Future fire emissions associated with projected land use change in Indonesia

Indonesia has experienced rapid land use change in past decades as forests and peatlands are cleared for agricultural development, including oil palm and timber plantations¹. Fires are the predominant method of clearing and the subsequent emissions can have important public health impacts by contributing to regional particulate matter and ozone concentrations². This regional haze was dramatically seen in Singapore during June 2013 due to the transport of emissions from fires in Sumatra. Our study is part of a larger project that will quantify the public health impact of various land use development scenarios for Sumatra over the coming decades. Here, we describe how we translate economic projections of land use change into future fire emissions inventories for GEOS-Chem atmospheric transport simulations. We relate past GFED3 fire emissions³ to detailed 1-km land use change data and MODIS fire radiative power observations, and apply these relationships to future estimates of land use change. The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to use modeling results to interact with policy makers and influence development strategies in ways that protect public health. ¹Miettinen et al. 2011. Deforestation rates in insular Southeast Asia between 2000 and 2010. Glob. Change Biol.,17 (7), 2261-2270. ²Marlier et al. 2013. El Niño and health risks from landscape fire emissions in southeast Asia. Nature Clim. Change, 3, 131-136. ³van der Werf et al. 2010. Global fire emissions and the contribution of deforestation, savanna, forest, agricultural, and peat fires (1997-2009). Atmos. Chem. Physics, 10 (23), 11707-11735.