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Indonesia escalates firefighting operations across Kalimantan

Indonesian authorities are ramping up efforts to contain wildfires ravaging Kalimantan, deploying additional aerial resources and resuming cloud-seeding operations to combat the environmental disaster.

LSN Malaysia · 23 August 2026

Indonesia escalates firefighting operations across Kalimantan

Indonesia's disaster management agency has announced a stepped-up campaign to tackle widespread fires engulfing Kalimantan, with officials confirming that cloud-seeding activities have resumed across the affected regions. The intensified response comes as the scale of the conflagration threatens to worsen environmental conditions and air quality across the vast Indonesian territory.

Additional helicopters have been mobilized for water-bombing operations, joining existing aerial units in efforts to suppress active fire zones. The deployment represents a significant expansion of the government's firefighting capacity as conventional ground-based containment measures prove insufficient to manage the fire's spread.

Cloud-seeding, a technique that uses aircraft to seed clouds with particles to induce rainfall, is being employed alongside the aerial water-bombing campaign. Officials have indicated that both methods will be sustained as part of a comprehensive strategy to bring the fires under control and prevent further ecological damage across Kalimantan's vast forest regions.