Session 1. 8. A.

Integrated Fire Management (IFM or sustainable fire management) has been identified by the international fire community as a suitable interdisciplinary approach to address the problem of more extreme wildfires spreading across the globe. IFM includes actions aimed at reducing the extent and severity of undesired wildfires while maximizing the positive impacts of fire on biodiversity, ecosystem services and human wellbeing.

The FIRE-ADAPT has set up a network of scientists and practitioners from the Mediterranean Basin, the UK and Latin America to expand the knowledge of IFM in tropical and subtropical regions. The project partners are working on a set of outcomes on IFM such as 1) handbooks for assessing the impacts of prescribed burns on biodiversity and C dynamics, 2) databases on IFM practices, 3) modelling solutions for assessing the impacts of IFM on vegetation health and Carbon fluxes under climate change conditions, 4) Rapid Assessment Booklet for Policymakers and media, 5) guidelines for IFM capacity building for practitioners, and 6) virtual exhibition to raise awareness about IFM to the general public.

These results can be relevant for the international fire community, as IFM is identified as a potential solution to reduce the negative impacts of wildfires. Particularly interesting for researchers and practitioners working in regions where fire suppression efforts are increasingly unsafe and ineffective, and the response systems are overwhelmed due to the shift of fire regimes to more extreme events.

This paper situates dominant fire suppression practices within historical colonial regimes of environmental governance. Across much of the colonial and neocolonial world, the use of fire in landscapes by smallholders has been widely suppressed, a practice that remains pervasive today. In regions such as the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe, centuries of fire suppression have led to severe ecological and cultural consequences. Ecologically, fire suppression disrupts landscapes, altering plant ecologies and contributing to more extreme wildfires. Culturally, the suppression of fire destabilizes smallholder livelihoods, as fire is an essential element of many land management systems. This paper traces the origins of fire suppression to Europe during the industrial revolution, where it emerged alongside a suite of land use restrictions. These restrictions were driven by tensions between the priorities of capitalist states and the livelihoods of rural land users. Land use policies made smallholder livelihoods increasingly untenable, justified by perceptions of smallholders as economically unproductive. European authorities extended these policies to colonial contexts, where they applied to populations that relied on fire for landscape management. The paper argues that understanding fire suppression and its consequences within its colonial history has important implications for sustainable fire governance, environmental justice, and climate resilience.

Changing commons and their implications for fire management in Northern Ghana’s savanna landscapes
Commons of Northern Ghana’s savanna landscapes have undergone significant changes due to factors such as climate change, land use changes, land privatisation, resource governance and livelihoods. These changes have affected traditional burning practices, leading to tensions among herders, hunters and farmers. Drawing on institutional perspective (n = 10) and local resource users (n=56) and using in-depth interviews, we analysed how changes in commons affect fire management in the West Gonja Municipal of Ghana’s Savannah Region. The results indicate that agricultural expansion into the commons, which herders and hunters also lay claim by burning to regenerate fresh grasses for cattle or drive game for hunting has destroyed many farm produce and threatened food security, particularly during the dry season. Additionally, the communal system of fighting fire with fire is eroding due to the implementation of local fire suppression policies and the introduction of herbicides and tractor services as alternatives to burning for clearing lands for agricultural activities. Recognising that fire plays a significant role in shaping the composition and function of savanna landscapes, this study argues that it is important to establish an appropriate land use system and acknowledge the significance of controlled burning in the West Gonja Municipal.

Crofters, smallholder upland farmers in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, use fire to maintain common grazing areas for livestock, a practice known as muirburn or falasgair in Gaelic. Archival records show that pastoral fire use has been practiced by peasant farmers in Scotland since at least the Medieval period. Yet fire use has varied with political, ecological, economic, and social context, and has certainly changed in living memory. Based on research interviews with crofters in Sutherland, Skye, and Lochaber, I explore some of the challenges that crofters face in maintaining controlled, collective, fire use on common grazing areas in the 21st century. These include high fuel loads due to declining stocking levels (especially of cattle), decline and aging of the crofting population, the inflexibility of 21st century life and work, risk to plantations and other assets in the landscape, and poor public awareness of the distinction between controlled burning and wildfire. Alongside these drivers, the national muirburn regulations have recently been revised in ways that could make much fire use by crofters illegal. In the context of a changing climate, we need to ask whether wildfire risk might be exacerbated by the loss of controlled burning and the fire knowledge held by crofters. If so, could well-managed muirburn, or alternative fuel management techniques like grazing by cattle, be better supported?

