Nepal Wildfire: Nepal endures one of its worst wildfire seasons in recorded history
25 April 2021
Published by https://news.cgtn.com/
NEPAL – Over recent weeks, Nepal has been battling its worst forest fires in years, with smoke wafting across its mountains and polluting the capital Kathmandu. The country’s disaster risk reduction agency recorded more than 2,700 fires during the dry period between mid-November last year and the end of last month. CGTN’s Kanchan Jha reports from Nepal.
Harka Bahadur Singtan is grieving together with his father. His 69-year-old mother died when flames from a forest fire swept across their village in Bhimphedi.
What was once Singtan’s family home for generations is now reduced to ashes.
HARKA BAHADUR SINGTAN Victim’s son, Bhimphedi Village “I was away in another village. My father was on this side of the hill. It was he who saw it first. My mother got trapped in the house when it caught fire. Everything was burned, including our goats.”
Nepal is enduring one of its worst wildfire seasons in recorded history that has killed at least 10 people and affected thousands of households.
Forest fires are not new to the Nepali landscape. But this year’s nearly 6,000 incidents recorded before the peak season, the government’s weak capacity to respond have exacerbated the crisis.
ANIL POKHAREL Chief Executive National Disaster Risk Reduction & Management Authority “What we’ve seen this year is unprecedented in our history, that these numbers of forest fire and to that scale has happened in the forest landscape within Nepal.”
Local governments and response units are struggling to respond to control damage. And the central government lacks a proper mechanism to deal with wildfires.
KANCHAN JHA Nepal “It is estimated that annually Nepal loses 200,000 hectares of forest area, wildfires being one of the major reasons for biodiversity loss. With a low pre-monsoon rainfall following an extended winter drought, experts project that the devastation is likely to grow this year, given that there is still a month of fire season to go.”
Raging fires across Nepal have not only burned hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests and ravaged wildlife but also caused an alarming drop in air quality.
As plumes of smoke from the wildfire cloaked much of the country, Kathmandu’s air quality reached a hazardous level, earning it headlines for being the most polluted city in the world.
Local and federal response units are doing what they can to control the wildfires. But the experts on the ground say the situation is already out of hand. And the extreme pollution caused by the blazes also threatens to compound the problems of respiratory illness, just as Nepalis brace for a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Kanchan Jha, CGTN, Nepal.
