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Manage fire regimes, not fires

Nature Geoscience volume 14, pages 455–457 (2021)Cite this article

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Globally, land- and fire-management policies have counterproductively caused cascading ecosystem changes that exacerbate, rather than mitigate, wildfires. Given rapidly changing climate and land-use conditions that amplify wildfire risk, a policy shift to adaptive management of fire regimes is urgently needed.

The litany of catastrophic wildfires, causing death and destruction in anthropogenic landscapes, grows year after year: the United States in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2020; Australia in 2009, 2019 and 2020; Chile in 2017; Portugal/Spain in 2017; Canada in 2016; and Indonesia in 2015 and 2019. Climate change intensified these fires, but changes in land and fire use compound issues by enhancing wildfire risk. From savannas to shrublands, wetlands to mountains, and boreal forests to rainforests, unforeseen fire problems develop wherever agricultural societies transform landscapes and disrupt indigenous fire-management practices. Societies respond to wildfire threats with various strategies such as fire bans, land and fuel management, and outright fire suppression. Yet rather than solving the problem, some of these approaches make the original fire issue even more problematic. This is because settler societies fail to grasp what pre-agricultural peoples understood: fire and vegetation are dynamically linked — changing either one alters the other1. Human land uses set in motion processes that often culminate in unmanageable wildfires. Land-management policies and practices must recognize that wildfires are a persistent condition of flammable landscapes requiring adaptive management2 — not a ‘solvable’ problem.

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Fig. 1: Fire-regime management.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES), Appalachian Laboratory, Frostburg, MD, USA

    Mark A. Cochrane

  2. University of Tasmania, School of Natural Sciences, Sandy Bay, Tasmania, Australia

    David M. J. S. Bowman

Authors
  1. Mark A. Cochrane
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  2. David M. J. S. Bowman
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Correspondence to Mark A. Cochrane.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Geoscience thanks Paulo Fernandes and Mark Finney for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Cochrane, M.A., Bowman, D.M.J.S. Manage fire regimes, not fires. Nat. Geosci. 14, 455–457 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00791-4

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