“Incendio: ¿Cómo cabías, oh incendio,en el pequeño vientre de la chispa?”

Efraín Bartalomé(1999)

“Pourtant je peux être le serviteur, l’ami.

Non pas le destructeur, l’implacable ennemi,

Et forger les outils, réchauffer les logis,

Apporter le bonheur, la joie avec les ris.”

El Hadj Mbara Sène (2002)

“The use of two toolboxes – one based on indigenous tradition and the other with roots in science – allowed us to bring wildfire back under control in western and central Arnhem Land.”

Dean Yibarbuk[1]

Challenges for Community-based Fire Management

Keynote address at theSixth International Wildfire Conference, 12–16 October 2015

Pieter van Lierop

Forestry Officer (Fire Management), Forestry Department, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

Abstract

Many people working in vegetation fire management accept the importance of community-based fire management (CBFiM), and the approach has been lauded at past international conferences on wildland fire, yet it struggles to fully capture the attention of policymakers. This paper proposes actions thatCBFiM advocates can take to ensure that it becomes more effective and implementedmore widely. These actions arerelated to:

  • traditional/indigenous knowledge and institutions related to fire management;
  • the use of fire versusalternatives;
  • finance; and
  • enabling policy and legal frameworks.

The paper emphasizes the importance of building on existing traditional knowledge and management rather thansuperimposing new models of CBFiM on communities.

Possibilities for external financing of CBFiMexist, but there is a need to better quantify the impacts of wildfires and the benefits of CBFiMto obtain more support for this approach, and more work is needed to develop enabling policy and legal frameworks. While CBFiM is undoubtedly important, the search for alternatives to fire use should continue.

Introduction

This keynote is a logical follow-up topresentations onthe role of communities in wildfire managementmade at previous international wildland fire conferences and associated events. David Ganz, Robert Fisher and Peter Moore[2]reported on the critical elements of community-based fire management, or CBFiM[3], at the Third International Wildland Fire Conference in Sydney in 2003. FAO prepared a position paper on CBFiM for the Global Fire Summit convened later that year[4], and PeterMoore gave a keynote address titled “Wildland fire prevention and community involvement”at the Fourth International Wildland Fire Conference held in Seville, Spain, in 2007.

While there was no keynote dealing with communities and wildfire at theFifthInternational Wildland Fire Conference, held in South Africain 2011, three parallel sessions at that conferenceaddressedvarious aspects of the relationship between communities and wildfire: fire and poverty alleviation in developing countries; community fire awareness, prevention and survival; and indigenous fire management. In addition to those parallel sessions, a training workshop was held on the “fire-wise approach”.

From the attention given to the role of communities in fire management at the last three international wildfire conferences, we may conclude that its importance is recognized by participants and, by extension,by the global firemanagement community more generally.

Many actions are underway worldwideto involve communities in fire management. My purpose today is to draw on my experience, the experience of my organization, and experiences shared with me by others,to examine some ofthe challenges I see for the greater spread of CBFiM. Some of these challenges are relatively new, others have existed from the beginning, and others overlap with community-based natural resource management more broadly.

First, let’s look at the“what”and “why” of CBFiM.

From community involvement tocommunity-based

Various definitions and descriptions of CBFiMexist.

In a review of community involvement in the management of forestfires in Southeast Asia, for example, Karki (2002) introduced the terms“community-based fire management” and “community-based forest fire management” but did not define them. He considered that incentives for the implementation of CBFiMmust be relevantto community needs if the approach is to be sustainable. Therefore, the fire management objectives of individuals and communities mustbe fully understood.

The Global Fire Monitoring Centre’s 2003 update of the FAO Wildland Fire Management Terminologydefined CBFiM as a strategy for theinclusion of local communities in the proper application of land-use fire and in wildfire prevention, preparedness and suppression.

In their keynote in 2003, Ganz, Fisher and Moore defined CBFiM as a type of land and forest management in which locally resident communities– with or without the collaboration of other stakeholders – have substantial involvement in deciding the objectives and practices for preventing, controlling or using fire.

According to Abberger and Marbyanto (2003), communitiesplaydecision-making roles inthe application and control of fire as part of CBFiM when:

  • they have sufficient formal or informal tenure to ensure that their rights are considered along with broader – that is, national, provincial and district – production and conservationaims and objectives; and
  • they consider that their involvement in land and firemanagement decision-making and activities will improve their livelihoods, health orsecurity.

FAO (2003) presenteda CBFiM continuum[5], with three nodes. At one end of the continuum is a node involving local-scale fire management,in whichtraditional or indigenous knowledge plays the major role in informing and undertaking fire management, which is planned, conducted and controlled by local people. Maintaining livelihoods and landscape functioning is probably the key purpose of this node, which isapplied by many indigenous groups.

Somewhere in the middle of the continuum is community involvement in fire management involving a range of local actors, including agencies and non-governmental organizations working on fire management. This node may involve the maintenance of local livelihoods and some traditional practices and community institutions. Elements requiringsupport mightinclude analysis of the fire problem; technical capacity; the regulatory framework; and logistics.

