Gaharu
Every drop of Bornean oud begins as an injury. A tree is wounded, something gets into the wound, and the tree answers with resin. It takes twenty years. The forest that grows it is being cleared in an afternoon, with a match, on land that mostly belongs to licence holders, in a country whose government has understood exactly how this works for thirty years.
A tree that only becomes valuable when it is hurt
Four species of Aquilaria grow in the swamp and hill forests of Kalimantan. Indonesia's own submission to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species groups them as the malaccensis cluster, found in the western half of the country, in Sumatra and Borneo: Aquilaria malaccensis, A. beccariana, A. microcarpa, A. hirta.
Left alone, all four are unremarkable. The wood is pale, light, soft enough to be worth almost nothing. A sawmill would not cross a river for it.
Then something goes wrong. A boring insect gets in. A branch snaps in a storm. Someone drives a chisel into the trunk. The opening lets in fungi, and the ones repeatedly recovered from resin-bearing wood have names that sound like a hospital chart: Fusarium solani, Lasiodiplodia theobromae, Phaeoacremonium rubrigenum. The tree does what a tree can do. It floods the injured tissue with defence chemistry and seals it off.
That defence is the perfume. It is built from two families of molecules. The sesquiterpenoids, with names collectors have known for a century, agarospirol and jinkohol and jinkoh-eremol and the agarofurans, carry the woody, spiced, faintly animal weight. The second family, the 2-(2-phenylethyl)chromones, is the part that smells like burnt agarwood itself: warm, balsamic, sweet in a way that lasts for hours after the smoke is gone.
So the note is not a fragrance the tree makes. It is a scar the tree makes, and we have decided the scar is beautiful.
The listing was Indonesia's idea. Our delegation argued at Bangkok in 2004 that protecting one species was pointless, because once wood is chipped nobody on a customs bench can tell one Aquilaria from another. It was a serious, well-made argument, and the world accepted it.
Hold on to that. It matters later, when we get to the parts of this story where the state knows precisely what it is doing.
The tree is not giving us anything. We are reading its wound and calling it a top note.
Malinau, Pontianak, Tarakan, Kutai
If you have ever bought Bornean oud you have bought a place name. Most buyers assume these work like Burgundy: a defined ground, a defined character, a body somewhere enforcing the difference. None of that is true here. There is no appellation system for gaharu. There is a habit.
Sort the names actually in circulation and they fall into three piles, and only one of the piles is a forest.
Names that are forests
Malinau is the real one. A regency in North Kalimantan, up against the Sarawak border, wrapped around a large part of Kayan Mentarang National Park. It is the only Kalimantan name with corroboration from outside the shops that sell it: independent houses use it specifically rather than decoratively, and East Kalimantan field research in 2018 recorded the top natural grade, typically Malinau material, at Rp 5 to 10 million per kilogram while ordinary grades sat at Rp 500,000.
What the trade says it smells like is unusual, and consistent enough across sellers to be worth repeating. Not smoke. Blueberry and cinnamon, pear and melon flesh, orange and vanilla, orris butter, a creamy woodiness. One house calls it ginseng injected with iris liqueur under a buttery vanilla raspberry veneer, which is marketing copy and also, if you have smelled good Malinau, not wrong. Where a species is named it is usually Aquilaria microcarpa. The claim attached to it is always the same: no cultivation here, wild only, old stock.
Kapuas Hulu in West Kalimantan, holding Betung Kerihun National Park. Ketapang, holding Gunung Palung. Mahakam Hulu, Berau, Kutai Barat, Murung Raya. These are documented growing grounds. Almost none of them appears on a bottle, because wood from them is sold onward under the name of the town where it was bought.
Names that are desks
Tarakan is an island city. It has an airport and a port and very little forest. Oil sold as Tarakan is described as greener and sharper than the Bornean average, pine and herbs and jungle air, less sweet than Cambodian, and it is almost certainly wood carried in from Malinau, Bulungan and Nunukan on the mainland opposite.
Pontianak is the same story with a better reputation. It is the capital of West Kalimantan, sitting on the Kapuas, and it is where material from Kapuas Hulu, Sintang, Sanggau, Sambas, Ketapang and Melawi is consolidated. Collectors treat Pontianak as scarce and prestigious, and describe it as spicy and woody with a balsamic sweetness, earthier and more layered than Malinau. An Indonesian retail roundup in November 2024 listed Pontianak at Rp 50 million per kilogram, near the top of every price it published. That reputation is real. It is also the single most stretched name on the market, which brings us to the third pile.
