Children in south Borneo face health risks as El Niño fuels wildfires | News | Eco-Business | Asia Pacific

Nature & Climate Perspective

**Catastrophic peatland and tropical forest combustion across Borneo severely degrades critical carbon reservoirs and destabilizes regional ecological infrastructure. **

• Extensive fire propagation across Borneo and Sumatra imperils irreplaceable biodiversity, causing rapid habitat fragmentation for critically endangered fauna and disrupting endemic peat-swamp forest biomes.
• The burning of subterranean peat deposits converts high-density terrestrial carbon reservoirs into active GHG emissions, directly undermining net LULUCF carbon sequestration capacity.
• Hydrological destabilization of peat domes caused by sustained wildfire exposure creates systemic vulnerability, accelerating soil degradation and reducing environmental resilience to future El Niño-induced climate stress.

Market & Policy Outlook

**Heightened non-permanence risks from Indonesian forest fires challenge ICVCM Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) integrity and threaten international carbon crediting pipelines. **

• Uncontrolled reversal events will trigger policy interventions by host governments, potentially restricting the authorization of ITMOs under Article 6.2 and Article 6.4 to preserve domestic NDC targets.
• Market pricing faces widening spreads and increased risk-discounting for jurisdictional REDD+ assets that fail to meet ICVCM CCP mandates on permanence and buffer pool capitalization.
• Corporates exposed through Scope 3 compensation and voluntary claims face reputational and audit friction under SBTi guidelines due to physical credit invalidation and supply-side non-permanence.