Fires reach the edge of Indonesia's new capital

Indonesia's fire season has now reached the ground where the new capital is being built. The South China Morning Post reports that fires were burning across more than 400 hectares inside the Nusantara project area in East Kalimantan, the 252,000-hectare site meant to take over from Jakarta. President Prabowo Subianto ordered emergency help on Monday, including water-bombing drones and navy vessels. The Giuseppe Garibaldi, the former Italian warship that became Indonesia's first aircraft carrier, is due to arrive on 17 September, the navy told state news agency Antara.

The numbers behind that order are steep. About 202,000 hectares of forest and peatland burned across the country between January and June, in what is now the worst fire season in 11 years. Between 1 August and 9 September, monitors counted more than 14,000 hotspots, against 1,033 in the same weeks of 2025. A hotspot is a point of heat that a satellite can see from orbit, and it usually means land is burning. East Kalimantan sits among the hardest-hit provinces.

Officials at the site say the core of the project is safe for now. Myrna Asnawati Safitri, deputy for environment and natural resources at the Nusantara Capital City Authority, said there are no hotspots or fires in the main government area, and that air quality has been generally good since July. The nearest fires are roughly 35 kilometres from the main construction zone. Only about a quarter of the site is planned for offices, civil service housing and commercial buildings, so most of it is land and forest that can burn.

Why it matters

Anyone working at Nusantara or living in the towns around it should plan for weeks of smoke rather than a quick end to it, because the fires are close enough that the government is sending a warship. The larger signal is about capacity. When the answer to a fire season is an aircraft carrier, the ordinary firefighting system is already stretched, and that same system is what protects villages with no presidential project next door.