Rising Forest Fires Could Hinder India’s Green Cover Ambitions

Ajay Kumar Chandel, the head of Bhagetu, told IndiaSpend that frequent fires had thinned the forest cover on the slope opposite his village in the last few decades.

“In the eighties, when the forest was dense and made up of mature chir (pine) trees, the ground was not visible, but now, the ground is clearly visible, we only see immature trees--chir, as well as other species planted by the forest department--because successive fires don’t give the trees a chance to grow to their full height and girth,” Chandel said.

Frequent fires are known to hinder the growth of regenerating seedlings.

Moti Ram, the sarpanch of Ropa village, told IndiaSpend that “2023 marked the first time a forest fire spread near a hut in the village”.

Chandel attributed the frequent forest fires to climate change, specifically to the summer heat that was unthinkable a few decades ago. Baljeet Singh, the sarpanch of Samtana village, agreed that the intense summers caused more fires. Research has also called out land-use change as a contributory factor for the increasing frequency and intensity of forest fires in Uttarakhand.

A study of forest fires across India between 2005 and 2022 confirms an “overall upward trend”, with most of the significant peaks occurring in the later years of this time period. Incidence rose from 8,430 fires in 2005 to 104,500 such events in 2021.

Fires wipe out the carbon locked in forests, besides adversely impacting the flow of goods and services therefrom. About 34,562 sq km of forests--that is, just over 1% of India’s overall area--was burnt in the last fire season from November 2023 to June 2024, according to the Forest Survey of India (FSI).

India proposes to increase its forest cover to 33% of its geographic area by 2030, up from 25% now. For this to happen, 26 million hectare of degraded agricultural, forest and other wastelands must be restored. More frequent and extensive forest fires would deter this goal.

More vulnerable regions need special attention beyond fire alerts

While forest fires happen almost across the country, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha have led the event count in the last couple of decades, recording 893, 521, and 1,125 incidents respectively in 2005, and 18,912, 11,132 and 10,445 incidents in 2021. In contrast, the Andaman and Nicobar islands, Chandigarh, Daman and Diu, Delhi, Haryana, Lakshadweep, and Puducherry saw few fires.

Within states, too, certain districts are more at risk. Odisha’s Koraput, Malkangiri and Rayagada districts, for example, consistently report high numbers of fire incidents, averaging around 2,641 fires per year.

Forest fires by state, 2005 and 2022

Source: September 2024 study published in Ecological Indicators

Because of these differences, the authors of the aforementioned study concluded that forest fire occurrences across India are heterogeneous by nature, necessitating region-specific mitigation strategies and increased awareness as opposed to a national strategy.

“Each region’s unique ecological (climatic conditions and vegetation types) and socio-economic context (socio-economic activities and local awareness levels) underlines the importance of a localised approach rather than a one-size-fits-all strategy,” K.P. Suresh, corresponding author of the aforementioned study and principal scientist, ICAR-National Institute of Veterinary Epidemiology and Disease Informatics, Bengaluru, said.

Asked whether the FSI had modeled the impact of a warming climate on the likelihood of increased forest fires, Meera Iyer, joint director, Forest Geoinformatics Division, FSI Dehradun, said “The Forest Survey of India is carrying out a country-wide study on Forest Fire Risk Zonation Mapping.

“A pilot study has already been carried out for the west Himalayan states,” Iyer said, which has now been published in the India State of Forest Report 2023. “The results of another study on the identification of fire-prone forest areas is also to be published soon.”

Iyer also said that the FSI is currently working on a system similar to the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS), which helps “assess which fires threaten human safety, property, environmental or cultural assets, and which fires can be monitored without suppression actions”. Essentially, outcomes from the CFFDRS “help wildland fire managers determine what wildland firefighting resources are needed and where”.

What the studies show

Climate is a major determinant of a forest’s vulnerability to fire. The fire weather index (FWI), a meteorologically-based index used worldwide to estimate fire danger, is a composite measure based on weather variables such as temperature, relative humidity, precipitation and wind speed over a forest ecosystem, which affects the fuel loading (a measure of the biomass, dead and live, that can be ignited and burned, per unit area) and the start and spread of fires.

FWI-related information is downloadable from the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS-5) daily data from the NASA Global Fire Weather Database (GFWED). These data when merged with forest type layer information, forest fire archival information, and other data are used to generate a forest fire danger rating. Geographic zone-wise parameters are quantified and overlaid on grids of 5 km x 5 km across India.