At the far end of the CBFiM continuum are models involving community volunteers, perhaps with theinvolvement of government agencies, who conduct fire management on behalf of communities across private and public lands. An example of this node is the volunteer bushfire brigades that operate in Australia; brigade members may or may not earn their livelihoods directly from the rural landscape.

From thevarious definitions, the concept of a continuum of types, and the many CBFiM case studies now emerging[6],itmay be concluded that communities not only provide labour for CBFiM, they playan active role in the planning and implementationof fire management. CBFiMtends not toforbidthe use of fire, recognizing instead the importance of using fire wisely. It dealswith fire suppressionand reacts when a wildfire occurs, but it involves all the “5Rs” – review, risk reduction, response, readiness and rehabilitation. CBFiMrecognizes that many fires occur outside forests and thereforeconsidersfire at thelandscape scale. And, finally, CBFiM is not limited to fire management in a narrow sense;improvinglivelihoods is also an important function.CBFiM may be considered, therefore,as a subset of community-based natural resource management, from which many tools can be borrowed.

Challenges for CBFiM

Traditional or indigenous knowledge, management and institutions

Community involvement in the management of traditional lands and natural resources is not a new concept: indigenous communities have been using fire to varying degrees for millennia in managing and shaping the landscapes they inhabit. For example, many of the Native American tribesthat inhabited the Great Plains of North America used fire to manage their landscapes (Caitlin, 1848; Komarek, 1964, 1966; Anderson, 1972).

Many indigenous and other local communities continue to use fire as a tool for maintaining their livelihoods and protecting resources. They are familiar with the use of fire for traditional livelihood activities such as clearing vegetation for agriculture; improving pastures for grazing; hunting;and stimulating the growth of non-wood forest products. Inmany countries, however, indigenous and other traditional communities are subject to firemanagement policies that conflict with their traditional fire-use practices, leading to ecosystem degradation and consequent impacts on livelihoods, biodiversity and other values (FAO, 2011a).

To illustrate the traditional knowledge and skills that exist on fire management, I mention here two cases: the Aboriginal people in West Arnhem Land in northern Australia; and tribes in Tanzania.

Garde et al. (2009) described the detailed knowledge held by people living on the Arnhem Plateau. Before adopting a sedentary lifestyle in past decades, the Aboriginal people in the area spent substantial parts of their lives walking the Plateau. They had a highly nuanced and skilled approach to fire as a land (scape) management tool, and they possessed considerable knowledge of thetemperature, fuel loads, vegetationand wind strength and direction suitable for the effective burning of various vegetation types, mainly the grassy understorey of man-berrk savanna woodland.

William (2010) examined the approach taken to fire management in nine villages in Tanzania, where tribal cultures are influenced by agro-ecological, social, economic and climatic variations among regions and districts. All villages exhibited fire knowledge, management and customary norms related to fire prevention, suppression and controlled use. For example:

  • Most of the nine villagesused firebreaks to prevent fire from burning property, farms and other useful vegetated areas (e.g. grasses for thatching).
  • Fire-resistant species were used preferentially as fire beaters, and villages deployed both land management fires and counter-fires (or “controlled burns”).
  • In the conduct of controlled burns, most villages concentrated felled vegetation into heaps, and made use of firebreaks. Knowledge existedon the best times of year and day to burn. In some cases, environmental factors such as wind direction, air humidity and the flowering of certain plants were used asindicators ofthe nearing rainy season, before which controlled burnsmust take place.
  • Cultural norms set rules on where and when to burn, and where not to burn, and violations of these rules couldbe punished by committees ofelders or by village chiefs.[7] In a more friendly way, people who damaged other people’s property through theiruse of fire would be mocked in local dances.
  • In one village, it was found that fire events were socommon theywere culturally embedded. “Did fire pass well on you?” was a common greeting in the fire season.

This brief discussion on the knowledge and skills that already exist in communities leads me to my first challenge to fire managers.

CBFiM and the use of fire

In many rural settings, fire use is strongly related to people’s imperative to make a living – not only to survive but also to increase economic wealth.If fire usein a community is causing unwanted impacts, a first step in addressing the situation is tofind out why people are using fire and why such use is producingnegative outcomes. Efforts can then be made, using participatory processes, to improve fire management,develop management tools other than fire, or cultivate alternative economic activities.

Many fire management organizations have strived to build capacities in communities to use fire responsibly and take precautions to avoid unwanted wildfires. Considerable progress has been made in this sense, but I would like to repeat a comment made at the Fifth International Wildland Fire Conference in South Africa in 2011.The paradigm shift from forbidding fire to accepting it as a management toolhas led to progress in dealing with wildland fire; in so doing,however, we have tended to abandon the search for alternatives to fire use. A combination of threeapproaches seems logical.

  • One, the more responsible use of fire should be promoted when no alternatives are available or when the right framework for the implementation of such alternativesdoesnot yet exist. In southern Africa, for example, it is likely that improvedgrazing regimescan help reduce the impacts of savanna wildfiresandeven prevent them, but institutions in the subregionare notyet strong enough to organize this, and alternatives are yet to be developed.
  • Two, alternatives tothe use of fire should be promoted wherever theyare available.For example, conservation agriculture is based on the principle that organic residues should always be returned to the soil, not the air,as a way ofbetter conserving soils.
  • A thirdapproachcompatible with both or either of the first two approaches involvesthedevelopment ofeconomic pursuits that do not require fire.

