Indonesia is turning to the skies for help as a powerful El Niño-driven dry season fuels widespread forest and peatland fires, with authorities deploying firefighters and preparing weather-modification operations in an effort to bring desperately needed rain.
More than 100,000 hectares of land had burned across Indonesia in the first half of 2026, according to government figures cited by CNA. Independent fire and deforestation monitoring group Nusantara Atlas put the area affected through July at more than 285,000 hectares, highlighting the scale of the crisis.
The fires have hit several of Indonesia’s most vulnerable regions, particularly parts of Sumatra and Kalimantan on Borneo, where extensive peatlands can continue burning underground even after surface flames appear to have been extinguished.
Indonesia’s unusual response: Make it rain
Authorities are increasingly turning to cloud seeding, a weather-modification technique designed to encourage precipitation from clouds that already contain the necessary moisture.
The process can involve dispersing substances such as salts or silver iodide into suitable clouds. But officials stress that the technique does not create clouds from nothing. It can only work when the atmosphere provides clouds capable of producing rain.
Indonesia has significantly expanded its use of weather modification in recent years. The country’s weather agency, BMKG, said 252 cloud-seeding operations were conducted between 2021 and August 2026, compared with 85 operations during the previous decade. Many were carried out to manage flooding, while others were intended to help suppress wildfires and keep vulnerable peatlands wet.
But there is a major obstacle.
The problem is in the sky
Cloud seeding is of limited use when there are simply not enough suitable clouds.
Hydroclimatology expert I Putu Santikayasa of IPB University warned that the technique’s effectiveness can be very low during the dry season because of a lack of clouds. Research on cloud seeding has also found that its effectiveness can be difficult to measure, while questions remain about its cost and the environmental implications of widespread use.
Indonesian officials acknowledged that weather modification is a mitigation measure rather than a permanent solution.
And in an indication of just how difficult conditions have become, officials said on Aug. 10 that weather-modification operations were being hampered by a lack of rain-bearing clouds, leaving ground crews and aerial firefighting as the main tools available at the time.
El Niño is making a dangerous situation worse
The wildfire crisis comes as Indonesia experiences an unusually dry period intensified by El Niño, a climate pattern associated with warmer Pacific Ocean temperatures and altered rainfall patterns.
Reuters reported that more than 107,000 hectares had burned from January through June 2026, representing a 110 per cent increase compared with the same period in 2023. Officials have deployed helicopters and aircraft as the government battles fires across several priority provinces.
El Niño does not necessarily start the fires itself. Instead, the hotter and drier conditions can make vegetation and peatlands significantly more vulnerable to ignition and allow existing fires to spread more easily.
Human activity remains another major factor.
Environmental groups have warned that deforestation, land conversion and the degradation of peatlands are increasing the country’s vulnerability to fire. When peatlands dry out, they can burn beneath the surface, making fires particularly difficult to detect and extinguish.
The bigger threat: another regional haze crisis
Indonesia’s recurring forest and peat fires are not only an environmental problem. Large-scale fires can produce dense smoke and haze that affect communities far beyond the immediate fire zones.
Recent fires have already caused deteriorating air quality in parts of Indonesia, while haze has reached neighboring areas of Malaysia. Reuters reported that authorities were dealing with hazardous air conditions and that some schools had been closed as smoke worsened.
The memory of 2015, when severe fires during a strong El Niño triggered a major Southeast Asian haze crisis, remains a powerful warning.
That is why Indonesia is watching the weather so closely.
Nearly 50,000 firefighters are currently involved in firefighting efforts, while aircraft and helicopters are being prepared for aerial operations and potential cloud-seeding missions when conditions allow.
For now, Indonesia’s strategy is a race against the weather: fight the fires on the ground, attack hotspots from the air and wait for clouds capable of producing rain.
But as the dry season continues, the question hanging over the region is whether the skies will cooperate before the fires grow even larger.
And that could determine whether Indonesia manages to contain this year’s crisis — or faces another devastating chapter in Southeast Asia’s long-running battle with forest fires and haze.
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