguish everything you can see, and it will still be alight underneath. This is what Pak Langgi is testing for when he digs into brittle wood, and what he found when he returned to ground his team had already cleared: wind, and a small point of heat that never quite went out. Close up, he says, you can feel it from two or three meters away.

There is no simple date for when a peat fire is finally out. Teams here work on a rule of thumb: five to seven consecutive days of rain, sometimes more.

Until that rain comes, the priority is reaching fires as early as possible, before they get into the peat. On mineral soil, a team arriving within the hour can usually stop a fire where they find it. On drained peat, an hour is often already too late.

Fires here are not spontaneous. Land gets cleared by burning because burning is fast and cheap, and fire does not respect the boundary somebody drew for it.

Some smallholder farmers still use fire to prepare agricultural land, as their families have for generations. In normal conditions, a small controlled burn stays inside the plot, the rain comes, and the ash feeds the next crop. This year, prolonged dryness and low water levels in peat make any use of fire considerably more dangerous.

This is not only an outside observation. Asked what worried him most about the coming weeks, Pak Langgi said that if the long dry season continues, there is a real possibility of more fires, and that some will come from activities carried out by people in the surrounding communities. He was describing the risk from inside it.

However, burning is excluded entirely on peat and within 500 metres of it, and the exception cannot be invoked after an emergency declaration until the emergency, alert and transition periods have all been declared over. It is not available to companies, commercial plantations, mining operations or concession holders at all. The instruction also directs strengthened criminal, civil and administrative sanctions against anyone who carries out, orders, facilitates or allows burning. 

Across four landscapes in West Kalimantan: Kubu Raya, Gunung Naning, Gunung Nyiut Penrissen, and the Karimata Islands, community governance bodies in 32 villages, home to around 27,000 people, hold authority over how their forests and coastal ecosystems are managed. These are elected village-level institutions with legal standing in Indonesian law, not project committees, and they operate year-round. When fire season starts, the response is not built from scratch. Planet Indonesia works alongside them.

Not every fire arrives that way. Pak Langgi says information reaches his team from two directions: the hotspot data, and neighbours who saw something. On the morning of 6 September, a monitoring team in Kenyabur, in Ketapang, came across a fire on a round they would have walked anyway. It had already started. They had a pump, hose, and protective gear, and they worked it as far as the hose would reach.

Teams map the nearest usable water source before they need it, and coordinate with the national fire brigade, the disaster agency, the forest management unit and the conservation agency when a fire is larger than a village can handle. Equipment is bought as close to the village as possible so it arrives in days rather than months. Volunteers are chosen in open village meetings rather than appointed by any individual, rosters are recorded and checked, and payment follows verified attendance on shift. Any equipment provided for fire response stays in village hands afterwards.

Some of the equipment has arrived. Pumps, hoses, and protective gear have been handed to teams in Mengkalang Jambu, Seruat Dua, Mengkalang, and Dabong, in Kubu Raya. In Beginci Darat, a village fire response team has formed, and when the district forestry unit visited for seedling nursery training, the session was extended to cover the firefighting equipment and how to use it.

Some of it has not. On 15 September, a team in Desa Tanjung Harapan, in Kubu Raya, saw a fire on the side of Gunung Bongkok spreading towards houses. Six of them worked on it from half past five in the morning until eleven. They recorded two constraints afterwards: not enough water to run the pump, and not enough hose to reach the water that was there.

There is a limit to what the national figures can show. The burned-area data excludes any burn scar smaller than 6.25 hectares, a threshold Nusantara Atlas adopted to match the minimum mapping unit Indonesia's Ministry of Forestry uses for its own national assessments, and the method misses roughly a third of burned area outright, most often where fire burns at low intensity beneath a forest canopy or where haze obscures the scar. Both conditions describe West Kalimantan in a smoke season. The omission is deliberate: the product is built so that an area labeled as burned has, with very high confidence, burned. So the fire the Kenyabur team put out on 6 September is in none of these figures, and neither is any fire stopped at that scale. The national total is a record of fires that got away, which is why the evidence for what village institutions change has to come from somewhere else.

There is evidence that this kind of village governance holds under pressure. Planet Indonesia's monitoring, using a matched-pair design comparing villages with community governance bodies against similar sites without them, found 74 percent less forest loss than matched controls in 2024, up from 65 percent in 2023. During the pandemic, when outside monitoring largely stopped, affiliated villages showed 68 percent less forest loss than controls, up from 52 percent in the period before it.

Fire detections have also been lower inside these landscapes this season. Between 5 and 31 August, satellite fire detections per 1,000 km² ran 57 percent lower in Cagar Alam Gunung Nyiut, 77 percent lower in Hutan Lindung Gunung Naning and 86 percent lower in the coastal village forests of Kubu Raya than the rate across West Kalimantan as a whole. These are unmatched comparisons against the provincial rate, so land cover, peat extent and accessibility all differ between them. They show where fire was detected, not what caused the difference.

Community governance bodies across the four landscapes have costed what the rest of the season needs, together with Planet Indonesia — patrol shifts, equipment, daily hotspot checks, water source mapping, and relief for households hit by fire. The equipment is arriving. The day-to-day costs of keeping teams on shift through December, food, fuel, and compensation for time spent patrolling instead of working, are not yet funded.

The Kenyabur team worked their fire as far as the hose would reach. Tanjung Harapan had water and not enough hose to reach it. That is not a detail about one bad morning. It is the difference between a fire that stops where it started and one that gets into the peat.

The same problem will return. Village teams need equipment, current information, and enough operating support to respond in the first hours. Keeping peat wet through the dry months matters more than anything you can do once a fire has started.

Eventually the rain will come. It will need to fall for days before the peat is out. As river levels rise, the salt will retreat down the estuary and fresh water will return to the taps.

In Sintang, Pak Langgi's team will start the morning shift at seven. Most days they will find nothing. What they carry is measured entirely in fires that never grew large enough for anyone to count.