Forest fire: Complexities, communities, and contemplation
For a country like Nepal, where authorities have political and politically personal priorities to meet, there are limited contributions and advocations to make in global and even regional platforms. They can neither influence interceptive response nor alleviative fight against forest fire. Nevertheless, there are still numerous actions, and more importantly, responsibilities to administer at the local level that can prove to be significant to reduce the impact. The easiest thing that we can do is to talk about it. Obviously, not to the point where the talk starts traumatizing people, but up to the point where the talk makes people think that it is dangerous, its occurrence is inevitable, it can happen again, but it can be dealt with. There should be discussions, from the kitchen corner and local tea shop to the media, and from Chautari to Singha Durbar, about what can happen and how.
It has been a few months now since the catastrophic, but not unexpected, fire caravan passed through our forests. So, let’s talk about this. Talk helps to process the gravity of post-disaster trauma, enhances perception towards the fire, triggers a ‘blame game’ dominos among stakeholders, and eventually raises voice to a ‘Kathmandu Standard’ frequency that is audible to at least one Department or Responsible Authority. It was a pity that nobody took responsibility to give victims and burnt forests a horizon to look up for relief and rehabilitation. But who actually was going to take responsibility for the wildfire anyway? Department of Forest? National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority? Locals? God? No one?
Talks ignite mass thinking, and eventually, mass awareness. Such awareness on fire anatomy is the simplest yet the most significant way to fight fire. Anatomically, fire is made up of three components: heat, fuel, and oxygen. They collectively make a fire triangle. Getting rid of one of them will break the fire chain and stop any fire. In a natural environment, it is rather impossible to remove oxygen from the fire triangle, therefore, heat and fuel are two components that can be manipulated to break the fire triangle.
If we break down the fire triangle into a fire equation, there are numerous dependent and independent variables that influence forest fires. The forests’ species composition is one of the variables for fire occurrence, and in return the fire regime and frequency of occurrence dictate back the forest composition. Unlike other fire-dependent forests (such as in Australia), our forests don’t possess a defined fire regime. The species aren’t fire dependent; they neither encourage the fire to ignite and spread nor rehabilitate from extensive damages after the fire. Even though such periodic and recurring fire events are not attributes of our forests, they do occur, mostly during the dry season before monsoon.
Climate change, however, is the one that drastically influences the equation. In the current context, it is no speculatation to say that climate change is considerably the strongest variable for the increasing trend of forest fires globally, including in Nepal. The elongated dry seasons, irregular precipitation, and spiking rise in temperature have made forest fires inconsistently frequent and catastrophic. Such uncharacteristic fires not only burn down the existing forest resources but also facilitate weed infestation and alter the historical species composition of native forests. In the hilly and mountainous frame of reference, the challenging landscape is another strong variable that brutally facilitates fire spreading and impedes firefighting.
It is, nonetheless, not right to blame climate change for everything that goes wrong in the forest and alleviate ourselves from the equation. That’s because almost all forest fires in Nepal are anthropogenically induced. Such fires are most likely to burst out in the proximity of settlements given the common sources of heat are pre-cultivation preparation burns, post-harvest residue burns, unsmothered campfires, cigarette butts, and other religious and recreational fires. In addition, increased migration patterns triggered by climatic vulnerabilities have created a circle of increasing forest cover, increasing fuel load, increasing risk of catastrophic fire events, and eventually increasing the migration. Since fires start in the vicinity of settlements, serious damages to settlements are foreseen, including fatalities, injuries, property and crop damage, and exposure of communities to socio-economic vulnerability and psychological trauma.
In Nepal, forests have been extensively exploited for purposes ranging from livelihood support and tourism to industrial entrepreneurship and infrastructural development. From Kharkhadai and Yarsagumba collection to illegal extraction of forest resources, every human maneuver poses a threat of forest fire. People, hence, are the center of problems but also the center of solutions. There are more than 22000 Community Forests in Nepal with hundreds of thousands of locals of Community Forests registered as associated user groups.
Hypothetically, user groups are managing forests intending to sustainably exploit them in perpetuity. Forests have been managed by traditional users for centuries. There are therefore traditional approaches prevalent for fire management with the localized skill and extensive understanding of their forest. If such traditional skills are incorporated with safety procedures, contemporary science, and professionalized responsibility, it will generate the most effective and methodical package for fire management. Training those user groups will constitute a huge squad of local firefighters; firefighters who won’t wait for the fire to start to fight against it, who fight fire every day. The training could include operational safety procedures, fuel reduction, prescribed burn, and awareness programs.
At present, we neither have readily available technology nor profuse skilled manpower to modernize firefighting. However, with available local resources and trained volunteers, fire breaks, drenches, rainwater harvest reservoirs, and fire towers could still be engineered. The construction of fire prevention structures and utilization of forest extracts, especially the dead and dry resources could effectively reduce the fuel load and hence axes the vulnerability of forests to a catastrophic event. One of the major headaches, nevertheless, will be the investment in operational tools and safety equipment. But the biggest headache is migration.
As we mentioned earlier, there is a serious consequence of migration on forest fires. The out-migration not only increases the forest area in and around the village but also intrudes on human-nature coexistence. Most if not every household in rural Nepal used to rear cattle. These cattle were cogs for active farmland, rangeland, and forest management.
Some activities triggered by cattle were grazing, fodder and firewood collection, dry leaves collection for bedding materials, forest trial delineation, and landscaping. The aforementioned activities were the reason why local people comprehended forest geography, composition, physiology, and biodiversity. Everything that was collected from forests eventually ended up in farmland in the form of fences, mulch, and manure that contributed to subsistence farming. The whole phenomenon, hence, established a historical linkage between forests and hand-to-mouth affairs in every family in rural Nepal. Therefore, people worshiped auspicious forests in the name of Bankali, Ban Devi, Deurali, Nagasthan, Chautari, etc., and celebrated auspicious days such as Deurali Puja, Jhakri Puja, Deuli Puja, etc. to pay gratitude to forests and nature.
Given the cultural structure and composition of rural communities, traditional beliefs and norms had a strong influence on forest management. And then the migration started. Migration, for various significant reasons, enabled poverty reduction, changed the socio-economic activities and livelihood patterns of villages, shuffled the demographic structure, and broke off the traditional land-use motif. Eventually, the inevitable lack of manpower, willpower, and reasons for active intervention in forests led to reduced active forest management in community forests.
Anyway, when life gives us lemon, we ought to make lemonade. The forest rehabilitation is the consequent lemonade here. We should perform post-fire salvage operations to harvest economically valuable timber and non-timber products before they are exposed to climatic and pathological attacks. All the woods that had their crown, branches, and bark burnt could still have some salvageable wood left on them. The salvage operation also opens space and circumstances for regeneration. In addition, we should also be aware that if we fail to regenerate, weeds and invasive species can call the forest floor their new home.
In the end, fire predictions, early fire warnings, and smoke detection systems are some important mechanisms to contain the fire and limit its spread. Science has evolved extravagantly in the past few years and has moved the early detection system from terrestrial to air-based and satellite-based systems eventually resulting in extensive, prompt, precise, and reliable information. There are technologies like unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAV) for fire predictions and vulnerability mapping. UAVs, famously known as Drones, can do much more than feature on Instagram. The use of Nepali satellites for the study and management of disasters has already been realized at the government level for a while now. However, it will take time to execute the realization into practice.
Meanwhile, NepaliSat-1 and SanoSat-1 have triggered a hopeful question; whether the use of satellite-based systems for real-time fire detection, monitoring, severity mapping, and risk assessment would be possible with Nepali technology?
