Smoke from rampant peatland wildfires fueled by a record-breaking El Niño has engulfed Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia in a toxic haze. As the blazes diminish air quality by releasing hazardous pollutants, they are also emitting massive amounts of planet-warming carbon.

So far this year, Indonesia’s fires have released an estimated 190 million tons of carbon. That’s roughly equivalent to three-quarters of the country’s annual CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels, according to Earth scientists Gareth Roberts and Martin Wooster. In an article for The Conversation, they explain how El Niño-driven drought set the stage for the current crisis.

Parched conditions are exacerbating the flammability of peatlands that were already degraded by deforestation and drainage, making it easier for fires to spark and spread, they write. When peat ignites, it can smolder underground for weeks or months, releasing ancient carbon that had been locked away for centuries. This situation is just one example of how El Niño’s impacts will ratchet up atmospheric CO2 levels in the coming months.

Take the strong El Niño of 2023 and 2024, for example. That event helped boost the global average CO2 concentration by 3.5 ppm, the largest increase since modern record keeping began in 1957. On Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization published a report showing that CO2 levels rose by 2.8 ppm from 2024 to 2025—a more moderate increase, though the global average CO2 concentration still reached a record high.

“We can expect to see a further increase in concentrations in 2026 because of fossil fuel burning and the development of a powerful El Niño which will impact land carbon sinks as it did in 2023/2024,” Oksana Tarasova, senior scientific officer for the WMO, said in a statement.

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