Samarinda, Palangka Raya, Balikpapan, Banjarmasin, Sampit: buying centres, ports, desks. A trader in Palangka Raya profiled in the Indonesian press moves around ten tonnes a month and exports to Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Turkey, Singapore and Taiwan. None of that wood grew in Palangka Raya.
Names that are adjectives
One seller offers Tiger Pontianak, Triple King Pontianak, Pontianak King and Ant Nest Pontianak. These differ from each other by adjective. They do not differ by sub-origin, because there is no sub-origin to differ by. A real regency has been stretched into an in-house grading vocabulary, which is what happens to any origin name that starts to sell.
The same seller lists Malino as a Kalimantan origin. Malino is a hill town in Gowa Regency, South Sulawesi, about a thousand kilometres away across the Makassar Strait, on a different island. It is a real agarwood name. It is not a Bornean one.
And kinam, or kyara, the highest grade in the Japanese and Vietnamese tradition, now appears attached to Borneo material by exactly one house, whose own copy pre-emptively argues with the people who doubt it. Reference works written specifically to define kyara do not mention Indonesia at all. Treat Bornean kinam as a price tier, not a classification.
There is no body checking any of this. The names are conventions, kept by the people who profit from them, in a trade where the paperwork cannot even reliably tell you the species.
Nineteen names the oud trade attaches to Bornean material, put back on the island. Tap one. The colour tells you what kind of name it is before you read a word: a forest, a desk, or a place that is not even in Kalimantan.
Classification is ours. A name is called a forest where growing populations are documented in the scientific or conservation literature, a desk where the place is a port or provincial capital that consolidates wood from elsewhere, and no trade name where the place is real but we could find no evidence anyone sells oud under it. Scent descriptions are the trade's own words, reproduced so you can see the vocabulary, not endorsed. Prices are asking prices from Indonesian retail listings and Western artisanal houses, not audited transactions.
Why the label cannot be trusted, structurally
This is not a matter of a few bad sellers. TRAFFIC and CITES documentation accepts that Indonesian export figures for Aquilaria malaccensis have probably always included other Aquilaria species reported under the one name, because once wood is chipped nobody can tell. In Sarawak, herbarium specimens have been reclassified after the fact, which means even the scientific record has been wrong. Collectors document compressed agarwood powder bound with glue, sold as sinking-grade Kalimantan wood, and note that sinking is not a quality test anyway.
Harvesting also runs across the border in both directions, Indonesians working illegally in Sabah and Sarawak and the reverse, which is why so much material is sold simply as Borneo. It is not a region. It is an island shared by three countries, and the word does the work of erasing which one.
Everything in this chapter about scent is what the trade claims, not a finding. Descriptors are drawn from the published copy of Ensar Oud, Agar Aura, Oudimentary and Masantara, from collector discussion on Ouddict, and from the independent critic Olfactory Rescue Service, who cautions in the same breath that oud does not respect political boundaries and that regional profiles overlap.
A forest standing on nine thousand years of its own dead
Peat swamp forest works by failing to rot. The ground is waterlogged year round, there is not enough oxygen for the bacteria that would normally break down fallen leaves and wood, and so the forest floor never finishes decomposing. It just accumulates. Layer on layer, century after century, the forest slowly stands on a deepening mattress of itself.
In parts of Central Kalimantan that mattress is ten to twelve metres deep. Indonesian coastal peatland holds on the order of 3,300 tonnes of carbon per hectare. Per hectare, tropical peat stores several times what the forest growing on top of it does, and the world's tropical peatlands together hold a very large share of all the carbon in soil anywhere.
Researchers at CIFOR have put the exchange rate plainly. Drain one hectare of this and plant oil palm on it, and over the following century you can release carbon that the peat took roughly 2,800 years to lay down.
All of which is stable, permanent and entirely safe on one condition. The water has to stay.
In 1996 the state dug four thousand kilometres of drains and walked away
The Proyek Lahan Gambut Sejuta Hektar, the One Million Hectare Peatland Project, was announced under Suharto in 1995 and begun in 1996. Central Kalimantan peat swamp was to be drained and turned into rice fields, a million hectares of them, and the country would feed itself.
