Decades of deforestation and peatland drainage for industry and agriculture have also worsened this year’s wildfires. (EPA Images pic)SINGAPORE: Wildfires that hit large parts of Indonesia from August to October and plunged much of Southeast Asia into hazardous smoke were made much worse by "record-breaking" heat caused by human-induced climate change, scientists said on Friday.
While a very strong El Niño was the dominant factor in determining the extremely low levels of rainfall across Indonesia from July, human-induced climate change contributed around 1.6 degrees Celsius of additional heat during the fire season, said a report by climate research group World Weather Attribution.
"The conditions that we saw this year would simply just not have happened in a world without the human contribution to climate change, even with the very strong El Niño that we're seeing," said Theodore Keeping, a researcher into wildfires and extreme weather at Imperial College London who contributed to the report.