Such analysis shows that 27.97% of the country’s forest cover is fire-prone from the high to the extreme level (high, very high, extreme), up from 22.27% two years ago.

The available fuel ignites faster in higher temperatures, while rain protects a forest from fire. So, dryer deciduous forests are conventionally considered to be more vulnerable to catching fire than evergreen, semi-evergreen and montane temperate forests.

Further, warmer and dryer days increase a forest’s vulnerability to fire, while cooler and moist weather reduces this vulnerability.

In hot, dry Central India’s mixed deciduous and tropical thorn forests, a warmer climate could extend the severe fire season by as much as 61 days by the end of the century, according to a study recently published in Nature. This study only considers weather changes for which substantial evidence is available.

“A temperature rise in Central India is evident from many model projections,” explained author Anasuya Barik, doctoral scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and data analyst at Borlaug Institute of South Asia. “We also expect the monsoon to impact the fire danger in this region. However, we do not have substantial evidence of decreasing monsoons in future in this region.”

Himalayan alpine and subtropical pine forests are marked by severe fire seasons both before and after the monsoon. Barik’s study concluded that higher temperatures in September-October and lower overall precipitation (less snow in higher altitudes, less rain in the plains) could extend the post-monsoon severe fire season by 33 days.

“In the cold, dry Himalayan region, too, temperature models are reliable even though the factors causing winter rain (western disturbances, orographic lifting, etc.) don’t lend themselves well to projections,” Barik said.

Conversely, the wet, evergreen and deciduous forests of the warm, humid North East will see an overall decline in the fire weather index by 40%, despite a rise in temperature, because precipitation and humidity, which affect the possibility of fire more than temperature, are set to increase.

Barik’s maps showing the fire danger hotspots within different forest zones could inform fire management and mitigation policies if sufficient collaboration and communication existed between state agencies and the research community. As things stand, she said, “poor communication limits the use of advanced climate-based fire weather projections for planning”.

How research must inform policy and action on the ground

Steps to manage forest fires include a satellite-based monitoring system, fire-alert systems and community participation through Joint Forest Management Committees, said Barik. Further, state forest departments actively implement fire lines, deploy fire watchers, utilise drone technology and train staff.

On every Thursday during the forest fire season, which runs from November to the end of June, the FSI has been generating forest fire danger ratings and uploading these on the Van-Agni geo-portal. Extreme ratings are communicated to the state forest departments, the National Disaster Management Authority and the State Disaster Management Authority, and uploaded on the Sachet National Disaster Alert Portal. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) recognised forest fires as a national disaster as recently as in 2019.

However, Barik pointed out that the firefighting infrastructure is limited to certain pockets and is proactive only in a few states. Also, strategies like controlled burning to eliminate dry fuel in regions where fire weather projections are high and in severe categories, are underutilised.

In chir (pine) forests, Chandel said, people should be mobilised to collect the pine needles, which are highly flammable especially when they are dry. “They have commercial value,” he said, “and involving villagers in such efforts would give them employment.”

Explaining how regional differences could inform fire management strategies, Suresh pointed out that an appropriate strategy for Koraput, Odisha’s dense forest cover and higher tribal population, might be community-driven forest management, incorporating traditional ecological knowledge and early warning systems tailored to specific forest types.

In contrast, less vulnerable forestland in Puducherry, being predominantly urban, could possibly be integrated with urban planning. Increasing the fire-resilient infrastructure in the resulting green belt and improving the rapid response mechanism would help secure the forest.

Involving the community in protecting forests

More than nine in ten forest fires in India are caused by humans, whether by mistake or intentionally. So experts like Barik recommend limiting human access to vulnerable areas. However, there is another angle to the role of the community in protecting a forest.

Uttarakhand is India’s only state to have pioneered the concept of Van Panchayats, or community-managed forests, as opposed to reserve forests which are managed by the state forest department, or Civil and Soyam forests, which are owned by the state revenue department.

“Van Panchayats tend to have better fire control due to active local community participation in protective activities (such as reducing combustible leaf litter and speedily responding to fires), traditional knowledge, and a vested interest in maintaining forest health for ecosystem services,” says Vinod Chandra Joshi, scientist, Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, and author of a study that assessed the total tree biomass and carbon stock in forests spanning these three popular governance systems.

