Impact case study database

Climate change presents the single biggest threat to sustainable development across the world¹. Its widespread, unprecedented impacts – driven by increasing amounts of carbon-bearing greenhouse gases like CO₂ in the atmosphere – disproportionately burden the poorest and most vulnerable. The high carbon content of peat makes it one of Nature’s most efficient carbon stores. The annually re-occurring peat forest fires in Indonesia represent a substantial fraction (up to 15 – 20%) of the global anthropogenic CO₂ emissions². In severe years they release more CO₂ than the entire global transport sector³, thus greatly impacting climate change. The fires have additional devastating consequences. They lead to enormous economic losses⁴ for tens of millions of Indonesian people, and the World Bank estimates that tens of millions of people suffer health problems from these annual fires⁵.

Efforts are underway to find and contain the fires, but the challenges faced are considerable. For example, to completely extinguish a peat fire with an area of only 1m² requires 200 – 400 litres of water(!). Identifying the precise location of fires when they are small and more easily contained and extinguished is therefore vital. However, finding and then fighting fires on peatlands is difficult and dangerous work, owing to limited accessibility, water availability and visibility, particularly in remote and forested areas, plus the fact that peat fires can burn beneath the surface and re-emerge.

¹ https://unfccc.int/achieving-the-sustainable-development-goals-through-climate-action.

² Peat fire emission in South-east Asia in 2015 exceeded the 8.9Tg CO₂/day fossil fuel CO₂ release rate of the whole EU (Huijnen+, 2016, Scientific Reports, 26886). Average = ~1% of global fossil fuel emissions (Page+ 2016, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 371).

³ Page et al., 2002, Nature 420, 61–65.

⁴ The World Bank estimates Indonesia lost USD 16.1 billion in 2015 alone ( http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/643781465442350600/Indonesia-forest-fire-notes.pdf)

⁵ For example, Crippa et al. (2016, Scientific Reports, 37074) estimate 69 million people were exposed to smoke for 3 months and 100,300 deaths arose from the 2015 fires alone.

Fire detection is traditionally carried out on foot, which is inherently very slow and person-intensive. Having reached the fire-zone, it can take large, experienced fire crews many hours of walking in near-zero visibility to pinpoint the fire location, especially when burning underground. This leads to prolonged exposure to extremely dense and harmful smoke inhalation, and horrific injuries by inadvertently standing and falling into fires burning underground. Drones have been tried as a potential solution to overcome these problems, but visible wavelength cameras cannot detect fires through smoke and vegetation, particularly for fires that burn underground.

Our research showed that our drone plus thermal infrared camera system can easily identify peat fires burning both underground and through the smoke – current fundamental bottlenecks in stopping the fires – from large distances. In September 2019 we delivered a thermal drone system to our Indonesian collaborators, and it has subsequently been used by fire-fighting teams in the Central Kalimantan province (the region often containing the most numerous, widespread and severe fires). For each fire, the fire-fighters recorded the GPS location, how long it took to extinguish, the number of person working days needed to tackle it, and the total area burnt. We asked our collaborators [the Borneo Nature Foundation (BNF), government agencies, universities and fire-fighting teams] for a joint letter quantifying the impact our system has had on finding and extinguishing fires.

In this letter, Bernat Capilla, Director of Programs at BNF, states, “… the overwhelmingly positive feedback from fire-fighting teams and their desire for thermal drones to attend all possible fire events, attests to this positive impact. This derives from an increased ability and speed of detecting fires (compared to checking on foot, which is dangerous and may take many hours for a large fire, we estimate that use of a thermal drone allows fire hotspot location mapping to be completed around at least 10x quicker and with almost no safety risk), which in turn improves the ability of teams to monitor the current fire situation and deploy team members as necessary to prevent fire spread and extinguish hotspots. … The technology is also particularly useful in surveying fire sites post-initial fire-fighting, to confirm that all hotspots are extinguished and it is safe to leave the site, again increasing the speed of this by at least 10x. This is vitally important, as peat fires can smoulder beneath the surface, where they are difficult to detect without the aid of thermal imaging technology, and then re-emerge after fire-fighters have gone home, causing more damage.” Further quantitative impacts are summarised below.

Impact 1 – Increased efficiency in finding/extinguishing fires: The fire-fighters estimate that compared to traditional methods, our drone system accurately identifies the location of the fires over 10x quicker, helps extinguish them 50% quicker and makes it over 10x quicker to confirm fires are extinguished.

Impact 2 – Substantial reduction in CO₂ released into the atmosphere: Using the known amount of CO₂ that peat fires in the Kalimantan region emit per unit area (Setyawati & Suwarsono, 2018, IOPConf.Ser.: Earth.Environ.Sci. 166012041) and the spread rate of smouldering peat fires (Prat-Guitart et al., International Journal of Wildland Fire 2016, 25, 456–465), on average, the fires that were tackled released 1 ton of CO₂ (equivalent to 2 trans-Atlantic flights) per hour. Given the increased efficiencies described above, our drone system conservatively saves 3 tons of CO₂ from being emitted per fire. In October 2019, the fire-teams extinguished 26 fires using the drone. We are therefore saving roughly 78 tons of CO₂ (156 trans-Atlantic flights worth) from entering the atmosphere per drone system per month.

Impact 3 – Improved health of firefighters and surrounding population: the increased efficiency in finding/extinguishing the fires led to (i) virtually zero exposure to the previous safety risks finding fires; (ii) 200 days less smoke inhalation for the fire fighters, the effects of which are known to be extremely harmful; (iii) a corresponding drop in the concentration of toxic haze which had to be endured by the ~15 million Kalimantan province residents.

Impact of COVID-19: In 2020 we intended to bring additional drone systems with new automated fire-detection capability to additional fire teams in Indonesia. We believe this would have significantly increased the above impacts. However, COVID-19 travel restrictions meant it was not possible to deliver the systems.