In 1997 and 1998, the Indonesian government’s Mega Rice Project to use the Central Kalimantan province’s peat swamps for intensive, Javanese-style wet rice production failed. The government did not foresee that the peat soils were poor in nutrients and unsuitable for wet rice cultivation. An ENSO-induced drought in 1997 drained the tropical peatlands, which caused the soil to undergo rapid biogeochemical oxidation and erupt in flames. The flames emitted vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; the amount was equivalent to somewhere between 13 and 40 percent of global annual carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
