ITS5.1/BG8.5

Under the current changing climate and social governance conditions, wildfires occurrence in Latin America has become a critical issue, trespassing academic and technical disputes, and reaching sensible socio-political arenas. Developing a new vision and capacities for the integral and intersectoral management of wildfires instead of only fighting them requires the inclusion of multiple perspectives, actors and the rescue of the adaptive knowledge and practices of local communities that inhabit natural spaces. This paper summarizes the main results and advances achieved during more than 20 years of learning and working with the Pemón Indigenous peoples in northern Amazonia and the escalation towards new fire management policies in Venezuela. Our results reveal a sophisticated Indigenous knowledge system on using fire in the main subsistence activities, especially shifting cultivation and collaborative burning practices at the savanna-forests transition to protect forests from catastrophic wildfires. In addition, long-term fire experiments demonstrated that fire exclusion practices promote more severe wildfires by fuel accumulation, enhanced by the drier and warmer weather conditions. Through the inclusion of Indigenous peoples, firefighters, public officials and academics in field research and joint experimentation, as well as in debates and dialogues on socio-ecological aspects, a paradigm shift was successfully negotiated of fire that values the relevance of the ancient Pemón culture in Venezuela in the sustainable management of resources, as well as adaptation and mitigation capacity to climate change. Currently, these experiences are being capitalized to create a national integrated fire management policy preserving the same participatory, intercultural and intersectoral principles. 

How to cite: Alejdanra Bilbao, B.: Experiences and lessons learned in the construction of a new paradigm of integrated fire management in Venezuela., EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-13420, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-13420, 2022.

Previous studies have suggested that the behaviour of policymakers can be influenced either for personal gain or for electorate pleasing. However, politicians’ role and incentives in the determination of fire regimes have been largely ignored in research advocating for the adoption of effective fire adaptation and prevention strategies. In this context, understanding the drivers of wildfires is pivotal for developing and promoting effective fire prevention strategies. This empirical analysis investigates whether there is a significant change in wildfire occurrence around the gubernatorial election years and whether the change is consistent with the incumbent candidate running for re-election. To assess the impact of electoral cycles on wildfire occurrence, I estimate a Quasi-Maximum Likelihood (QML) Poisson fixed-effects model.

How to cite: Piroli, E.: Do politicians’ reelection incentives affect wildfires occurrence?, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-5927, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-5927, 2022.

Widespread burning of tropical peatlands across regions of Malaysia and Indonesia is now considered to be an annual event in equatorial Southeast Asia. The fires cause poor air quality (‘haze’) across the region, affecting the health of millions, and leading to transboundary disputes between places that burn and the places downwind that suffer the smoke plumes from the burning. We seek to investigate the emerging social construction of a new season in the region – the ‘haze season’.

Seasons are a social construct that enables societies to organise their livelihoods around the expectation of recurring phenomena. They are not defined ‘objectively’ by observed patterns of relevant variables (e.g. satellite fire detections or air quality indices), but are instead the product of deliberation and contestation of which phenomena to observe, and how to normalise such phenomena to reflect and serve matters of concern to particular societies.

The emergence of a new season may imply the normalisation of the phenomena, which may carry both positive and negative implications for progress towards adapting to and/or mitigating haze and the fires that drive the pollution crisis – a good example of a socio-environmental feedback. In this paper, we seek to answer three research questions:

• When is the ‘haze season’ (onset, duration)?
• How is ‘haze season’ portrayed in the media? and
• What role does the haze ‘seasonality’ play in shaping people’s behaviour towards haze? Does the new season play a role in normalisation (e.g. densensitisation), adaptation (e.g. wearing masks, indoor activities) and mitigation (e.g. fighting haze, activism) behaviours?

To answer these questions, we analysed news articles published in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore through the Factiva database.

First, we identified the monthly distribution of newspaper articles mentioning ‘haze’ and ‘haze season’. Then, we identified keywords associated with ‘haze’ and ‘haze season’ by comparing the words found in the articles mentioning each concept with a corpus of words drawn from general usage in the year 2020. This is followed by a keyness analysis between two corpora of articles, namely articles that mention only ‘haze’ and articles that mention ‘haze season’. By doing so, we compare the differences between two distinct textual corpora in order to discover divergent themes. Finally, we used structural topic modelling (STM) to identify topic clusters. 

We find a strong distinction between the themes of articles that are written about the ‘haze season’ and articles that simply refer to the haze problem alone. Articles that mention ‘haze’, but not ‘haze season’ focus on the root causes of the haze crisis – peatland fires in Indonesia, oil palm plantations, deforestation – as well as geopolitical cooperation to prevent fires (e.g. through ASEAN). Both our keyness and STM analysis revealed that the ‘haze season’ articles have strong association with the effects of the haze crisis, particularly during the haze season months – poor air quality, pollution standards, mask-wearing, air filtration – suggesting that seasonality plays a role in adaptation behaviour. Outside of the haze season months, articles mentioning the new season focus more on haze mitigation and associated political action.

How to cite: Liu, F., Yian, V., Holden, J., and Smith, T.: Seasonality in the Anthropocene: On the construction of Southeast Asia’s 'haze season' in the media, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-13091, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-13091, 2022.

