In normal conditions, the vast swathe of tropical forest and peatland swamp covering much of Southeast Asia is immune to fire. Beneath the dense forest canopy lies a water-saturated world, teeming with plant and animal life.
But these are not normal times. Nature is conspiring with man to put unprecedented stress on the forest, raising the risk of devastating fire and a big jump in the region's greenhouse-gas emissions.
Many scientists blame global emissions, mainly of carbon dioxide, for warming the planet to potentially dangerous levels. They say that the global average surface temperature rose by about 0.7 degrees Celsius in the 20th century as a result mainly of humans burning carbon-based fossil fuels and clearing forests for timber and agriculture.
Trees soak up and store carbon dioxide when they grow and release it when they rot or are burned. Emissions from cutting forests in Southeast Asia, Brazil and equatorial Africa account for around 20 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, about the same as from the transport sector.
Reflecting scientific warnings of the risks of runaway emissions and temperature rise, the Group of Eight leading industrial nations, at their recent summit in Italy, agreed not to allow the global temperature to increase more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, although they made no binding commitments.
The 2-degree limit is seen as the threshold for severe, perhaps irreversible, climate change. On top of man-made temperature rises, weather forecasters expect the return of El Nino, a natural cycle that occurs every few years, bringing dryer-than-normal conditions, and sometimes drought, to Southeast Asia and Australia.