Somebody lit those fires. That’s the detail worth considering before anything else in this story. The peat burning across Kalimantan and Sumatra right now is mostly deliberate, set by plantation companies and smallholders clearing ground for palm oil and pulp, and Indonesian police have arrested 72 people for it in the past week. The smoke from that clearing has now put 5.5 million Indonesians under toxic air, shut nearly 600 schools in Malaysia, and reached air monitors in Manila. Meanwhile, the World Meteorological Organization warned Thursday that the El Niño driving the drought may be the strongest on record. The Church has a specific thing to say about an economic act whose costs fall on people who had no part in it, and it says it in the language of accounting rather than sentiment.
The News Story
The World Meteorological Organization said Thursday that the current El Niño is likely to strengthen further and could become the most powerful since monitoring began four decades ago. At a Geneva press conference, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said that if the pattern holds its trajectory, it may run “off the charts” the agency has used for the past 40 years. The agency’s forecasts now show a near 100% likelihood that El Niño persists through February 2027, the first time the WMO has stated that degree of certainty. Exceptionally warm sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific are driving it. The WMO expects the pattern to peak toward the end of this year, with effects carrying into 2027 and leaving higher global temperatures behind. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the planet is “in uncharted waters.” Saulo said the agency is expanding early-warning and preparedness work with humanitarian partners across agriculture, health, energy and water.
El Niño is a periodic warming of the eastern Pacific caused by weakening trade winds. It recurs every two to seven years and typically lasts up to a year, shifting rainfall and temperature patterns worldwide. This year’s cycle has already driven a severe food crisis across Central America’s Dry Corridor and lowered water levels in the Panama Canal.
The warning arrived as fires in Indonesia pushed the region into its worst haze episode since 2015. Indonesian government figures put the area burned between January and July at more than 200,000 hectares (about 494,000 acres) across Borneo and Sumatra, with nearly 95,000 hectares of that in July alone. Deputy Health Minister Dante Saksono Harbuwono said Monday that roughly 13,500 people were treated for respiratory infections in July and August, and that about 5.5 million people on the two islands have been directly exposed to smoke. Hotspots in West Kalimantan nearly doubled Monday, rising by 3,553 to 7,377, according to Berton Panjaitan of Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency. Air quality readings compiled by the Swiss monitoring firm IQAir hit 780 in Palangkaraya and 593 in Pontianak.
Smoke from Kalimantan has settled over the Malaysian state of Sarawak for much of August and reached peninsular Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and, farther north, the Philippines. Six areas in Sarawak recorded readings above 300 on Malaysia’s Air Pollutant Index on Tuesday, with Kuching at 407 and Serian at 408. Anything above 100 is unhealthy. Malaysia’s health ministry reported asthma cases nationwide rising to 1,811 in the week of August 23 to 29, up from 219 the week before, and conjunctivitis cases climbing to 720 from 146. Nearly 600 schools in and around Kuching closed on August 20 and 21, keeping some 200,000 students home. Sarawak Deputy Premier Douglas Uggah Embas said any area crossing 500 will be placed under local emergency, with offices shut. ASEAN has activated its highest transboundary haze alert for the southern part of the region.
In the Philippines, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources said seven monitoring stations in Manila recorded unhealthy PM2.5 levels, with air quality also worsening in Central Luzon, Calabarzon, Mimaropa and Central Visayas. Indonesian police said last week they had arrested 72 people suspected of setting fires, a practice used illegally to clear peatland for palm oil and pulp production.[1]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
Start with the financial ledger, because that’s where the Church starts her teaching.
A company clears a hundred hectares of Kalimantan peatland. On the balance sheet, that clearing costs what the labor and equipment cost. Fire is cheap. Draining and burning peat is the cheapest way anyone has found to turn carbon-rich swamp forest into ground that will hold palm oil. The land is then worth something it wasn’t worth before, and that new value shows up on the balance sheet as a gain.
Now look at what doesn’t show up. Thirteen thousand five hundred respiratory infections treated in Indonesia over two months. An air quality index of 780 in Palangkaraya, on a scale where anything above 300 is called hazardous. Two hundred thousand schoolchildren in and around Kuching were sent home for two days. Asthma cases in Malaysia went from 219 in one week to 1,811 the next. None of that appears anywhere in the price of palm oil. Those costs were real; they were incurred by a specific decision, and they were paid by people in three countries who had no say in it.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church addresses this directly, and I want to be careful about how plainly it puts it, because the phrasing matters. Economic activity that uses natural resources must “foresee the costs involved, which are ‘an essential element of the actual cost of economic activity.'”[2] An essential element of the actual cost, which puts environmental harm inside the price rather than beside it as a matter of corporate goodwill. The Church is making a claim about arithmetic here: the number on the invoice is wrong, and it’s wrong in a specific direction, because part of the real cost was quietly moved onto somebody else’s account.
