Background
Between 2003 and 2012, approximately 67 million hectares of forest land burned annually.
The role of fire in the world’s vegetation is mixed. In some ecosystems, natural fires are essential to maintain ecosystem dynamics, biodiversity and productivity. Fire is also an important and widely used tool to meet land management goals.
However, every year, wildfires burn millions of hectares of forest woodlands and other vegetation, causing the loss of many human and animal lives and an immense economic damage, both in terms of resources destroyed and the costs of suppression. There are also impacts on society and the environment – for example, damage to human health from smoke, loss of biological diversity, release of greenhouse gases, damage to recreational values and infrastructure.
Most fires are caused by people. The list of human motivations include land clearing and other agricultural activities, maintenance of grasslands for livestock management, extraction of non-wood forest products, industrial development, resettlement, hunting, negligence and arson. Only in very remote areas of Canada and the Russian Federation, lightning is a major cause of fires.
There is evidence from some regions that the trend is towards more fires affecting a larger area and burning with greater intensity, while the risk of fire may be increasing under climate change in association with land-use changes and institutional constraints on sustainable forest and fire management.
Better landscape management needed to prevent wildfires
From an assessment of megafires in 2011, it was concluded that the main contributing elements of these wildfires are drought, fire meteorology, accumulation of fuel and homogenous or fire prone landscapes, which are often caused by lack of appropriate land management.
Preventive landscape management is therefore needed and should include policy, cultural, technical, social, financial, organizational, economical and market aspects.
- For instance, large homogeneous forests and housing areas shouldn’t be established in regions with fire-prone vegetation, but different land uses should be combined to maintain mosaic features in the landscape with natural firebreaks.
- Special attention should be paid to timing of certain agricultural activities e.g agricultural burning should take place before the dry season and before the surrounding landscapes turn fire-prone. Burning should also be avoided during the high winds and hottest time of the day. At the same time alternatives for agriculture fires might be developed.
- Local populations should be involved through participatory and/or community based approaches because they are often main actors in landscape management activities, they suffer directly from the fires which threaten their livelihoods and might also be involved in some of the fire causes.
The FAO Ministerial Meeting on Forests and the 17th Session of the FAO Committee on Forestry, March 2005 (Rome, Italy 2005) called upon FAO, in collaboration with countries and other international partners, including the UNISDR, to develop a fire management strategy to enhance international cooperation in fire management, that advanced knowledge, increased access to information and resources and explored new approaches for cooperation at all levels. They also requested preparation of voluntary guidelines on the prevention, suppression and recovery from forest fire. The need for such tools to assist in international cooperation had also been highlighted at the 3rd International Wildland Fire Conference and the International Wildland Fire Summit (Sydney, Australia 2003) because of the increasing incidence and severity of impacts of major fires globally.
An international expert consultation in wildland fires (Madrid, May 2006) agreed that the non-legally binding Strategy to Enhance International Cooperation in Fire Management includes the overarching framework and four components:
- Fire Management Voluntary Guidelines;
- Implementation Partnership;
- Global Assessment of Fire Management;
- Review of International Cooperation in Fire Management.
These tools have been tailored primarily for land-use policy makers, planners and managers in fire management, including governments, the private sector and non-governmental organizations to assist in the formulation of policy, legal, regulatory and other enabling conditions and strategic actions for more holistic approaches to fire management.
Their scope includes the positive and negative social, cultural, environmental and economic impacts of natural and planned fires in forests, woodlands, rangelands, grasslands, agricultural and rural/-urban landscapes. The fire management scope includes early warning, prevention, preparedness (international, national, sub-national and community), safe and effective initial attack on incidences of fire and landscape restoration following fire.