Modern logging techniques, even when not involving clear-felling leave an enormous amount of trash behind, which when dry can easily catch fire, spontaneously or accidentally. Areas cleared through logging, pioneer slash and burn, or specifically for the purpose, are planted with plantation crops. Here again, it is the uncleared dry waste left by the firms involved which seems to pose the greatest risk. It has been common since the late seventies for fires in Kalimantan to occlude the sun and to pose hazards for residents in, for example, Brunei and east Malaysia. In some places surface coal seams and peat have ignited and continue to burn for years rather than months.
Institutions appear to be corporately more ignorant, and less well-placed to respond.
Why this should be so is crucial to understand if the problem is to be addressed, let alone solved. It is not, it would appear, for lack of information. The Indonesian Department of the environment, for example, is able to match satellite imagery to databases which indicate precisely the ownership of plantations where the worst fires have started. These have been on estates belonging to hardly more than 146 companies. Some of these companies are owned by members of the Indonesian political elite, some have Malaysian and Singaporean backing and some involve Western capital.