KUALA LUMPUR -- Indonesia's wildfires are not only burning swaths of jungle, plantation and farmland. They are also threatening the country's four recently launched projects that issue carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of dollars by preventing greenhouse gas emissions from 225,000 hectares of forest.

Hundreds of people in the project areas, two of which are on Borneo and two on Sumatra, are battling extreme heat and thick acrid smoke to stop fires encroaching into the protected lands. There have been no reports yet of fires damaging the carbon sinks.

"[The] fires are intense in the region right now. ... We are working to prevent fire in the project and surrounding area," said Dharsono Hartono, cofounder and CEO of Rimba Makmur Utama, the company behind the Katingan Mentaya Project (KMP) in Central Kalimantan province, which comprises 149,800 hectares of forest and peatland. "At stake is the health and safety of ... the emissions." The other three projects are Sumatra Merang Peatland Project in South Sumatra province, Mayas Project in Borneo's West Kalimantan province, and the Bujang Raba community forestry project in Sumatra's Jambi province. All are run separately and the emissions saved are independently verified.

Indonesia is battling its most intense wildfires in 11 years, with " super El Nino " weather conditions exacerbating the impact as temperatures rise and rainfall is delayed.

Choking haze has blanketed Singapore and parts of Malaysia in recent weeks. On Friday Singapore said it would issue warnings to seven companies based in Sumatra to take more decisive action to tackle fires the city-state said started on their land. Indonesian Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni has forecast that the wildfires might continue until December.

The projects work by protecting and restoring the forest and peatland to prevent emissions. The number of metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) is calculated, verified and then turned into credits that can be sold to companies and governments looking to offset their own emissions.

The scheme was relaunched in July after a five-year hiatus following a restructuring to address legal concerns, including the possibility of double-selling credits.

The four projects issued approximately 31 tons of carbon credits with an estimated transaction value of 5 trillion rupiah ($280 million).

The buyers have not been made public but Anglo-Dutch oil major Royal Dutch Shell and German automaker Volkswagen are among the businesses that have bought KMP's carbon credits in the past.

KMP holds approximately 600 million tons of carbon comprising around 11 million tons in aboveground biomass and the rest in underground peat. It avoids an average of about 7 million tons of CO2e per year, Dharsono said, the equivalent of emissions from 4.8 million typical gas-powered cars.

An orangutan in the Katingan Mentaya Project area in Indonesia's Central Kalimantan. The endangered primates are at risk from the raging forest fires. (Katingan Mentaya Project) In the first week of September, Indonesia's fires emitted 19.7 million tons of carbon emissions, making up more than a third of the global total, according to Fire Emissions Watch, a portal developed by the European Union's Copernicus climate monitoring service, Reuters reported.

With fires intensifying around KMP, flames breached four non-forest areas in the project, affecting some forest land.

"The firefighters have managed to stop the fires from spreading and causing more damage. They are now using ... long injection hoses to pump water deep into the peat to soak it and put out isolated smoldering fires," Dharsono said. He said the most effective way to protect the peat swamp forest is to keep it wet.

KMP has built a system of more than 100 canals and dams for peat re-wetting, alongside 559 fire bore wells and 198 water reservoirs, Dharsono noted.

KMP runs 18 to 22 patrols a day by motorcycle and boat while 19 thermal-sensing drones are deployed across the project. It also maintains 6.76 kilometers of "green firebreaks," strips of living, high-moisture, low-flammability vegetation that resists combustion, and cleared 129 km to create "yellow firebreaks," strips of land where combustible vegetation has been removed.

Dharsono Hartono, cofounder and CEO of Rimba Makmur Utama, the company behind the Katingan Mentaya Project in Indonesia's Central Kalimantan province. (Katingan Mentaya Project) Indonesia's Forestry Ministry director-general of sustainable forest management, Laksmi Wijayanti, told Nikkei Asia that protecting the carbon projects from fires is "of critical importance." "The government automatically enforces high-risk mitigation standards for all forest utilization activities in these provinces ... including carbon sequestration and storage projects like those in question," she said.

Dharsono said this year's fires will not affect the 17.3 million credits issued in July because they "were for 'performance' in 2021 to 2023." "Any fire damage that might occur in 2026 cannot undo previously issued credits, so there is nothing to replace. Instead, any emissions resulting from fires in the project will be measured and accounted for during the 2026 monitoring period where the loss will be deducted from the credits generated that year," he explained.

Putra Adhiguna, managing director of the Energy Shift Institute, an Australia-based think tank, said this year's fires have prompted speculation about whether the perennial disaster poses an existential threat to the carbon projects.

He said people may question whether the risks faced "will continue to escalate and become too widespread to be addressed by project owners."

Dharsono acknowledged that "as the climate crisis worsens, threats to forest and peatlands are going to increase." But he stressed, "We cannot afford the luxury of being fatalistic, assuming that the threats are too great and so giving up on environmental protection."

Damayanti Buchori, professor of plant protection at Bogor Agricultural University, said that if KMP's protected forest was burned, the "devastating" impacts would go well beyond carbon emissions.

"If it burns, all the wildlife will be gone -- some 3,000 orangutans, not counting all the plants, [and] source of food and medicine for the local communities," she said. "The local communities will lose their homes, their livelihoods. And all the research will be gone." Amy Chew is a contributing writer