Prabowo Seeks Expert Input on Peatland Fires After Criticism Row

President Prabowo Subianto sat down with twenty-two experts on a Thursday in late September to ask them how to stop Indonesia's peatlands from burning. The meeting itself was a reversal—just days earlier, he had publicly derided unnamed experts as people who "are so smart that they become idiots," accusing them of weaponizing criticism against his administration's policies. The backlash had been swift and broad. Now he was asking for their advice.

Indonesia holds more than thirteen million hectares of peatland, vast stretches of earth that can hold enormous quantities of water but turn into tinderboxes when drained. Once ignited, peatland fires are nearly impossible to extinguish because they smoulder beneath the soil surface and spread underground, burning for months. The country has been struggling to contain wildfires raging across Kalimantan and Sumatra, with no clear end in sight. During the meeting, Prabowo asked the assembled researchers directly: what are the best steps to prevent fires in forest areas, including peatlands? Could peatlands be converted to cropland?

One expert present, Indratmo Soekarno from the Bandung Institute of Technology, brought up the Peatland and Mangrove Restoration Agency—an organization the government had dissolved just sixteen months earlier, in April 2025. Soekarno suggested that the agency's existing blueprint for managing peatlands held valuable lessons. By the meeting's end, Prabowo had agreed to the experts' recommendation to establish a new peatland and mangrove management agency that would take on the dissolved organization's responsibilities, particularly around fire prevention and developing technology to detect hotspots.

Yet skepticism about the consultation was immediate and pointed. Herdiansyah Hamzah, a law professor at Mulawarman University in East Kalimantan and a member of the Indonesian Academic Freedom Caucus, did not attend the meeting. He called it a gimmick. The government, he said, had consistently ignored scientific data and expertise when making policy decisions. Environmental experts had long documented that peatland clearing was a primary driver of land fires—something, he argued, the Prabowo administration should have addressed from the start. The dissolution of the restoration agency itself, he suggested, was evidence of the government's fundamental disregard for science.

The timing of Prabowo's outreach to experts was impossible to separate from the political damage his recent remarks had caused. In September, he had accused critics of trying to undermine his flagship free nutritious meal programme. In March, he had called unnamed observers "unpatriotic." In July, he had suggested that journalists and analysts critical of his policies were serving foreign interests. Each statement had drawn condemnation from academics and the public. During the expert meeting, Prabowo said he had "the utmost respect for experts" and claimed his public remarks were often distorted to suggest otherwise.

Meanwhile, the human consequences of the fires were mounting. On September 17, indigenous and civil society groups in West Kalimantan had filed suit against Prabowo and his government, alleging deliberate negligence in failing to prevent and manage the wildfires that had paralyzed the province. Environmentalists pointed to decades of peatland degradation and deliberate land clearing by fire as the root causes of the current crisis. Affected communities were demanding answers about why the government's response had been so inadequate. The new agency, if established, would inherit a problem that had been building for years—one that a previous government body had been tasked with addressing before it was shut down.