00:00But I've seen this disaster described as the El Nino disaster, but that risks making something that's largely shaped by
00:08human activity sound almost inevitable.
00:12Because the thing is, Indonesia's peatlands are sort of crucial to this story.
00:15Peat is essentially partly decomposed organic material that's accumulated in very wet conditions over thousands and thousands of years.
00:24Leave it saturated and it's quite difficult to burn, but if you drain it and clear it and convert it
00:30into farmland, you effectively create this enormous stockpile of incredibly combustible material.
00:36And across Indonesia, peatlands have been drained in this way and cleared for agricultural and commercial crops, including palm oil
00:43and timber.
00:44And once that's all dried out, they burn extremely intensively and crucially, fires can continue to smolder underground, making them
00:52just incredibly difficult to put out.
00:54So this is kind of why the current drought is so destructive.
00:58The climate has supplied the dry conditions, but it's these decades and decades of land clearance that have kind of
01:04contributed to creating this landscape capable of turning drought into something like catastrophe.
