The peatland forest fires of 2015 in Indonesia choked much of Southeast Asia with a persistent haze from August to October that year.

The fires caused as much damage to GDP as the Indonesia’s largest industry - palm oil - contributes to the economy in a single year. 

Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo, suffered the worst of the fires. The region is particularly fire prone because of a disastrous project to drain its peatlands to convert them into rice fields that was abandoned in the 1990s.

Eco-Business recently visited a palm oil estate in West Kalimantan owned by Singapore-listed Golden Agri Resources (GAR) - Indonesia’s second largest palm oil firm, with a planted area of 482,228 hectares - to find out what the company is doing to tackle the country’s well entrenched culture of seasonal land burning, which has been fingered as the main cause of forest fires.

See the photos here.