Pekanbaru
Riau's capital thrives on palm oil revenue while choking on peatland fire haze — competitive exclusion between plantation economics and the orangutans it displaces.
In severe years, the air quality index in Pekanbaru hits levels where PM2.5 concentrations reach 7,120 micrograms per cubic metre — 142 times the WHO safe limit. The haze comes from burning peatlands being cleared for the same crop that funds the city's economy. Pekanbaru, capital of Riau Province in central Sumatra, has roughly 1.14 million residents and sits on the banks of the Siak River, downstream from where geologists discovered Southeast Asia's largest oil well in 1944.
Wikipedia describes Pekanbaru as an administrative centre. What it undersells is the metabolic contradiction: a city that lives on palm oil and chokes on its own supply chain. Riau is Indonesia's largest palm oil producing province. In regencies like Siak, 38% of direct employment is in the palm oil industry. Smallholders account for over a third of national crude palm oil production. The province also once contributed 70% of Indonesia's petroleum output, making Pekanbaru the beneficiary of two extraction economies simultaneously.
The fires are not accidental. Slash-and-burn clearing of peatlands for plantation expansion is the primary driver. Tropical peat, accumulated over millennia, is essentially compressed carbon. When drained and ignited, it burns underground for months, generating haze that blankets Singapore, Malaysia, and southern Thailand. The 2015 event alone caused an estimated 100,000 excess deaths across Southeast Asia. Indonesia has certified roughly 20-25% of palm oil area under sustainability schemes, but in optimistic projections, reaching full certification for Siak's smallholders would take 95 years at the current pace.
The biological parallel is the orangutan. Riau's peatland forests are critical orangutan habitat, and the species has lost over 80% of its range in the past century — primarily to the same palm oil plantations that sustain Pekanbaru's economy. The city and the primate occupy the same landscape and depend on the same resource base, but one's expansion requires the other's elimination. It is competitive exclusion in real time: one species displacing another because both cannot occupy the same niche.