Managing Fire to Avoid Wildfires in Fire-prone Ecosystems
Authors: Schmidt Isabel Belloni 
Published: March 2021

&lt;p&gt;Fire-prone ecosystems evolved and have been managed by humans with fire for&lt;br&gt;millennia. Ignoring these socioecological realities, zero-fire policies have been&lt;br&gt;implemented in fire-prone ecosystems across the world. These inappropriate policies are&lt;br&gt;mainly originated from a forest-centered perception that fire is an essentially negative&lt;br&gt;and anthropogenic disturbance. The attempts to exclude fires have generated deleterious&lt;br&gt;ecological impacts, high fire-fighting costs, damage to properties and human lives in&lt;br&gt;grasslands, savannas and Mediterranean-type ecosystems. These zero-fire policies also&lt;br&gt;generate conflicts between governments and local communities who use fire to manage&lt;br&gt;the landscape, food production and livestock raising. Excluding fires from fire-prone&lt;br&gt;ecosystems may lead to changes ecosystem functioning and biodiversity due to woody&lt;br&gt;encroachment and/or fuel load accumulation. In regions where soil conditions allow&lt;br&gt;grasslands can be invaded by trees, changing vegetation structure and their ability to&lt;br&gt;provide ecosystem services, especially water production. In most fire-prone ecosystems,&lt;br&gt;fuel load accumulates, and the long-time unburned areas become time bombs waiting&lt;br&gt;for the next ignition source to cause disastrous wildfires. Fire bans disrupt traditional&lt;br&gt;fire management practices and commonly lead to more irresponsible uses of fire, since&lt;br&gt;local communities continue to depend on fire for their productive areas but use fire in&lt;br&gt;furtive ways to avoid criminalization. In combination with large areas with high and&lt;br&gt;homogeneous fuel loads, this leads to large, hard to control and highly impacting&lt;br&gt;wildfires, especially during late-dry season, when fires tend cause more severe impacts.&lt;br&gt;After decades under these scenarios, zero-fire policies have been substituted by active&lt;br&gt;fire management policies in fire-prone ecosystems in many countries in Africa, Latin&lt;br&gt;America, in the US and Australia, among other countries. Fire management policies&lt;br&gt;should be adapted for each regional socioecological context and allow for the active use&lt;br&gt;of fires for landscape management, biodiversity conservation and/or productive&lt;br&gt;activities. The Brazilian savanna (Cerrado) is the most biodiverse and threaten savanna&lt;br&gt;in the world and has been managed under zero-fire policy for decades. It is a tropical&lt;br&gt;humid savanna (1,500mm mean annual precipitation) where large (&amp;gt;10,000 hectares),&lt;br&gt;frequent (2-4 years fire interval) late-dry season wildfires are common, including in&lt;br&gt;Protect Areas (PA) dedicated to biodiversity conservation and traditional communities&amp;#8217;&lt;br&gt;livelihoods. In 2014, a pilot Integrated Fire Management (IFM) program has been&lt;br&gt;implemented in three Cerrado PAs. The program considers local uses of fire,&lt;br&gt;implements prescribed burns and landscape management planning aiming to (i) change&lt;br&gt;the main season of burnings (from late- to early- and mid-dry season); (ii) protect fire-&lt;br&gt;sensitive vegetation, such as riparian forests, from fires; (iii) decrease firefighting costs;&lt;br&gt;(iv) reduce conflicts with local communities and (v) lower greenhouse gases emissions.&lt;br&gt;The IFM program has since been implemented in more than 30 federal PA, including&lt;br&gt;Indigenous Territories., where this approach has successfully achieved its main&lt;br&gt;objectives. The present challenge is to expand IFM actions to the state and especially&lt;br&gt;private -owned lands, which will allow for a significant change in wildfire patterns&lt;br&gt;across the whole 2 million km 2 of the Brazilian savanna.&lt;/p&gt;