Managing the human component of fire regimes: lessons from Africa

Abstract

One contribution of 24 to a discussion meeting issue 'The interaction of fire and mankind'. Human impacts on fire regimes accumulated slowly with the evolution of modern humans able to ignite fires and manipulate landscapes. Today, myriad voices aim to influence fire in grassy ecosystems to different ends, and this is complicated by a colonial past focused on suppressing fire and preventing human ignitions. Here, I review available evidence on the impacts of people on various fire characteristics such as the number and size of fires, fire intensity, fire frequency and seasonality of fire in African grassy ecosystems, with the intention of focusing the debate and identifying areas of uncertainty. Humans alter seasonal patterns of fire in grassy systems but tend to decrease total fire emissions: livestock have replaced fire as the dominant consumer in many parts of Africa, and fragmented landscapes reduce area burned. Humans alter the season and time of day when fires occur, with important implications for fire intensity, tree-grass dynamics and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Late season fires are more common when fire is banned or illegal: these later fires are far more intense but emit fewer GHGs. The types of fires which preserve human livelihoods and biodiversity are not always aligned with the goal of reducing GHG concentrations. Current fire management challenges therefore involve balancing the needs of a large rural population against national and global perspectives on the desirability of different types of fire, but this cannot happen unless the interests of all parties are equally represented. In the future, Africa is expected to urbanize and land use to intensify, which will imply different trajectories for the continent's fire regimes.This article is part of the themed issue 'The interaction of fire and mankind.

Fire Regimes and Their Drivers in the Upper Guinean Region of West Africa

“…These findings are consistent with experimental results from the Kruger National Park in South Africa which found that total burned area was mainly controlled by fuel availability rather than the number of fire events [2]. The northeastern landscape was generally flat and encompassed the largest protected areas of savanna in the study area, located in central and northern Ghana and north-eastern Côte d'Ivoire ( Figure 1 and Figure S5), thereby providing the most contiguous savanna cover with continuous fuel beds that are conducive to ignition and rapid fire spread.…”

“…The complex interactions of ignition sources with vegetation, climate, and topography give rise to fire regimes, an ecological concept describing the range of fire characteristics occurring at a given geographic location and time period [1,2]. Fire regimes can be characterized by various metrics, including fire size, seasonality, frequency, intensity, and severity.…”

Historic global biomass burning emissions for CMIP6 (BB4CMIP) based on merging satellite observations with proxies and fire models (1750–2015)

“…We have assumed that fire emissions did happen at a much lower rate, either as a result of man-made factors or naturally. However, the relation between climate, humans, and fires is complicated (Archibald, 2016).…”

Living on a flammable planet: interdisciplinary, cross-scalar and varied cultural lessons, prospects and challenges

“…From transnational Earth system impacts [1], to domestic impacts on sovereign nations [2], to impacts on local communities [3] and the individuals who make up communities, the perceptions, decisionmaking and prioritization of policy goals are built upon cultural and historical experiences [4][5][6] that have legacy effects, lags and feedbacks across temporal scales [7][8][9][10][11][12]. Although there is a growing literature on building fire-adapted communities [13,14], it is important to recognize that there is both heterogeneity and variability in the historical, technological, cultural and environmental contexts in which humans perceive and respond to fire challenges [15], and that in turn these have cross-scalar feedbacks through sociopolitical structures [2,16], intergenerational cultural transmission [5], historical ecology of landscapes and biomes [12,17,18], and even fire-atmosphere-climate feedbacks [19][20][21].…”