Indonesia and South Korea have broken ground on a new firefighting brigade dormitory in Ogan Komering Ilir District in South Sumatra, kickstarting construction of a broader Forest and Land Fire Management Centre backed by the Korea Forest Service.
That is according to Thomas Nifinluri, Director of Forest Fire Control at the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry, who attended Wednesday’s ceremony alongside a representative of the South Korean Embassy in Indonesia, with the groundbreaking timed to Earth Day.
“Efforts to control forest and land fires cannot be carried out independently, but require strong and sustained collaboration not only domestically but also between countries,” Nifinluri said, adding that the bilateral agreement would accelerate the exchange of knowledge, experience and firefighting technology across ASEAN.
Wood Central understands that the Korea Forest Service-funded programme bundles four interlocking deliverables — the Manggala Agni dormitory now under construction, a forest fire command and training centre, firefighting brigade capacity-building, and a wildfire detection system — with the OKI site selected for its chronic peat-fire burden.
It comes as the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) warned that Indonesia could see an early-onset El Niño in the second half of 2026, tightening the preparation window across Sumatra, Kalimantan and peat-rich Java. Rising global temperatures would make forest and land fires harder to contain and more frequent as the dry season intensified, Nifinluri said, with Korea Forest Service support needed to scale response capacity for Indonesia, ASEAN and the wider international community.
OKI has long carried the largest share of South Sumatra’s fire burden, with the district recording 33,748 hotspots during the 2015 fire disaster — 72 per cent of them on peatland — and remains a United Nations Environment Programme-backed pilot for collaborative fire prevention, with reported fires falling from 345 in 2021 to 109 in 2022.
The groundbreaking follows a bruising year for Indonesian forestry, with roughly 1,000 people killed across Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra during Cyclone Senyar in December, triggering the first suspension of all timber harvesting in three provinces and a criminal probe into 11 logging firms, as Wood Central reported from the Ministry of Forestry’s December moratorium.
The bilateral push reflects Korea’s own 2025 fire season, when record wildfires burned roughly 104,000 hectares across North and South Gyeongsang and Ulsan, a disaster that sharpened the Korea Forest Service’s priorities under newly installed Commissioner Park Eun-sik, whose March 2026 reform agenda has extended into bilateral fire programmes across Southeast Asia.
The centre’s construction anchors the 2025 Project for the Development of a Forest and Land Fire Management System in South Sumatra, a Korea-Indonesia Forest Cooperation Center programme that delivered water-pump maintenance and warehouse-management training to 20 Manggala Agni personnel at the DAOPS XVII Sumatra headquarters last May.
Construction will run parallel with BMKG’s second-half 2026 El Niño forecast, leaving only months for Manggala Agni brigades to stand up the new OKI command before peat-rich Sumatra’s next dry season begins.