Between 1996 and 1998, more than 4,000 kilometres of canals were cut through the swamp. The forest was cleared. The water ran out of the peat and into the rivers.
The rice did not grow. Drained tropical peat is acidic and short of nutrients, and rice wants seasonal flooding, which is precisely what a drainage canal is designed to prevent. Of the 243,216 hectares at the heart of the scheme, later assessment found something on the order of one per cent was actually suitable for agriculture. The project was abandoned within four years.
The canals were not abandoned. Nobody filled them in. Thirty years later they are still doing the one thing they were built to do, which is pull water out of the ground, and every dry season the ground they emptied catches fire.
This is the single most important thing to understand about Kalimantan burning, and it is the thing that almost never survives into the headline. The fires are not a forest problem. They are a plumbing problem. A wet peat swamp will not burn no matter how hot the year gets. A drained one will burn in a drizzle.
You cannot set fire to a swamp. That is why the first thing anyone does is drain it.
The failed project area is now known in the literature as the ex-Mega Rice Project landscape. It is still the most reliable fire hotspot in Central Kalimantan, and in 2020 the state chose it as the site of a new national food programme. We will come back to that.
Drag the water down and watch what a drainage canal actually does. Indonesian regulation defines a peat ecosystem as damaged once the water table sits more than 40 centimetres below the surface. Below that line the peat is no longer wet ground. It is fuel, stacked several metres deep, and it burns downwards.
The carbon figure is an illustration, not a measurement: it applies a peat carbon density of about 3,300 tonnes per hectare over ten metres to the depth burned, and converts carbon to carbon dioxide at 3.67. Real emissions vary with bulk density, moisture and how completely the peat combusts. The 40 centimetre line is the damage threshold written into Indonesia's own peat ecosystem regulation.
Thirty years of the same year
These are the government's own figures except where marked. Read down the column and the pattern is not a series of accidents. It is a schedule.
| Year | Burned | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1997–98 | over 8 million haestimates vary widely | Released somewhere between 0.81 and 2.57 gigatonnes of carbon, on the order of a tenth to nearly half of that year's global fossil fuel emissions. |
| 2015 | 2,610,000 haCentral Kalimantan alone: 583,000 ha | 1.62 billion tonnes of CO2 by late October. Indonesia was briefly the fourth largest emitter on earth. On peak days the fires alone out-emitted the entire United States economy. |
| 2019 | 942,000 ha | 720 megatonnes of CO2, close to double the Amazon fires of the same year. Twelve airports closed. US$5.2 billion, said the World Bank. |
| 2023 | 1,161,193 haGreenpeace's own mapping: 2,130,000 ha | South Kalimantan 190,395 ha, Central Kalimantan 165,894 ha, West Kalimantan 111,848 ha. Peat fires alone released an estimated 553 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. |
| 2024 | 375,805 ha | A wet year. The figure fell 68 per cent and the press releases wrote themselves. |
| 2025 | 213,985 ha | The lowest in a decade. Announced as an achievement. In the same twelve months national deforestation rose 66 per cent to 433,751 hectares, the worst in eight years. |
| 2026 | 107,465 ha by JuneKalimantan by end of July: 33,837 ha | On 20 August, 1,487 hotspots across Kalimantan in a single satellite pass. By 21 August the health ministry counted 3,158,166 people affected across 29 districts in seven provinces. |
Two things in that table deserve to be said out loud.
The first is the 2015 cost. Sixteen point one billion US dollars, one point nine per cent of national GDP, more than twice what it cost to rebuild Aceh after the tsunami. The World Bank added a detail that should have ended the argument permanently: if every hectare burned that year had instead been successfully planted with oil palm, the crop would have been worth around eight billion dollars. The country set fire to sixteen billion dollars to chase eight. Nobody involved was punished in a way that changed the arithmetic.
The second is the gap in the 2023 row. The Ministry's number and Greenpeace's number differ by roughly nine hundred thousand hectares, an area larger than Bali and Lombok together. Greenpeace's mapping found that 1.3 million hectares of the 2023 burn was land that had already burned at some point between 2015 and 2022, and that 599,000 hectares of it lay inside the 211 peatland units the government had formally designated as restoration priorities. The Ministry reported 182,789 hectares of peat burned. You are entitled to ask which number the policy was built on.
