A study recently published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction shows that 60% of 111 interviewees considered deforestation the main cause of forest fires affecting the Amazon, followed by the use of fire in agricultural management (58%) and droughts (39%). 

Public managers, scientists and representatives of the third sector were interviewed. 

They also pointed out that the main vulnerabilities in the containment of impacts of fire in the region are the deficiencies in institutions and control agencies, associated with the reduction of employees and limited financial resources.

The research was developed by the MAP-Fire project, which discusses the governance of forest fires in the tri-national border of the southwest Amazon with the participation of local representatives. The region, known as MAP, encompasses Madre de Dios, in Peru; the state of Acre, in Brazil; and Pando, in Bolivia.

According to the publication, the instabilities of national and local public policies appeared as a failure in governance. 

In great part, these actions only mirror proposals of national measures without observing the peculiarities of each location. Other points of attention are the lack of community participation and the socio-cultural aspects of fire use, especially in pasture and agricultural zones near environmental preservation areas.

"One of the elements of greatest risk to ecosystem services, besides deforestation, is the issue of degradation by fires, by selective logging, and by the edge effect associated with the entry of fire into the forest, as we showed in Science. On the other hand, there is very limited research evaluating governance, specifically associated with burning, a growing, emerging, and urgent issue facing the Amazon. In this sense, we sought to bring together a multidisciplinary, cross-border team to analyze the issue," says Liana Anderson, researcher and corresponding author of the article.

Anderson is referring to the study The drivers and impacts of Amazon forest degradation, which was one of the cover stories in the late January issue of Science magazine. It revealed that approximately 38% of the current Amazon area suffers from some type of degradation caused by four factors - fire, selective logging (mostly illegal), edge effects (which are changes in forest regions next to deforested zones), and extreme droughts, which are increasingly frequent due to climate change.

In addition to compromising forest ecosystem services and biodiversity loss, forest fires can become transboundary disasters mainly due to the effects of smoke that crosses borders, compromising human health, disrupting transportation, and affecting the regional economy.

The microparticles of soot, easily inhaled, contributed, for example, to the increase in hospital admissions for respiratory problems in five states of the Brazilian Legal Amazon between 2010 and 2020. A technical note from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), released in March 2021, pointed out that during this period 174 daily hospital admissions for respiratory diseases were registered in Pará and 57 per day in Mato Grosso.

The fires also generated high costs for the Unified Health System (SUS), with the amount spent in the five states for high and low complexity hospitalizations reaching R$ 1 billion in the period.

Alternatives

According to the researchers, a way to better governance against fires in the perception of the participants goes through the strengthening of organizational capabilities, through adequate investments to the socio-environmental issues according to the reality of each country and region of MAP, besides the need to increase the human capital of the organizations from the quantitative and qualitative point of view.

In Brazil, the municipal civil defenses are composed of one to two people, most of them by political appointment, without professional valorization. A large part of the municipalities also lack the budget to perform disaster risk management actions.

Formulating public policies and laws that take into account the local reality, distributing responsibilities and resources among the national, regional and municipal levels, is another need highlighted by the researchers.

"The people who live in the region, exposed to or using fire, end up not being involved in any governance system that helps them make decisions or be better informed. Improving integration between institutions and the quality of communication within and between them can help. So can environmental education and the need to bring the topic of fire into the school curriculum, connecting it very clearly with the reality of the people who live there," says Anderson.