Jakarta, Indonesia – Critically endangered Sumatran elephants are being pushed to the brink as wildfires raze vast swathes of their habitat in Sumatra, Indonesia, an Indonesian conservation group, Geopix, told AFP on Wednesday.

For weeks, Indonesia has been battling fires in parts of Borneo and Sumatra, which have blanketed the country and its neighbors, Malaysia, and Singapore, with a suffocating haze.

Geopix said in a report published Tuesday that more than 4,500 hotspots were detected in 21 Sumatran elephant habitats between June and early September, threatening one of the world's rarest elephant species.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates that only 2,400 to 2,800 Sumatran elephants remain in the wild.

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During the same period, more than 1.4 million acres burned, per Geopix's report.

Hotspots within elephant habitats jumped to over 2800 in the first week of September, more than double the roughly 1300 recorded in August, the NGO said.

Geopix senior wildlife campaigner Annisa Rahmawati described the fires' impact on Sumatran elephant habitat this year as "brutal."

"Ecologically, fires caused habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation, reducing food and water sources as well as changing the elephants' movement patterns," she said.

Rahmawati said exposure to toxic smoke from the fires could increase the animals' physiological stress. She also warned that food and water supply shortages could further threaten the elephants' ability to survive in the wild.

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Indonesia regularly battles wildfires during the dry season, which typically runs from July to October. Unfortunately, this year, fires were worse in part because of the El Nino weather phenomenon.

Experts also blame climate change, decades of forest degradation, and slash-and-burn land clearing practices that have changed the naturally fire-resistant landscape.

The Indonesian government has said more than 500,000 acres of land burned countrywide between January and July.

The Nusantara Atlas project put that close to 740,000 acres over the same period, and last week estimated the total area affected, including August, was nearly 2,214,064 acres.