Non-indigenous islanders have also used fire for hunting, said Siegert. For example, "turtles live during the day usually in mud holes, where they are difficult to find," he said. "Fire forces them to come out, and then they can be easily collected."
Huge swaths of forest have also been cleared to make way for pulp wood and palm oil plantations. Much of the forest land that has been cleared is anchored in peat, which is a rich source of fuel for fires.
From 1996 to 1997 alone, nearly 2.5 million acres (one million hectares) of peat land was drained for a rice-growing project and then set on fire to clear the land, said Siegert. Peat fires set by plantation companies and transmigrants contributed enormously to the acrid cloud of smoke that hung over Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia in 1997, garnering international attention.
Fires are also used as a "weapon" in land disputes between the plantation companies and local people who consider the land to be theirs.
And then there's logging. Indonesia is one of the largest suppliers of tropical timber in the world. According to the World Bank, about 70 percent of the timber is felled illegally.
The bank predicts that if current deforestation trends continue, lowland rain forests will become extinct in Sumatra by 2005, and in Kalimantan soon after 2010.
CIFOR has estimated that the current level of deforestation might be as high as 4.3 million acres (1.7 million hectares) a year.
Toward Prevention
Siegert said data acquired from the study was used to produce a "fire-risk" map showing the most vulnerable areas of forest, which can help policy makers establish fire-prevention policies and determine where to allocate fire-fighting equipment.
Conservation groups have long been clamoring for a change in government policies regarding land conversion and logging in the tropical rain forests.
At a regional ministerial-level conference on forest law enforcement held in September in Bali, Indonesia signed on to an agreement to step up enforcement against illegal logging. But the situation is urgent, and conservationists are justifiably worried.
"Unless land-use policies are changed to control logging and to introduce reduced-impact logging techniques, recurrent fires will lead to a complete loss of Borneo's lowland rain forests," the authors warn.
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