Each year, a noxious haze blankets much of Indonesia. It’s the result of burning peatlands — the boggy land that covers more than ten per cent of the country. Farmers here have traditionally used slash-and-burn techniques to prepare land for planting, but the level of burning has increased dramatically as large areas are converted to industrial-scale palm oil plantations.

WISE researchers hate to see a valuable resource go up in smoke. So they’ve proposed a better idea: gasification.…