In January the state publishes the lowest fire figures in ten years. By August the sky over Palangka Raya is the colour of weak tea. Both things are allowed to be true because nobody is required to reconcile them.
Every August, the same explanation
Drought. El Niño. Slash and burn by poor farmers who do not know better. The meteorological agency says the climate is dry, the ministry says enforcement is being strengthened, and the country waits for November.
The drought is real. It is also not an explanation, because drought does not dig a canal, and drought does not choose which hectare to light.
Between January and July 2026, Kalimantan recorded 34,262 hotspots. Overlay those points on the licence maps, as Mongabay Indonesia did in August, and 25,524 of them, seventy-four per cent, fall inside licensed concessions. Oil palm plantations account for 10,739. Mining concessions account for 7,880. Forestry utilisation permits account for 6,905.
These are not remote, unowned places where a fire could start unobserved. They are areas that a company applied for, was granted, is legally responsible for, and can be found on a map at the ministry that granted it.
The pattern is not new and it is not contested by anyone who has looked. Greenpeace's mapping of the 2015 to 2019 seasons found roughly a third of the 4.4 million hectares burned nationally lay inside palm oil and pulpwood concessions. An investigation by Betahita counted high confidence hotspots across concessions held by 231 separate companies in a single month of 2025. In March 2026 WALHI counted 1,351 hotspots in and around the concessions of fifteen companies in four weeks and called it what it is: not a climate factor, but a structured pattern of ecological crime that the law has failed to touch.
Fire is free. Excavators are not. And on acidic peat the ash does something useful, which is raise the pH of ground that would otherwise reject the crop. Burning is not a mistake that keeps happening. It is a method that keeps working.
Below are the 34,262 hotspots detected across Kalimantan between January and July 2026, one dot for roughly every seventy-one. To start with they are just dots, which is how they are usually reported. Turn on the licence maps one at a time and watch the accident dissolve.
Hotspot totals and the concession breakdown are from Mongabay Indonesia's August 2026 analysis of the January to July 2026 season across the five Kalimantan provinces. A hotspot is a thermal anomaly detected by satellite, not a proven ignition, and a concession boundary is not by itself proof that the licence holder lit the fire. It is, however, the place the law says somebody is responsible for what happens on the ground.
Twenty-four people died in the 2015 fires
That is the official Indonesian figure, and it is accurate. Twenty-four people died in the fire. It is not the number of people the fire killed.
In September 2016, researchers at Harvard and Columbia modelled the smoke plume against what is known about fine particulate exposure and published an estimate in Environmental Research Letters: on the order of 100,300 excess deaths across Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore attributable to the 2015 haze. The governments of Indonesia and Malaysia publicly dismissed the finding.
Nobody has produced a better number since. Nobody has produced a competing study. The finding was dismissed and then it was left alone, because a premature death from particulate exposure does not arrive with a case file. It arrives as a stroke in February, an underweight baby in March, a grandfather who never quite recovered from the cough.
This season is not history. On 7 August 2026 West Kalimantan had logged 151,965 respiratory infection cases since the start of the year. Flights out of Singkawang and Pangkalan Bun were cancelled for visibility in the third week of August. On 12 August the government confirmed it had no plan to close schools.
There is a phrase that gets used for all of this, in Indonesian and in English. Kabut asap. Haze. It is a weather word. It makes the smoke sound like fog, like something that arrives from nowhere and lifts on its own, and it has done more work protecting the people responsible than any lawyer ever has.
It is not haze. It is the airborne remains of a carbon store thousands of years in the making, on fire because somebody drained it, being breathed by three million people who were not asked.
The government has not been absent. It has been extremely busy
It is comfortable to describe Indonesian environmental governance as weak, under-resourced, overwhelmed. Some of it is. But the record of the last decade is not mainly a record of failure to act. It is a record of decisions, taken deliberately, by people who had the alternative in front of them.
The judgments that were won and never collected
The environment ministry does sue. It sues well, and it wins. In 2014 a district court in Meulaboh ordered PT Kallista Alam to pay Rp 366 billion for burning peatland in Aceh, under the strict liability provision of the 2009 environmental law. The Supreme Court upheld it and threw out the company's petition for review. Years later, execution of that judgment had still not been completed.