To succeed, each of these three approaches requiresthe genuine participation of communities in design and implementation, as well as a sound understanding of the reasons behind burning in communities.

One should, not forget, however, that members of rural and indigenous groups, either individually or as communities, often have strategies for satisfying their developmental needs based on theirintimate knowledge of their environments.

From this discussion, I pose two key challenges.


Financing CBFiM

To be effective, CBFiMrequires investment– for example by national authorities and international donors and agencies – to put in place enabling fire management policies and to implement pilot projects at the community level. If we are to convince politicians and donors that such investment is necessary, we mustbe able to quantify the extent of the problem and the cost of inaction, and we must be able to demonstrate the capacity of CBFiM to reduce the problem. Politicians will always be reluctant to invest money in CBFiM if we cannot quantify the economic costs and benefits. Why should they, if the value of such investment cannot be demonstrated?

In many developing countries,and in some developed countries, data are lacking at the national level on the economiccosts of wildfire related to, for example, human health,damaged and destroyed property, crops and livestock, standing timber, future losses as a consequence of lost production capacity, and carbon emissions.

Many countries lack recording and monitoring systems to quantify even basic parameters of wildfire, such as the area burned, the number of households affected,and the number of people killed or injured. Progress is being made: for example, the Global Fire Monitoring Center collects annualdata on the people killed by fire globally; and there are national and global estimates of carbon emissions due to wildfire. Nevertheless, there remains a strong need to improve data – and the reporting of data– for a range of parameters.

Data on the benefits of CBFiM are even rarer. Even those of us who recognize the huge importance of CBFiMoften cannot quantify the gainsthat could be made – for example in reducing economic losses, the number of people affected and the volume of carbon emissions – by applying the approach.

Voluntary carbon market schemes offer a potential means of funding or partly funding CBFiM initiatives and contributing to local livelihoods, especially in developing countries, even though the price of carbon is currently low. Such schemesrequire the development of baseline carbon emissions and a system for monitoringfires and emissions.One of the few examples globally of a CBFiM initiative making use of this source of revenue is the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement Project (WALFA) in Australia’s Northern Territory,a partnership between the Aboriginal traditional owners and indigenous ranger groups, Darwin Liquefied Natural Gas, the Northern Territory Government and the Northern Land Council. Underthis partnership,indigenous ranger groups are implementing strategic fire management across 28000 km2of western Arnhem Land to offset greenhouse gas emissions from a liquefied natural gas plant at Wickham Point nearthe city of Darwin.[8]

The project has:

reduced emissions by 700 kilotonnes of CO2-equivalent over five years;

created employment opportunities for up to 400 indigenous people living in remote areas;

provided benefits in biodiversityconservation;

improved the health and well-being of remote indigenous communities;

reinvigorated cultural ties to country and traditional knowledge transfer; and

helped develop local expertise and opportunities to engage in other economic activities, including ecotourism and feral animal control.

Based on this and other experiences, the Australian Government is nowfundingthe International Savanna Fire Management Initiative in an effort to repeat the success of WALFA in other countries.[9]

The new Programming Directions of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) under the sixth replenishment, known as GEF6, offer direct opportunities for countries to use GEF allocations for fire management. Specifically:

  • The Climate Change Mitigation Focal Area Strategy states that measures to address“short-lived climate forcer”emissions from peat fires may be supported.
  • The Land Degradation Focal Area Strategy states that GEF support will focus on managing fire disturbances in relation to rangeland management and sustainable pastoralism.
  • And the Sustainable Forest Management Strategy recognizes human-induced fires as one of the driving forces of forest degradation.


The preceding discussion on CBFiM financing gives rise to two further challenges.


CBFiM and enabling legalframeworks

Lawsshould provide a clear basis for CBFiM. For example,theyshould:

  • enable the creation of local community groups that can undertake certain forest or land management responsibilities on the basis of specific agreements, following the provision of adequate information and training;
  • require consultation withlocal communities and concerned land and forest owners in the adaptation or revision of fire management plans and fire-related laws;
  • provide for agreements with land and forest owners, setting out rights and obligations – for both owners andgovernments –regarding the prevention and management of fire;
  • require responsible authorities to adequately inform the public of monitoring activities and other aspects of forest and land management (FAO, 2009); and
  • recognize or delegate to traditional or local laws dealing with fire management.

Laws related to tenure and fire use are also likely to have a bearing on the effectiveness of CBFiM. As mentioned earlier, effective CBFiM requires that communities havesufficient tenure – either formal or informal – to ensure that their rights are maintained.Regarding forest fires we may say that as long as as communities have no secure tenure rights on the concerned forest resources, there will be little hope for any kind of sustainable CBFiM. Secure tenure is a pre-condition for successful CBFiM. In its absence some schemes might run with external assistance, but they will never be sustainable.