President Joko Widodo on Tuesday told officials that he had given his word for 2018 to be a haze-free year to the prime ministers of Singapore and Malaysia. Jokowi’s administration on Dec. 26 launched an ambitious US$2.73 billion plan designed to cut land and forest fire hotspots by nearly half, in part by protecting peat forests, aiming to ensure that 121,000 sq. km. of land, a fifth of it peat forest, will be fire-free by 2019. An award-winning method for mapping Indonesia’s vast peatlands, developed by Dutch, German and Indonesian scientists, will help the Southeast Asian nation tackle annual fires that harm health in the region.