It is not an isolated case. By February 2019, eleven companies were carrying a combined Rp 18.9 trillion in court-ordered damages from fire and forest destruction cases dating back to 2015. The phrase used at the time, and not by an activist but as a description of the state's own accounts, was that not one rupiah had reached the treasury. According to reporting on the ministry’s own review of those cases, by 2025, of roughly Rp 5.6 trillion awarded across fourteen fire cases between 2015 and 2023, about Rp 3.05 trillion was somewhere in the execution process and Rp 2.55 trillion had not been touched at all.
A fine that is never collected is not a penalty. It is a press release with a number in it.
The case that was won three times and then unwon
In 2016 residents of Palangka Raya took the President, four ministers, the governor and the provincial legislature to court over the 2015 fires. They won. The government appealed. In 2017 the appellate court upheld the ruling. The government appealed again. On 16 July 2019 the Supreme Court upheld it on cassation, finding the state had committed an unlawful act and ordering it to issue the missing regulations, review permits, build hospitals for respiratory illness with free treatment, establish evacuation centres and put in early warning.
The government did not comply. It filed for judicial review. On 17 May 2023 the Supreme Court reversed itself and every ruling below it, and the citizens of Palangka Raya lost a case they had won three times over seven years.
The agency that was dissolved
After 2015 the government created the Peat Restoration Agency, later broadened to cover mangroves as BRGM. It claimed 1.6 million hectares restored, tens of thousands of canal blocks and wells, and a 29.59 per cent reduction in fires. In April 2025 it was dissolved by a letter from the State Secretariat, its work parcelled out to three ministries, with no published evaluation of whether any of it had worked. Sixteen months later, West Kalimantan alone had 17,236 hotspots and roughly seven thousand of them were inside peatland conservation zones.
The moratorium that quietly expired
Presidential Instruction 8 of 2018 froze new oil palm permits for three years. It expired on 19 September 2021 and was never renewed. The ministry said it would keep refusing permits anyway, using an internal indicative map. An internal map is not an instruction, it carries no sanction, and it can be revised by the office that drew it.
The permanent moratorium on primary forest and peat, Instruction 5 of 2019, is real and it matters. It also only stops new permits. Everything already licensed inside primary forest and peat stays licensed. WALHI's accounting puts 33 million hectares of forest area already under forestry permits, 4.5 million hectares of mining concessions in or beside forest, and 7.3 million hectares released from state forest altogether, most of it to oil palm.
The law that was rewritten
The 2009 environmental law made a concession holder strictly liable for what burns on its land. The 2020 Job Creation Law folded the standalone environmental permit into an ordinary business licence, narrowed who is entitled to object during an environmental impact assessment, and moved criminal enforcement toward a last resort. In November 2021 the Constitutional Court found the law procedurally unconstitutional and gave the government two years to redo it properly. The government issued an emergency regulation re-enacting the same content, and parliament made that permanent in March 2023. The defect the Court identified was the absence of public participation. The remedy chosen was to remove the public from the process entirely.
Three snapshots of the same ledger, taken years apart by different people. The hatched bar is what a court ordered. The solid bar is what is actually moving. Press collect and watch how little travels.
Figures compiled from reporting on the environment ministry's civil suits: the February 2019 total is the eleven-company figure reported by Greenpeace Indonesia and Greeners; the 2023 total is from reporting on fourteen fire judgments; the April 2025 execution split is from reporting on the ministry's own review. Bars are scaled to the largest ordered amount in the set. Rupiah figures across years are nominal and not inflation adjusted.
The people who have lived in it for a thousand years are the ones without a document
If you want to know who a state believes a forest belongs to, do not read the speeches. Read the register.
As of 30 April 2026 the Ministry of Forestry had formally designated 174 units of customary forest, roughly 368,877 hectares, benefiting about 92,955 households. That is the whole national total, after a decade of a policy that was announced as historic.
The Customary Territory Registration Agency records around 28.2 million hectares of mapped indigenous territory in Indonesia, of which it assesses that some 13.8 per cent has received any form of recognition at all. Set the two numbers beside each other and formally recognised customary forest comes to something on the order of one per cent of what indigenous communities have mapped and claimed. The ministry's own roadmap targets 1.4 million hectares by 2029. If it hits that target exactly and on time, it will have recognised under five per cent.
