Fires from Indonesia that caused the massive haze in 1997 released up to 2.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the largest single release since records began in 1957, according to a British newspaper.

Quoting scientist Dr Susan Page during a presentation to the Royal Geographical Society in London recently, The Guardian reported that the carbon dioxide was equivalent of up to 40 per cent of global emissions from fossil fuels.

Page, a geography researcher at the University of Leicester, said the annual fires provoked by peatland drainage on the island of Borneo were releasing enough carbon dioxide to swamp worldwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions agreed under the Kyoto protocol.

She said the wetlands were drained in a project to turn the peat swamps into rice plantations under the previous Suharto administration. She called for international action to reflood the peat swamps in Central Kalimantan province, which were drained by Suharto in the mid 1990s, and now catch fire each dry season.

"Tropical peatlands are vast stores of carbon that have accumulated over thousands of years. In a matter of months, peatland fires can liberate 1,000 to 2,000 years' worth of carbon," Page said.

"The situation can only get worse. We need to stop the fires, and the best way is to re-wet the landscape."

At the current rate of burning, the peat swamp's entire carbon stocks, built up over 27,000 years from forest litter too wet to rot, will be released into the atmosphere by 2040.

Page said the environmental problems caused by the massive smoke clouds each year had got international attention, but the scale of the carbon emissions had not.

Many of the fires are started deliberately by locals to clear land for agriculture, but they spread rapidly out of control.

Suharto's project, called Mega Rice, was to convert more than a million hectares of peat swamp into rice fields.

Barely a grain was ever produced. The uneven ground made irrigation impossible and the soil proved too acidic, as the few local experts willing to speak out against Suharto's plan had predicted.