Arbain, one of the local firefighters, marches across the ashy remains of a once lush peat swamp forest recently burned by the invisible fires that blaze underground.
When a peat swamp catches it’s incredibly difficult to battle, because the fire not only burns above, but also beneath the surface of up to several meters of decomposing vegetation. The trees are literally suffocated from below as the smoldering inferno travels between root systems.
This year, the drought has been so bad that the ground is a lot drier than normal. The chance of the fire growing much more out of control is high.
Because so much of the biomass is stored underground in dense layers, the burning of peat swamp forests releases significantly more carbon dioxide than traditional forests, which further drives the global temperatures up… resulting longer drought periods, which result in higher frequency of rampant fires, which leads to more drought, and so on.
When we arrived, the destruction was less than 2km from the base of operations and their tree nursery with over 100k seedlings being grown to reforest previously burned land.
The stakes are high.
Written on their firefighter water packs.
As per a recent report from Business Standard, WhatsApp has secured regulatory approval to launch its payments platform in the country in a phased manner. The NPCI has given the messaging platform the permission to operate WhatsApp Pay in the country, with a pilot run that will initially be extended to 10 million users. In a bid to get official approval, WhatsApp has assured the RBI and the NPCI that it will comply with the country’s data localization norms, which was the key reason behind the impending rollout. Sources familiar with that matter have revealed that, “If WhatsApp is able to fulfill the compliance requirements, the messaging platform will be able to do a full roll-out.”
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