Joshi’s study, published in Environmental Challenges in August 2024, found that the Chir-pine tree biomass in Van Panchayats was 236.31 tonnes per hectare (t ha-1) as against 224.85 t ha-1 in reserve forests and 193.58 t ha-1 in Civil & Soyam forests.

“While Reserve forests are under stricter legal protection than the Van Panchayat-managed forests, their bureaucratic management system can sometimes delay the response to fires, especially in remote areas,” said Joshi. “Civil and Soyam forests often lack strong governance frameworks, leading to challenges in fire management, and increasing their susceptibility to unsustainable resource extraction, higher levels of combustible material, and neglect in fire prevention measures.”

In January 2024, a fire broke out in forests near Shunkhdhura village in the Munsiari region in the Western Himalayas.

“We all ran because we can’t afford to have a fire spread,” Malika Virdi, two-time sarpanch and president of 210 Van Panchayats of the Munsiari told IndiaSpend.

Virdi, a resident of Sarmoli village near the affected area, believes that when people own forests, they protect it, and they can do much more than a few stretched forest employees.

“We were 20, whereas the forest staff were just 3-4,” she said. “They told us upfront that they would not be able to reach the affected slopes. We battled the fires for three days.”

Diluting the community’s control on forests could prove harmful

Despite the proven advantages of Van Panchayats, Virdi is concerned about the government move to merge a few Van Panchayats into larger Nagar panchayats.

“Our Sarmoli-Jainti, Shankhdhura, Boonga, Ghorpatta Van Panchayats have recently been merged with the Nagar Panchayat of Munsiari, despite serious concerns of rights holders as the merger effectively dismantles the Van Panchayats,” she said. “Centralisation carries the danger of alienating trustworthy local communities, people who live on the land and live off it,”

“Forest fires will happen, what’s important is how people will react,” Virdi said.

Uttarakhand’s chief conservator of forests Parag Madhukar Dhakate told IndiaSpend that the Uttarakhand Van Panchayat Rules of 2024 have substantially enhanced the Van Panchayat sarpanch’s authority by introducing pivotal powers, including the ability to detect and address forest offences, issue forest produce permits, levy penalties and adjudicate forest-related infractions.

“Such comprehensive provisions have not only expanded the sarpanch’s operational scope but also significantly bolstered the financial autonomy of Van Panchayats,” he said.

Virdi agreed that the new rules are more detailed, but she pointed out that the sarpanch already had broad powers equivalent to those entrusted to a forest officer, although the imposable fines had a ceiling.

Dhakate further said that “the new rules mandate diverse representation within Van Panchayats, a representative from the Gram Panchayat (the local self-governance body in rural India) and the Biodiversity Management Committee in rural settings, and in urbanised areas where rural regions have been integrated into Nagar Panchayats (municipal governance institutions for urban areas), the Urban Local Body chairperson is required to nominate an elected member to the Van Panchayat.”

While Dhakate said that ensuring representation from Panchayati Raj Institutions and Urban Local Bodies create a robust framework for collaborative and inclusive forest management, Virdi contended that respecting and adhering to the Panchayati Raj Institution democratic framework in the true spirit would have allowed the sarpanch and other panches to be elected.

“Nominating is subverting the very principle of democratic self-governance,” she said. “The recent merger into the Nagar Panchayat has taken away the autonomy of the four existing Van Panchayats with no clarity on the new governance system. Will we have one Van Panchayat with one sarpanch and his team for the four Van Panchayat areas? We need more clarity. We fear that the Van Panchayat will be the first casualty in the transition from rural to urban, with the protective forest commons arrangement giving way to open access, a situation where no one is responsible for the forests’ good management and conservation.”

At a consultative workshop of forest ministry officials in 2023, P.K. Mathur, lead consultant, UNDP-NDMA, emphasised that both the frontline staff of the state forest departments and the local communities will play the decisive role in controlling forest fires. So, there is an urgent need to strengthen physical infrastructure for fire suppression, enhance the capacity of frontline staff and other stakeholders including communities, and provide necessary incentives to communities.

Thinking of the bigger picture and the long-term is vital to conserve forests. As Samtana village’s head Singh said, “Whether the loss is of the country or a village, the loss is a loss.”

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