Francis worked the same point out in Laudato Si’, and he happened to choose almost exactly this example. “As long as the clearing of a forest increases production, no one calculates the losses entailed in the desertification of the land, the harm done to biodiversity or the increased pollution. In a word, businesses profit by calculating and paying only a fraction of the costs involved.” The test he then gives is the sharp one. An economic act can be called ethical only when the social and environmental costs of using shared resources “are recognized with transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations.”[3]
Run that standard against this story, and the verdict writes itself. Transparency failed first: the costs stayed invisible until the smoke crossed into Sarawak and Malaysian hospitals started counting asthma cases. The second test failed harder. A 10-month-old in Kuching with an underdeveloped lung is bearing a cost her family never incurred, and her parents have rushed her to the emergency room twice because she could not breathe. The third test fails on a longer clock, since drained and burned peat keeps releasing carbon for decades and cannot simply be put back.
So who pays for the smoke? Somebody always does. The question a Catholic should press is whether the person paying agreed to it.
That’s where the second half of the Church’s teaching comes in, moving the argument from economics to justice. The Compendium says the environment is a common good “destined for all,” and that care for it is “a common and universal duty.”[4] Air is the hardest possible case for anyone who wants to treat the environment as private property with a fence around it. The air over Borneo is unowned by anyone and breathed by everyone, and the smoke checks no passport at the Kalimantan border before it settles over Serian, where the index hit 408 on Tuesday. A company that burns peat is spending down something it does not own and cannot compensate anyone for.
The Compendium also names what should exist and doesn’t. It calls for the international community to “draw up uniform rules” letting states control activities with negative environmental effects, and it says that a state should work within its own territory to ensure that “its citizens are not exposed to dangerous pollutants or toxic wastes.” The Compendium then names the underlying claim outright: “the right to a safe and healthy natural environment.”[5] Hold that against what the region actually has. ASEAN has a transboundary haze alert system, currently at its highest level, and the alert is essentially a notification. It tells Malaysians that the air will be bad. It does not give a Malaysian child a claim against the person who lit the fire in another country. The gap between a warning and a right is the whole problem.
And this is the part where the analysis has to stay honest rather than comfortable. The people setting these fires are not all executives. Al Jazeera reports that both plantation companies and smallholders burn, and a smallholder with four hectares and no equipment burns because burning is what he can afford. The Compendium is clear that the environmental crisis and poverty are tangled together, and that the poorest are hit hardest by ecological damage.[6] They are also, in a case like this, sometimes the ones holding the match. A Catholic analysis that ends by blaming the peasant has understood nothing, and one that pretends he isn’t part of the causal chain has understood nothing either.
Which is exactly why Leo XIV’s instruction in Dilexi Te is the right note to end on. Charity, he writes, is what must inspire every effort to “resolve the structural causes of poverty,” and he asks for politicians capable of “healing the deepest roots” of the evils in our world rather than their appearances.[7] Seventy-two arrests are treating an appearance. Every one of those arrests may be just, and the fires will still burn next dry season, because the structure underneath is untouched: burning remains the cheapest way to clear land. The buyer of the palm oil never smells the smoke, and no mechanism exists to send the hospital bill back up the supply chain to the party that generated it.
Fixing a structure means changing what things cost. That is unglamorous work: land tenure that gives smallholders an alternative to fire, buyers who audit their own supply chains and pay enough that clearing without burning is affordable, and the enforceable cross-border rules the Compendium asked for twenty years ago. Every item on that list belongs to justice, the older and stricter of the two virtues, and justice is owed whether or not anyone feels generous.
One more turn, and the WMO gave it to us Thursday. A practice that was reckless in an ordinary year becomes something worse in this one. If El Niño runs stronger than any on record through February 2027, then the same fire, lit the same way, will burn longer, spread farther, and smolder underground where no one can put it out. Moral responsibility tracks what a person can reasonably foresee. After a warning that specific, from an agency that specific, “we always clear land this way” stops working as a defense. The forecast is public. Anyone who burns peat this season knows what the season is.
Most of us reading this will never see Kalimantan. But palm oil is in a startling share of what’s in the pantry of the average Westerner, and the ledger this post has been describing connects directly to it. The Church asks something harder and more useful of us than guilt over groceries: that the true cost of a thing be named out loud, and then paid by the people who ran it up.
This story turns on the universal destination of goods: the air over Borneo belongs to everyone, and no one may quietly bill his costs to a neighbor who never agreed to pay them.
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Footnotes
- “El Niño likely to intensify, may become strongest ever recorded, WMO says,” Reuters, published by The Star, September 3, 2026, thestar.com.my; “Toxic haze from wildfires spreads across South East Asia as ‘super’ El Niño intensifies,” BBC News, September 3, 2026, yahoo.com; Patrick Lee and Zaheena Rasheed, “Toxic haze from Indonesian forest fires chokes Malaysian Borneo,” Al Jazeera, September 1, 2026, aljazeera.com; “Haze besieges Southeast Asia as Indonesia’s wildfires blaze away,” The Jakarta Post, September 3, 2026, thejakartapost.com; “Mapped: Indonesia’s wildfires spread toxic haze across Southeast Asia as officials flag El Niño threat,” BBC News, September 2026, ca.news.yahoo.com; “EMB: Haze may affect parts of Philippines until September 3,” Rappler, September 1, 2026, rappler.com; “Will El Niño become supersized? What experts are saying,” EarthSky, September 2026, earthsky.org. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 470, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015), no. 195, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 466, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 468, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 482, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te: On Love for the Poor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2025), no. 91, vatican.va. ↩
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