Amazon: Lack of policies weakens fire management – 03/23/2023 – Environment

A study recently published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction discusses the governance of forest fires in the trinational border of the southwest of the Amazon with the participation of local representatives. The region, known as the MAP, encompasses Madre de Dios, Peru; the state of Acre, in Brazil; and Pando, in Bolivia.

“Living in Acre, we have little or no role, especially when it comes to the environment. We see scientists from other regions and even other countries talking about the Amazon, calling attention to the issue, but we, who live here, stay out of this governance. Bringing this local view of the region’s vulnerabilities and capacities is a very positive point of our study”, says sociologist Gleiciane Pismel, collaborator of Cemaden (National Center for Monitoring and Alerts of Natural Disasters) and first author of the article.

Based on an online survey, carried out during the Covid-19 pandemic (between 2020 and 2021), the work shows that 60% of 111 respondents considered deforestation the main cause of forest fires that hit the Amazon, followed by the use of fire. in agricultural management (58%) and droughts (39%).

The perception is in line with the results of recent studies on the subject. The increase in forest fires, associated with the advance of deforestation, has been one of the threats to the conservation of the Amazon and its socio-biodiversity (read more at: agencia.fapesp.br/40164/ and agencia.fapesp.br/39913).

The interviewees —public managers, scientists and representatives of the third sector— also pointed out as the main vulnerabilities in governance to contain the impacts of fire in the region the deficiencies in institutions and control bodies, associated with the reduction of employees and limited financial resources.

In addition to the weakening of institutions, the instabilities of national and local public policies appeared as a failure in governance. To a large extent, these actions only reflect proposals for national measures without observing the peculiarities of each location. Other points of attention are the lack of community participation and the sociocultural aspects of the use of fire, especially in pasture and agriculture zones close to environmental preservation areas.

“One of the elements that poses the greatest risk to ecosystem services, in addition to deforestation, is the issue of degradation by fire, selective logging and the edge effect associated with the entry of fire into the forest, as we showed in Science. On the other hand, there is a very limited number of studies that evaluate governance, specifically associated with fires, a growing, emerging and urgent topic that the Amazon has been facing. , researcher at Cemaden and corresponding author of the article.

Anderson is referring to the study “The drivers and impacts of Amazon forest degradation”, which was one of the cover highlights of the end of January issue of the journal Science. He revealed that approximately 38% of the current area of ​​the Amazon is suffering from some type of degradation caused by four factors —fire, selective logging (mostly illegal), edge effects (which are changes in forest regions alongside deforestation) and extreme droughts, increasingly frequent as a result of climate change (read more at: agencia.fapesp.br/40568/).

several glances

Developed within the scope of the MAP-Fire project, the study on forest fire governance was supported by FAPESP through the Research Center for Innovation in Greenhouse Gases (RCGI) and a Scholarship Abroad – Research granted to Cemaden researcher Victor Marchezini, who since 2004 works in the area of ​​sociology of disasters, seeking to involve local communities in the prevention of environmental disasters.

The RCGI is an Engineering Research Center (CPE) constituted by Fapesp and Shell at the University of São Paulo (USP).

The MAP-Fire project, created in March 2019 and linked to the Laboratory of Tropical Ecosystems and Environmental Sciences (Trees), has been developing a multi-actor adaptation plan to deal with forests at increasing risk of extensive fires, particularly in the region known as the MAP. Research was developed to understand the risks of disasters, in addition to a monitoring and alert platform to support planning and decision-making related to the occurrence of fires in the area.

“The research looks at the actors that are in the border territory. It involves representatives of non-governmental organizations, public managers in the region, as well as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scientists from Brazil, Peru and Bolivia as participating actors in risk management discussions. Disasters registered there do not respect political-administrative borders, making it necessary to think about inter and transdisciplinary methods to create and strengthen risk mitigation actions”, explains Marchezini, who is currently doing postdoctoral work, with the support of FAPESP, at the Natural Hazards Center, at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

In the work, the group analyzed perceptions about vulnerabilities and capacities in the governance of forest fires in the MAP region under four axes: risk knowledge; monitoring; education and communication; and disaster prevention and response. Vulnerabilities and capabilities were assessed in eight dimensions: economic, educational, environmental, organizational, political, legal (juridical), sociocultural and technological.

The research design had as its starting point an online workshop held during the pandemic with 668 participants from the three countries. “When we look at a socio-environmental problem, we have to have different perspectives. And that is what the MAP-Fire project and this article bring. In addition to being a multidisciplinary team, we have researchers from the three countries, including Galia Selaya, who is from Bolivia, and Eddy Mendoza from Peru”, says Pismel.

In addition to compromising forest ecosystem services and loss of biodiversity, forest fires can turn into transboundary disasters mainly due to the effects of smoke that crosses borders, compromising human health, disrupting transport and affecting the regional economy.

Soot microparticles, easily inhaled, contributed, for example, to the increase in hospital admissions for respiratory problems in five states of the Brazilian Legal Amazon between 2010 and 2020. Technical note from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), released in March 2021, pointed out that in the period, 174 daily hospitalizations for respiratory diseases were recorded in Pará and 57 per day in Mato Grosso.

The fires also generated a high cost for the Unified Health System (SUS), with the amount spent in the five states with high and low complexity hospitalizations reaching R$ 1 billion in the period.

Alternatives

According to the researchers, a path to better governance against fires in the perception of the participants involves strengthening organizational capacities, adequate investments in socio-environmental issues according to the reality of each country and region of the MAP, in addition to the need to increase capital of organizations from a quantitative and also a qualitative point of view.

In Brazil, municipal civil defenses are made up of one to two people, most of them by political indication, without professional development. Most municipalities also do not have the budget to carry out disaster risk management actions.

Formulating public policies and laws that take into account the local reality, distributing responsibilities and resources among the national, regional and municipal levels, is another need highlighted by the researchers.

“The people who live in the region, exposed to fire or who use it, end up not being involved in any governance system that helps them to make decisions or be better informed. The improvement in the integration between institutions and in the quality of communication within and among them can help. As well as environmental education and the need to bring the theme of fire to the school curriculum, connecting it very clearly with the reality of the people who live there”, says Anderson.

To help fill the educational material gap, the researchers produced a textbook, aimed at teacher training, available online.

“The material was a way of taking the theme into the classroom, especially in the context in which we live with the worldwide ghost of fake news. In Brazil, we had a loss of infrastructure, organizational capabilities and, at the same time, there was a weakening of knowledge with false information. When you have this type of information spreading in society, it is very difficult to regain not only confidence in the institutions that produce information and science, but also to reverse thinking. Sometimes false information arrives, but the counterpart does not go with the same speed”, concludes Anderson.

The article “Wildfire governance in a tri-national frontier of southwestern Amazonia: Capacities and vulnerabilities” can be read here.