This study explores the social life of forest fire legislation in the Uttarakhand Himalaya through the lens of Lefebvre’s spatial triad of conceived, perceived, and lived spaces. Colonial-era forest fire legislation in India is maintained to impose a specific ecological and territorial order in political forests. However, the laws in criminalising fire use frequently conflict with the lived experiences of indigenous communities, which employ fire in controlled and nuanced ways as part of their traditional land management practices. To these communities, the legislation often seems disconnected from their socio-cultural and ecological needs. At the local level, the implementation of these laws is further complicated by state agencies navigating rural democratic politics, where enforcement is often undermined by local political actors seeking to protect their constituencies from the legal consequences. This creates a complex landscape in which the conceived space of legislation diverges sharply from both the lived space of indigenous practices and the perceived space of local governance.

This study also investigates how disaster events, such as large-scale uncontrolled forest fires, disrupt these spatial dynamics, temporarily reinforcing the power and presence of legal norms. The state’s regulatory framework may prevail during such moments, but this dominance is typically short-lived, revealing the enduring disconnection between legal prescriptions and lived realities. By examining the interaction of these spaces, this study aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how forest fire legislation functions within the sociopolitical and environmental context of the Uttarakhand Himalaya, shedding light on the tensions and negotiations that shape the social reality of law in this region.

Wildland fire management emerges in Treaty #3 territory near the end of colonial administration and increasingly takes on characteristics of modernity following World War 2 as the State exerts increasing control over fire on the landscape. While wildland fire management in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries mainly focused on regulation and criminalization of Indigenous fire technologies, following World War 2 the use of modern technologies for surveillance and suppression of wildland fire become increasingly effective. Fire sciences also emerge in this period and an iron triangle of the state, industry and knowledge production become the dominant conceptual framing of human relations with fire favouring industrial and settler values of fire suppression. The outcome, as we now know, is a fire prone landscape, more susceptible to catastrophic fire at a time when fire frequency and intensity are increasing due to anthropogenic climate change. However, new approaches in Canada call for a whole of society approach to respond to the increased frequency and intensity of wildland fire. This has opened opportunities for a new fire science and management that includes Indigenous science, ways of thinking about and being in relation to fire. More than the instrumental use of Indigenous knowledges and technologies of fire this will require a decolonial process. A decolonial process includes, as a first step, an excavation of colonial history of wildland fire and how science and management become hegemonic during the period of modernity. In this paper, we trace the process by which western wildland fire science and management emerge in Treaty #3 territory and repress Anishinaabe knowledges and technologies of fire. We then turn to recognize the ongoing Anishinaabe constitutionality of their relations with fire during the colonial and modern periods of wildland fire science and management. We conclude by introducing some on-going efforts of the territorial planning unit of Grand Council Treaty #3 to strengthen constitutive processes through which Anishinaabe in Treaty #3 territory can dream right relations with fire as part of a decolonial future.

Due to acute climate change impacts and historical land-use changes, wildfires are becoming more and more frequent and severe in the Mediterranean area, disrupting long-established socio-economic and ecological cycles. The Mediterranean agroforestry landscapes, historically and culturally shaped by traditional subsistence and labour activities, combining patches of forest, small agricultural plots, olive groves, vineyards and grazing fields are greatly affected by these wildfires. Through a human geography and political ecology lens, in this paper, I explore the interconnections between rural depopulation, altering agroforestry landscapes and wildfires in the Greek island of Evia, that was severely affected by wildfires in the summer of 2021. With almost 50.000 hectares of coniferous forest and agricultural land burnt, they were the most extended wildfires in the country, up until that moment, affecting life-sustaining activities and infrastructure.

Despite a highly fragmented property system, comprising of several different forms and sizes of forest and land property (communal, public, associations, privately owned forests, agricultural plots etc), the burnt areas used to function largely as commons grounds, where beekeepers, resin cultivators, shepherds, farmers and recreational mushroom hunters seasonally accessed the forest and agricultural land, harvesting and at the same time ‘taking care’ of the landscape. Those mosaic landscapes, when preserved and worked, used to affect fire behavior in different ways and at the same time offered a certain kind of fire management knowledge to the local people. Following ethnographic fieldwork of 9 months in the area and 68 semi-structured interviews with forest producers, farmers, shepherds, fire and forest services actors, in this paper I explore local narratives on two interrelated topics: 1) how the loss of subsistence/multi-job lifestyles affects and is affected by fires and 2) how co-existence with fire is changing, related to: land use changes, rural desertification and forest re-wilding (in the absence of humans and traditional activities).