THE first thing you notice is the smell — acrid, heavy and unrelenting.
By the time the smoke reaches the nearest village in Pekan, it’s already too late. Somewhere deep inside the forest reserve, the peat is burning.
I’ve seen this too many times. One minute, the air is clear; the next, the haze rolls in like an invading army. It doesn’t just sting the eyes — it settles in your lungs, it clings to your clothes, it drapes over the land like a warning we keep ignoring.
This is one of Malaysia’s last surviving peat swamp forests — in Pekan, Pahang. They are quiet, mysterious, and vital. Beneath the waterlogged surface lies centuries of carbon stored in layers of peat soil. If left untouched, these forests quietly do their job: regulate water, shelter wildlife, and store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem.
But in my years working on the Pahang Peatland Restoration Project (PPRP), I’ve learned that the greatest danger here doesn’t come from storms or droughts. It comes from fire. And unlike other forests, once peat catches fire, the battle has only just begun.
A battle in the mud
In March 2025, the call came in before sunrise. A fire had broken out in the Pekan Permanent Reserved Forest. Within hours, my team was there — boots sinking into blackened mud, water pumps roaring, helicopters overhead.
For 22 days, we fought alongside Bomba Malaysia, Pahang Forestry Department, Department of Environment, Department of Irrigation and Drainage, NGOs and villagers who know these lands like the lines on their hands. A hundred people each day, hoses in hand, pushing back flames that refused to die. When it was over, 200 hectares of forest were gone. The loss was not just trees — it was a rich and important ecosystem. We saw a Sun Bear scurrying away in the smoke during our fire-fighting operations and we spotted charred carcasses of wildlife when we went back to measure the burnt scar.
Why it’s so hard to put out
Peat fires don’t behave like normal fires. Aboveground, embers leap from one dry patch to another. Belowground, the peat smoulders silently, eating away at the soil from beneath. In drained peat swamp forests, a fire can burn for months, even after the last visible flames are doused.
And these fires aren’t natural. Every one I’ve seen in Southeast Pahang has been human-induced — from burning land to clear it for farming, to cooking fires at fishing spots gone wrong. Logging makes it worse, drying the land by cutting canals and roads.
What we stand to lose
When peatlands burn, we lose more than trees.
Crops and native plants vanish.
Wildlife disappears.
Indigenous and local livelihoods are disrupted.
Forest-based economies crumble.
And the haze — carrying dangerous PM2.5 particles — travels far beyond our borders.
We also lose time. It can take decades for a peat swamp forest to recover.
The answer lies in prevention
We’ve learned the hard way that putting out fires is costly, exhausting, and often too late. Prevention is the only sustainable path forward.
That means stopping the burn before it starts — through strict bans on open burning, protecting forests from drainage and logging, and rewetting peatlands with canal-blocking measures. It means working with communities so that sustainable land use isn’t just an idea, but a livelihood. And it means investing in early warning systems so we act before smoke reaches the horizon.
Because the cost of doing nothing will always be more than the cost of acting now.
I’ve walked through forests that survived a fire years ago. The ecosystems are still scarred. But I’ve also seen rewetted peatlands come back to life — water levels rise, ferns reclaim the ground, and the air smells of damp earth again.
That’s what keeps me going. And that’s what’s at stake.
Dr Jane Koh currently serves as the Managing Director of Southridge Malaysia Sdn Bhd and Project Lead of the Pahang Peatland Restoration Project. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Sinar Daily.