Description

Indonesia suffered one of the worst forest fires in the world, last year. Almost 2,1 million hectares of forest land mostly in Borneo, Sumatera and West Papua, burned to the ground, spreading haze affecting millions of people throughout South East Asia.

The Pollutants Standard Index (PSI) which indicate the level of air quality in a place, climbed to over 2.000 in some cities, when the normal level for a healthy living standard should be below 100. As the result, approximately 500.000 people suffered respiratory illness. Thousands of people has to be evacuated.

The fires released more than 1.75 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, equal to the total annual emissions of Japan. While last year’s fires were the worst on record, fires on a similar scale have burned annually for nearly 20 years.

This year, many believe the forest fire will strikes again. The disaster is predicted to return because Indonesian government has not prosecute every people and corporations who are responsible for last year's fire. Moreover, all the burned land has not yet restored as forest and peatland, but used as palm oil plantation instead.

So far, Indonesian law enforcement has only announced that they have declared 10 corporations and more than 140 individuals as suspects of illegally burning forest to clear lands for plantations and other purposes.

However, most of them never brought to trial. Amongst a few exception, the District Court in Palembang, South Sumatera cleared one corporation, PT Bumi Mekar Hijau from all charges, last January 2016. The judge stated that burning forest is not a crime since trees can always grow back.

This game will help you understand all the intertwining elements in a major forest fire, what are the stakes, and how to effectively stop the haze disaster from happening again.

The game is built for students and young people who live in cities, faraway from forests, so they can experience a life threatening situation where a forest fire happened near them and make a strategic decision to stop the disaster.

We plan to have the game attached in our website at http://tempo.co as an explainer feature for any news related to forest fire and haze in Southeast Asia.

Technologies used for this project:

HTML5, CSS3, jQuery