Sumatran elephants threatened as wildfires burn habitat

Critically endangered Sumatran elephants are being pushed closer to the brink as wildfires burn large areas of their habitat on Indonesia's Sumatra island, conservation group Geopix said on Wednesday.

Geopix said in a report published Tuesday that more than 4,500 hotspots were detected in 21 Sumatran elephant habitats between June and early September. It said more than 560,000 hectares, or 1.4 million acres, burned during the same period.

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that only 2,400 to 2,800 Sumatran elephants remain in the wild.

Geopix said hotspots within elephant habitats rose to more than 2,800 in the first week of September, more than double the roughly 1,300 recorded in August.

Geopix senior wildlife campaigner Annisa Rahmawati said the fires caused habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, reducing food and water sources and changing elephant movement patterns. She said toxic smoke could increase physiological stress among the animals and warned that food and water shortages could reduce their ability to survive in the wild.

Indonesia has been battling fires for weeks in parts of Borneo and Sumatra, sending haze across Indonesia and neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore. Indonesia regularly faces wildfires during the July-to-October dry season. The blazes this year were worse in part because of the El Nino weather phenomenon, while experts also blame climate change, decades of forest degradation and slash-and-burn land clearing.

The Indonesian government said more than 202,000 hectares burned countrywide between January and July. The Nusantara Atlas project put the figure at close to 300,000 hectares for the same period and last week estimated the total affected area, including August, at nearly 896,000 hectares.