Fire represents a mainstay for rural communities managing tropical landscapes. However, increasing uncontrolled fires in tropical landscapes because of land use and climate change pose a major threat to livelihoods, public health, and ecosystems. Peatlands in Southeast Asia are one such example of tropical landscapes that experience high flammability due to clearance of forests and excessive drainage for agriculture and forestry. The degradation of tropical peatland ecosystems increases their susceptibility to landscapes fires, which in turn increase the vulnerability of people and peatland conditions to future fires. To identify locations of tropical peatlands and surrounding communities that are vulnerable to fires, we conducted a socio-ecological vulnerability assessment and mapped the socio-ecological vulnerability of tropical peatlands to fires. We used an inductive approach to conceptualize and operationalize vulnerability and its associated dimensions of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity through empirical case studies in the literature, with a focus on tropical peatlands and fires in Indonesia. We present preliminary results of our mapped social and ecological vulnerability of Indonesia’s tropical peatlands to peat landscape fires. This would allow policymakers to identify places which display both high ecological and social vulnerability to fires and channel aid and mitigation efforts where they are most urgently needed.

How to cite: Lee, J. S. H., Fatimah, Y. A., Smith, S. W., Rahman, N. E., Nurhidayah, L., Wardhana, B., Saad, A., Prasojo, Z., Khan, F., Wu, M. S., Giam, X., Chong, K. Y., Graham, L., and Lallemant, D.: Mapping socio-ecological vulnerability of tropical peat landscape fires, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-6811, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-6811, 2022.

Human-fire interactions have always played an important role in the United States of America. Important processes include land clearing with fires in the course of agricultural expansion and development of the West during the 19^th century, large-scale fire suppression in the first half of the 20^th century and recent “mega-fire” events in California. Strong regional divergences occurred: Fire regimes in the Eastern U.S. were significantly altered due to settlement and land-use changes over the past 100 years, resulting in reduced severity of fire events. In the West the area extent and severity of wildfires has increased, especially in recent decades, arguably due to more frequent climatic extreme events. Although the historical fire narrative in the U.S. has been studied in numerous publications, the links between these developments and changes in the socio-metabolic system i.e., changes in resource use, and consumption, are to our knowledge less well understood.

In this study we investigate the influence of anthropogenic alteration of fire regimes on forest biomass Carbon stocks in comparison to forest uses, i.e., the extraction of woody biomass and forest grazing on multiple spatial scales. We develop a long-term reconstruction of biomass burned in forests on the national, regional, and state level based on statistical and remote-sensing data. We describe and examine historical differences between fire regimes in the Eastern and Western United States in connection with human use of forest for the period 1940-2017. Using panel data analysis, we investigate the diverse connection between forest change, socio-metabolic processes, natural disturbances (i.e., wildfires), and associated human fire control on various spatial and temporal scales. With this study we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the underlying socio-metabolic drivers and accompanying processes of altered forest fire regimes.

How to cite: Magerl, A., Gingrich, S., Matej, S., Lauk, C., Cunfer, G., Yuskiw, C., Forrest, M., Schlaffer, S., and Erb, K.: Dynamics of fires, harvest and carbon stocks in U.S. forests 1926-2017, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-7970, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-7970, 2022.

Delineating the impact of various natural and anthropogenic drivers on the environment is a
paramount challenge in paleoenvironmental reconstruction. In the present study, we used faecal
biomarker (coprostanol) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the lake sediments
alongside population census and meteorological parameters from Central Himalayas to delineate
the anthropogenic and natural signals of environmental changes for the past ~70 years (1950-
2018 AD). The resulting stress from the human activities is evident by an abrupt increase in the
coprostanol (0.1-5.5 mg/g) and pyrolytic PAHs concentration (1422-32077 ng/g) in the
sediments. Further, with the metric of population rise, economic and infrastructural development,
the composition of PAHs in the sediments has changed: the proportion of heavy molecular
weight PAHs increased from 57% to 86%, whereas low molecular weight PAHs decreased from
43% to 14% indicating an increase in the proportion of fossil fuels combustion and a decrease in
biomass burning sources. Based on reanalysis datasets, the computed temporal variation of
annual precipitation and annual temperature over the region clearly indicated that natural drivers
have no direct influence on the PAHs concentration and other biogeochemical parameters. In
addition, the hysplit back trajectory analysis provided evidences of the atmospheric deposition of
black carbon from the countryside biomass burning and petrogenic pollution from the nearby
megacities.

How to cite: Kataria, V., Yadav, A., Chirakkal, A. J., Mishra, P. K., Kumar, S., and Ambili, A.: The influence of anthropogenic perturbations on the accumulation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in a lake system of Central Himalayas, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-451, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-451, 2022.

The frequency and intensity of wildfires will be aggravated by climate change. Small islands are more vulnerable to these events due to their greater number of endemic species, little territory, and the isolation of their firefighting systems, among others. Climate projections of Fire Weather Index (FWI) have been accomplished using as boundary conditions the results provided by the CMIP5 initiative, using Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, with a spatial resolution of 3x3km, until the end of the century, and two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), 4.5 and 8.5. The length of the fire season is expected to increase up to 74 days per year and the area with high risk could increase by 43%. In addition, FWI is projected to increase with altitude, mainly due to increasing temperature and decreasing precipitation, which are more pronounced at higher elevations.

How to cite: Carrillo, J., Pérez, J. C., Expósito, F. J., Díaz, J. P., and González, A.: Climate change impact on wildfires in the Canary Islands, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-5221, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-5221, 2022.