'Better landscapes management needed to prevent forest fires' in Kenya

Afrique en ligue: Countries need to pay more attention to fire management on lands bordering forests in order to prevent the 95 percent of wildfires that originate from human activities in forests and adjacent areas, an international partnership for forests warned Friday. The Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF), which consists of 14 international organizations and secretariats, issued its warning as many countries are experiencing an increasing incidence in the frequency and size of wildfires due to lack of fire management policies and impacts of climate change.

'In many cases, the fire starts on agricultural or pasture lands and spreads quickly on nearby forests,' said Pieter van Lierop, an FAO expert on forest fire management. 'When people continue to burn rubbish and agricultural waste, clear lands by burning vegetation for agricultural or development purposes, or burn pastures to allow grass to sustain its high productivity, there is always a danger of large-scale vegetation and forest fires particularly under dry and hot weather conditions,' he added. 'There are practical things that can be done to reduce the risks of fire escaping from agricultural areas.'

It is vital to think about fire prevention and suitable use of fire not only in forests but also through other parts of a landscape, in particular land in the vicinity of forests, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a news dispatch Friday.

For example, people should try to avoid establishing large homogeneous forest areas in regions with fire-prone vegetation, which usually exacerbate fires, and instead maintain mosaic landscapes with natural firebreaks provided by combining different land-uses….

Tree in timberline forest with lichens, shot by Mehmet Karatay, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license