South East Asia:  The Ecological and Socio-Economic Background of Fire

The application of fire in land-use systems and wildfires in forests and other vegetation in Indonesia and neighbouring countries within the South East Asian region have reached unprecedented levels and have been leading to severe environmental problems and impacts on society. Traditional slash-and-burn systems in the shifting agriculture mode are increasingly replaced by modern large-scale conversion of forest into permanent agricultural systems which are partially maintained by fire, and into forest plantations. Wildfires escaping from land-use fires are becoming more and more regular. The impact of land-use fires and wildfires are detrimental to biodiversity and the regional atmospheric chemistry. In Indonesia and within the South East Asian / ASEAN region a joint, concerted approach is needed to cope with the problem of transboundary pollution caused by vegetation burning. However, since fire is an essential tool in land use in the tropics a response strategy must be developed in which the benefits from fire use would be encouraged, at the same time the negative impacts of fire be reduced. National and regional fire management plans and policies must take into consideration the complexity and diversity of fire uses in different vegetation types and land-use systems. 

Introduction

The following five papers are publications of the Fire Ecology Research Group / Global Fire Monitoring Center (published in 1996 and 1997):

• Overview of Fire and Smoke Management Issues and Options in Tropical Vegetation

• The ASEAN Fire Forum:
  Initial Thoughts towards Cooperation in Fire and Smoke Research and Management in the ASEAN Region

• The ASEAN Fire Forum:
  Results of the Working Group Discussions

• The Role of Fire on Greenhouse Gas and Aerosol Emissions and Land Use and Cover Change in Southeast Asia:
  Ecological Background and Research Needs

• Fire in Dipterocarp Forests

• Updated version of the GFMC paper, focussing on equatorial forests: History of Equatorial Vegetation Fires and Fire Research in Southeast Asia before the 1997-98 Episode. A Reconstruction of Creeping Environmental Changes (2006)

• Fire Management in South Asia’s dry forests: Colonial approaches, current problems and perspectives (by J.G. Goldammer and K. Wanthongchai. In: Tropical Forestry Change in a Changing World. Volume 5: Dry Forest Ecology and Conservation [S. Diloksumpun and L. Puangchit, eds.], 2008) (PDF, 0.5. MB)

Recent Publications

• Increased damage from fires in logged-forests during droughts caused by El Niño (Nature Vol. 414, 22 November 2001) (PDF-File, 0,4 MB )
• ESA-NASDA Cooperation on Indonesian Forest Fires

• The ecological consequences of logging in the burned forests of East Kalimantan, Indonesia 
  (Conservation Biology 15(4): 1183-1186, August 2001)

• Land use and vegetation fires in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia (Forest Ecology and Management 179, 277–292, (2003) (PDF-File, 0.5 MB)

• Interprovincial and interannual differences in the causes of land-use fires in Sumatra, Indonesia (Environmental Conservation 30, 375–387, 2003) (PDF-File, 0.8 MB)

• Evaluation of remote sensing-based active fire datasets in Indonesia (Int. J. Remote Sensing 25, 471-479, 20 January 2004)

• Burning as usual: The causes and effects of deliberate burning. A case study within the province of Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand (2009) (PDF, 2.5 MB)
  

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