Indonesia: dry season to be less severe this year

Indonesia's dry season is forecast to be less severe this year compared to 2023, improving its chance of managing forest fires and crops.

In its report on Friday, the Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics (BMKG) said that the dry season this year is not as dry as last year, and forest fires will not be as severe as 2023.

However, people and functional forces still need to anticipate the risk of forest fires especially in provinces that have peatlands, it noted.

The dry season will start later than usual in May and June for the island of Java and parts of Borneo and Sulawesi, and it will peak in July-August, BMKG said, adding that from September, the weather will start to be affected by a weak La Nina weather pattern, bringing more rainfall.

Last year's El Nino pattern had an impact that stretched into 2024, with planting delays causing early-year rice harvests to slump.

Some areas in Indonesia's Sumatra and Java are currently being hit by floods amid heavy rains. At least 30 people were killed and 70,000 others displaced due to floods and landslides in West Sumatra last week.

According to BMKG, last year's dry season was the most severe since 2019 due to an El Nino weather phenomenon that lasted longer than usual, bringing a drought that hurt crops and exacerbated forest fires. More than 1.16 million ha of forests burned last year, the most since 2019 and more than five times the area of forest burned in 2022