The bill that would fix the underlying problem, the Indigenous Peoples Bill, was first proposed at the founding congress of AMAN in 2003. An academic draft went to parliament in 2010. It nearly passed in 2012. It has been placed on the national priority legislation list, taken off, and placed back on, through four presidencies. There have been more than sixty regional consultations. It is August 2026 and it is not law.
Meanwhile the same landscape hands out permits in months.
Who actually gets charged
In Jambi in 2024, fires were concentrated inside corporate concessions and more than a dozen farmers were named as suspects. WALHI reported 194 companies for fire across six provinces in 2023 and found 38 of them were repeat offenders with fires recurring on the same concessions between 2015 and 2020.
There is no published national tally comparing farmers prosecuted for burning with company directors prosecuted for the same thing. That absence is not neutral. A state that counts hotspots to four significant figures, every day, by satellite, could count this if it wanted the answer.
And what happens to the people who prove it
Article 66 of the 2009 environmental law is one sentence long in substance: nobody who acts to defend the environment may be sued or prosecuted for doing so. It has been on the books since 2009.
In 2025 two forestry scientists at IPB University, Bambang Hero Saharjo and Basuki Wasis, whose forensic testimony underpins a large share of the state's own successful fire cases, were sued by a company over expert evidence they had given about a peat fire on its Central Kalimantan concession. On 9 October 2025 the district court at Cibinong threw the suit out at the preliminary stage, applying the anti-SLAPP rule directly. The high court upheld it.
It was widely reported as the first time an Indonesian court had used that protection to stop a case before trial. Sixteen years after it was written into law. Which means that for sixteen years the protection existed, and anyone minded to test it could reasonably have assumed it would not be used.
A permit takes months. Recognition of a forest a community has lived in for centuries takes decades, and mostly does not arrive. Both of those are choices made by the same offices, in the same building, with the same maps on the wall.
What this has to do with a bottle on a shelf
We sell fragrance. It would be easy, and profitable, to publish the first chapter of this piece and stop. The wound, the fungus, the chromones, the beautiful old story about the tree that answers injury with perfume. Nobody complains about that article.
Here is the rest of it.
Nobody can tell you with confidence how much Indonesian agarwood in trade is wild and how much is planted. Two documents prepared for the same CITES conference in 2022 disagree flatly: one analysis of trade records from 2011 to 2020 reports Aquilaria as roughly 42 per cent wild-sourced and 50 per cent artificially propagated, while another states that less than 2 per cent of Indonesia's exports in 2019 and 2020 came from plantations. Both cannot be right. Neither is reassuring, and the uncertainty is itself the finding: the supply chain for one of the most expensive natural materials on earth is not documented well enough for the regulator to know what it is regulating.
What is not in doubt: Aquilaria malaccensis, the species Kalimantan is best known for, is assessed as critically endangered. Its habitat includes the peat swamp and lowland forest in every fire figure in this article. And a tree that needs twenty years to be worth cutting cannot outrun a landscape that burns every three.
The other thing that burns
There is a way this used to work. In East Kalimantan, collectors cut out only the resinous section of the trunk and left the tree standing, because a living tree might make more. In the gaharu rush of the 1990s people who had moved down to the lowlands went back up to their home villages to work the forest, and chips changed hands for a few dollars a kilo. Today a top wild grade is quoted in hundreds of millions of rupiah per kilogram, while cultivated lower-grade wood leaves the farm gate for hundreds of thousands. Almost the entire distance between those two numbers is captured by people who have never been to the forest.
So when a concession burns, three things go at once. The trees, which are the least of it. The peat, which is the carbon. And a way of earning a living from a standing forest, which was the only argument anyone had for keeping it standing.
What a house can actually do, and what we are asking
Not much, individually. Perfumery is a rounding error against palm oil and coal. But a small house is not entitled to use its size as an excuse, and there is one thing this trade has that palm oil does not: several hundred thousand people around the world who care intensely, specifically, about one forest.
We use wild Kalimantan oud, and we will keep saying so. Not as a boast, not as an apology. Because the honest position is that the thing endangering wild gaharu is not the person who buys it.
Look at the scales side by side. A collector working the old way opens the resinous section of a trunk and leaves the tree alive, because a living tree may make more. He does this to perhaps one tree in ten, because the other nine have nothing in them. A cleared concession takes every tree on the block, then drains the ground those trees were standing in, then burns it for a month, then burns it again in three years. Those two things are not the same kind of event, and treating them as though they were is a convenient mistake. It converts a question about land policy into a question about consumer guilt, and consumer guilt costs the people who drained the peat precisely nothing.
