We ask ourselves if fire can help us to conserve the Amazon

Manizales, a Colombian municipality, has been chosen this year to host the Third Inter-American Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation. Manizales is recognised for its excellent disaster risk management, thanks to its location in a seismic and volcanic zone, and the city has implemented preventive and preparedness measures that have been highlighted nationally and internationally.

The National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD), the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development and the European programme Amazonía+, have organised dialogues with specialists in integrated fire management and fire professionals from different countries in the Amazon basin whose purpose has been to promote a space for exchange on integrated fire management (IFM) as a strategy for conservation and reduction of the vulnerability of Amazonian landscapes to forest fires, giving an answer to the controversial and apparently contradictory question: ‘can fire help us conserve the Amazon?

Carlos Carrillo, director of Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management, welcomed the event saying ‘The era of forest fires that cannot be extinguished invites us not to be so reactive but to prevent fires, conserve biodiversity and recognise that the use of fire is an intangible heritage of societies’.

The Integrated Fire Management (IFM) promoted by the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) to all countries of the Amazon region, establishes the framework for joint work in fire management for the eight countries of the basin that incorporates the pyrobiocultural components, accepting and valuing the good practices of fire use by indigenous communities and recognizing the benefits of fire.

But what is IFM? IFM is a holistic approach to fire management that takes into account three components: fire ecology, fire culture and fire management.

‘Not all fires are fires’, Bibiana Bilbao, ecologist and professor at the Simón Bolívar University in Venezuela, reminds us repeatedly. Some fires even help to prevent and control fires. ‘The fire ecology perspective involves understanding the role that fire plays in each ecosystem; studying in an integral and holistic way the interactions that occur before, during and after a fire: fire-dependent ecosystems are those in which species have developed adaptive traits and fire is an absolutely essential process; or sensitive, those that have not developed with fire as an important and recurrent process,’ says Tania González, professor at the Universidad Javeriana. This is how, by understanding fire, we can use it to preserve ecosystems.

The meeting was attended by members of the Colombian Red Cross, Civil Defence, UNGRD, Ministry of Environment, Humboldt Institute, Sinchi Institute, National Police, Colombian Air Force, National Navy and National Army, National Natural Parks, and of course, the National Fire Department, who were able to ask questions to the panelists about the operability of Integrated Fire Management.

As a result, a summary document of recommendations for integrated fire management in tropical ecosystems has been presented as an input for COP16, which will serve as a basis for Amazonian work in the framework of the ACTO agreements.