Drought in the Rain Forest, Part II an Update Based on the 1994 ENSO Event

Abstract

In an earlier paper in this journal (Salafsky, 1994), I conducted an analysis of rainfall data from West Kalimantan, Indonesia, that indicated that 1) dry periods periodically occur in this otherwise humid environment, 2) these dry periods are often linked to El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, and 3) the intensity of these ENSO-linked dry periods has been increasing over the past two or three decades. I then examined the economic costs of the 1991 dry period to residents of several small villages in the region and concluded that it had severe impact on the local economy and thus should be considered a serious drought. At the end of the paper, I speculated that the increasing intensity of these droughts might be linked to climatic change and predicted that these droughts would be a reoccurring problem in the region that would need to be dealt with by decision makers.