Cultivated material is worth exploring, and we are exploring it. Inoculated plantation agarwood is a different thing in the bottle: thinner, brighter, less animal, and getting better. Kutai already shows what a working cultivation economy looks like. It belongs in the conversation as an addition, not as an alibi, because a plantation does not save a peat dome. Only water saves a peat dome.
Say where it came from, and say what is happening there. The regency when we know it, honestly labelled when we do not, and alongside it what burned in that regency this year. The two facts belong on the same page. They are the same story.
And this is the part we are asking you for
Oud has a constituency, and it is a strange one. It runs from Jeddah and Dubai through Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo, Paris and Los Angeles. It is obsessive, well informed about resin and completely uninformed about hectares, and it spends serious money on a material that cannot be manufactured. There is no synthetic route to what happens inside a wounded Aquilaria over twenty years in a peat swamp. No laboratory makes it. No plantation reproduces the best of it. It exists only for as long as the forest does.
So everyone who loves this note already has a direct material stake in Kalimantan not burning, and almost none of them has ever seen the numbers in this article. That is a fixable problem, and it is the one thing a perfume house is actually positioned to fix.
Ask your seller which regency. Not the country, not the island, the regency. Then look up what happened to it this season. If the answer is Malinau, look up North Kalimantan. If the answer is Pontianak, remember that Pontianak is a desk, and ask where the desk bought it.
Carry the arithmetic. Seventy-four per cent of this season's Kalimantan hotspots fell inside licensed concessions. Rp 18.9 trillion in court-ordered damages went uncollected. The peat restoration agency was dissolved in April 2025 with no evaluation published. Those three sentences travel further in an oud forum than in a policy paper, because in an oud forum they are about something the reader already loves.
Read and amplify the Indonesians doing the work. Mongabay Indonesia, Betahita, WALHI, Pantau Gambut, Auriga Nusantara, AMAN. They map the concessions, count the hotspots, litigate the cases and publish most of it in Indonesian, which is why the rest of the world has not read it. Translation is not a small contribution here. It is most of the job.
Stop letting the word haze do the work. Haze is weather. Say fire, say drainage canal, say concession, say the name of the season. Language is where accountability goes to disappear.
And say the political part out loud. A perfume house that sells the smell of a forest and has nothing to say about the forest is selling a costume. The fires are not weather. The moratorium expired. The restoration agency was dissolved. The fines were not collected. The citizens who sued and won three times were told, in 2023, that they had lost. Every one of those was a decision, and decisions can be taken differently by the people who took them, particularly when a large and wealthy international audience is watching a specific province instead of a general tragedy.
Wild oud is not the enemy of the forest. For a long time it was the only argument anyone had for leaving it standing.
We are asked, often, what oud smells like. It smells like a tree healing. What is happening in Kalimantan does not smell like anything, because the people making the decisions live somewhere the wind does not carry it.
Wet peat does not burn. Everything after that is a choice.
Written in Jakarta, August 2026, during the fire season
On the figures. Fire area and hotspot counts are from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry and BNPB via SiPongi, and from Mongabay Indonesia's August 2026 analysis of the January to July 2026 Kalimantan season. The 2023 alternative figure is Greenpeace Indonesia's own mapping. Emissions figures for 2015 are from Global Fire Emissions Database analysis reported by the World Resources Institute; the 2015 economic cost is the World Bank's. The 2015 excess mortality estimate is Koplitz and colleagues, Environmental Research Letters, 2016, and was publicly disputed by the Indonesian and Malaysian governments. Peat carbon density and the 2,800 year figure are from CIFOR. Court judgment totals are compiled from reporting by Greenpeace Indonesia, Greeners, CNN Indonesia and Mongabay. Customary forest figures are from the Ministry of Forestry as of 30 April 2026 and the Customary Territory Registration Agency's 2025 status report. Agarwood species distribution, CITES listing history and the wild versus cultivated dispute are from Indonesia's CITES non-detriment finding and documents prepared for CITES CoP19.
Where sources disagree we have printed both numbers rather than picking one. Where a claim is an allegation rather than a finding, we have said so. Nothing here is an accusation against any company that a court has not already made.