Human-set fires in drought-parched New Guinea are producing unusually high emissions on both sides of the island

Fires set by people are burning across both halves of New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island, and the carbon they are releasing is unusually high. NASA’s Earth Observatory reported on Oct. 22, 2026, that emissions on both sides of the island are unusually high as human-set fires spread in a landscape parched by drought. Smoke covered much of the island for weeks in September and October.

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The eastern half of the island is Papua New Guinea, and the western half is Indonesian Papua. The two are governed separately, yet the fires, the dry weather and the smoke do not follow the border. A record pace on one side is matched by an unusually bad season on the other, and both trace back to the same drought.

What the emissions data show

The numbers come from the Global Fire Emissions Database, a satellite-driven framework that estimates burned area and the emissions fires produce. According to the Earth Observatory article by Adam Voiland, Papua New Guinea had emitted nearly 32 megatons of carbon by Oct. 19, more than in any other year on record at that point. Indonesian Papua had emitted more than 35 megatons, the third highest after 2015 and 1997.

Guido van der Werf of Wageningen University and Research, one of the original developers of the database, said it is very likely that this will become the highest year on record for Papua New Guinea. The tally is not final, since fires continue to burn. A 2026 paper in Earth System Science Data by Yang Chen and colleagues extends the database to near-real-time, which is how running totals can be compared with earlier years.

For scale, the database’s own FAQ estimates that fires emit roughly 3.4 gigatons of carbon per year worldwide, about 34 percent of fossil-fuel emissions. By simple division, the two halves of New Guinea together, at about 67 megatons so far, amount to around 2 percent of a typical global year in a single season. The comparison is rough, since the global figure is an annual average and the island totals are year-to-date, but it conveys why the Earth Observatory flags the season as unusual.

Drought and El Niño set the stage

NASA ties the dry conditions to a strong El Niño. In the Trans-Fly region of southern Papua New Guinea, rain did not fall for more than 90 consecutive days, according to the country’s National Weather Service, and since August some areas have received roughly 5 to 10 percent of normal precipitation. The service’s drought monitoring page is the source for the weather record.

Dry fuel turns ordinary burning into a hazard. The Earth Observatory notes that people light most of the fires, for reasons that include crop fires, pasture maintenance, land clearing, deforestation and hunting. In a drought, managed fires can spread out of control, especially in the southern savannas, so a practice that is routine in a normal year becomes a regional emergency when the landscape is this dry. Because most ignitions are deliberate or accidental rather than natural, the drought sets the scale of the problem, while land-use choices and everyday burning supply the sparks.

Robert Field, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, called it “a horrible situation.” He told the Earth Observatory that the most fire is generally seen in unmanaged areas or primary forest edges rather than in plantations, which points to fire reaching forest that is otherwise hard to burn. The distinction matters for emissions, since forest edges and primary forest hold far more carbon per hectare than grassland, so fire there releases more.

Smoke, deforestation and the outlook

The effects have reached daily life. Air pollution delayed and canceled flights, closed schools, and prompted advice that children and older people wear masks in some areas. A VIIRS image from the NOAA-20 satellite, captured Oct. 11, shows smoke from the southern part of the island, and NASA’s FIRMS fire map lets readers see active fire detections for the past 24 hours.

In Indonesian Papua the fires land on top of a longer forest-loss story. Yang Chen of the University of California, Irvine, said Papua has emerged as Indonesia’s new deforestation frontier. According to Global Forest Watch, the region lost 27,000 hectares of primary forest in 2025, nearly double the 2024 figure and the most since 2017.

Researchers expect the fires to continue until wet-season rains arrive in southern New Guinea, typically in early November. Until then, the totals in the emissions database will keep rising, and the Papua New Guinea figure that is already the highest for the date may set the annual record that van der Werf anticipates. The final numbers will be known once the season ends, and the Earth Observatory’s image and charts, produced by Michala Garrison, are drawn from NASA’s satellite data archives and the emissions database as they stood on Oct. 19.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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