Ever since humans learned to control fire, it has been an essential part of our existence, playing a cultural role in agricultural production and in environmental management to prevent wildfires.
By Isabel B. Schmidt, professor at the Department of Ecology/UnB and member of the Biota Cerrado Network, and Livia C. Moura, technical advisor at the Institute for Society, Population and Nature (ISPN) and the Biota Cerrado Network.
Bill No. 1.818/2022, the National Policy for Integrated Fire Management, was approved by the Senate on July 3rd of this year and is now awaiting presidential approval. Amid so much bad environmental news, this is excellent. The policy aims to regulate and promote coordination among institutions for integrated fire management, reduce the incidence and damage of forest fires, and restore the ecological and cultural role of fire. The objective of reducing fires is easy to understand, but what is the ecological and cultural role of fire? What is integrated fire management?
Since humans learned to control fire, it has been an essential part of our existence, playing a cultural role in agricultural production and in managing environments to prevent wildfires. Yes, well-managed fire is very useful and effective in preventing fires in fields and savannas, such as the Cerrado, the southern and Amazonian grasslands, and the Pantanal—which is burning for the second time this decade alone. These environments, technically called pyrophytic, have coexisted with natural fire, started by lightning, for millions of years. In them, seasonality (drought and rain) and the continuous layer of grasses facilitate the spread of fire. A single spark during the dry season is enough for an uncontrolled fire to spread over thousands of square kilometers, fueled by the "fuel" of the thin grass leaves and pushed by the winds.
Natural fires in the Cerrado region are started only by lightning strikes, which arrive with the rains, and these rains extinguish the natural fires. We, humans, cause irreversible changes in the Earth's ecosystems and climate, and generate ignitions in times and places where they would never occur naturally, making fires more frequent, artificial, and difficult to control.
We then arrive at integrated fire management (IFM). IFM is an approach to managing environments based on three pillars: fire ecology — the natural (or non-natural) occurrence of fire in the environment to be managed; fire culture — whether and how local populations use fire for productive and cultural activities; and fire management, which considers institutional capacities and technical and scientific knowledge for using fire and preventing wildfires.
Although it has been used for decades in various regions of Africa, Australia, Europe, and North America, Integrated Fire Management (IFM) only arrived in Brazil in 2014. Since then, federal institutions (Prevfogo/Ibama, ICMBio, and Funai) have been managing fire in more than 10 million hectares of federally protected areas, where wildfires have decreased drastically in recent years.
One of the secrets to this success lies in the good planning, execution, and monitoring of prescribed (planned) burns in strategic locations. These burns create mosaics with different burning histories in the landscape, like a patchwork quilt, where each piece has a different amount of fuel (dry grass). Many do not have enough fuel for a fire to continue. Thus, thousands of kilometers stop burning because there is no continuity of fuel in the face of the first lightning strike, or worse, and more commonly, the first lighter.
These prescribed burns, carried out in fields and savannas, protect wooded and forested areas that suffer from any fire. In short, MIF considers ecological and traditional knowledge to manage environments prone to fires, reducing the continuity of fuel. Thus, we don't need to rely on luck to avoid ignition, and the fires end up "starving" due to lack of fuel (dry grass).
Breaking the zero-fire paradigm and ceasing the attempt to prevent each and every fire was a long process in federal reserves. After much resistance, managers learned that fire is a terrible boss—it makes us work at all hours and in inhumane conditions to fight fires. But it's a great employee, demanding relatively few financial and human resources to manage large regions with burned areas of varying sizes, protecting ecosystems, property, and lives from wildfires.
The National Policy on Integrated Forest Management (IFM) is the framework that will allow this form of management to be implemented throughout the country, on state, municipal, and private lands, with information and training. We now need institutional, political, and social commitment to understand that fires can be prevented with well-managed fires, and that trying to fight fires is much more expensive economically, socially, and environmentally than investing in fire management.
Article originally published in Correio Braziliense newspaper.