The new Geographic Information Sistem (GIS) data available on the Sawit Watch website makes it easy to see if there have been fires within the borders of oil palm concessions. For example this week (August1st –  5th) there were four hotspots within PT Dongin Prabhawa’s (Korindo group) concession in Merauke:

You can check for yourself on http://gis.sawitwatch.or.id/   Unfortunately the oil palm data concession they are using is about 5 years out of date, meaning that some of the plantations never happened and therre are a lot of new ones.Nevertheless, it is an interesting tool. (see also http://geodata-cso.org/)

Clearing forest using fire is illegal and pollutingl but it happens all the time. If you take a look at the situation in Sumatra or Kalimantan, you can see clearly that the air quality panics spreading across Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia haven’t stopped it from happening.