Environment

Indonesia Smoke Haze Death Toll Rises

The death toll from acrid haze blanketing parts of Indonesia has climbed to 19, a minister said Wednesday, almost double the previous figure as the crisis from widespread forest fires worsens.

For nearly two months, thousands of fires caused by slash-and-burn farming in Indonesia have choked vast expanses of Southeast Asia, forcing schools to close and scores of flights and some international events to be cancelled.

An estimated half a million people have suffered respiratory illnesses since the fires started in July. Indonesia's disaster agency previously stated the fires had killed 10 people, some of whom died while fighting the blazes and others from the pollution.

Wildlife also affected

The environmental catastrophe that is unfolding across Indonesian Borneo is threatening to engulf precious sanctuaries where a third of endangered great ape's entire population hangs on for survival.

For two months, uncontrolled fires have been raging across the Borneo landscape, spewing up thick black clouds of smoke that have caused respiratory infections in 500,000 people.

The financial cost for Indonesia is also immense, with the fires costing the economy as much as £30billion. Conservationists are warning the fires' impacts have taken a sinister twist by setting light to huge swathes of virgin peat swamp forest, a precious tropical wilderness where endangered clouded leopards and orangutans keep one step from extinction.

But, it is the Sabangau Forest, with the world's largest population of nearly 7,000 wild orangutans, which is facing the greatest threat. For the orangutans, recent decades have seen their wild kingdoms eroded by the onset of logging and the turning over of forest for oil palm plantations.