Forest fire brought under control in China’s Inner Mongolia

23 September 2007

published by news.xinhuanet.com

Hohhot, China — The forest fire raging in northeast China’s Greater Hinggan Mountains, the country’s largest forest zone, since Thursday morning has been “brought under control,” fire fighters said on Sunday.

More than 4,000 people, including armed police and forest workers, launched a “general attack” at 6:00 p.m. on Saturday on the blaze in an area of virgin forest in the Oroqen Autonomous Banner of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, bordering Heilongjiang Province, said a spokesman with the fire-fighting headquarters.

“The fire had been basically brought under control 12 hours later by 6 a.m. on Sunday,” the spokesman said.

Another 1,000 people had arrived at the scene Sunday morning to reinforce the fire fighting team, he said.

“Currently, the scene of fire is blanketed in heavy smoke accompanied by small, sporadic blazes, and more than 5,000 people are clearing the area to extinguish all fires completely,” he said.

Eighteen helicopters had also been used to put out the fire during the past several days.

Initial investigations show that the fire was triggered by lightening strikes and it had spread to 16 square km in the country’s largest forest zone.

Questions raised on Greek forest fire management

1 September 2007

published by africa.reuters.com

Greece — Forest fires that have raged in Greece for more than a week and left 63 people dead may have been exacerbated by an administrative decision 10 years ago, forestry experts say.

Greece’s forests may have been left more vulnerable when in 1997 rural fire management was shifted from the forestry service to the urban-based Fire Service, with no forestry experience, they say.

“Forest management is highly complex and if one part of that like fire management is missed out it can have these serious ramifications,” said Eunice Simmons, head of the National School of Forestry at the University of Cumbria in northern England.

“Controlled burns are all important, especially near habitations,” she told Reuters by telephone. “If they haven’t been done there will have been a build-up of dead undergrowth allowing fires to spread much farther and faster.”

Greece’s wildfires over the past eight days have razed vast swathes of forests and farmland; firefighters on Saturday were still battling flames in southern and eastern Greece.

There have been two other major fires in Greece since the administrative shift in 1997: one a year later when 112,802 hectares (278,700 acres) burned and another in 2000 when 167,000 hectares were destroyed.

There has been some speculation that after 2000 there was little left to burn until this summer, when fires have plagued the country.

After the 2000 blaze, Greek forest fire expert Gavril Xanthopoulos wrote a report saying the cause was the weakening of forestry management since the 1997 handover and warned that the danger would get worse unless remedial steps were taken.

Forestry expert Chris Perley, writing in the latest issue of the New Zealand Institute of Forestry’s weekly newsletter, said the change in the forestry service had made forest fire fighting a purely reactive process in Greece, with evident results.

The issue is topical in New Zealand where the government is proposing a move to the Greek forest fire management system from the existing decentralised arrangement.

“At essence is the loss of rural fire management focus on risk reduction, maintaining readiness, response, and recovery, as well as the loss of expertise, institutional knowledge, and cooperative community relations that are essential to the effectiveness of rural fire management.

“The overseas experience demonstrates that what actually happens is a loss of prevention emphasis, less willingness to listen to local expertise, an increase in costs, a decrease in effectiveness and a loss of environmental values, rural livelihoods, and even life,” he wrote.

In Greece, accusations of arson and terrorism have vied with those of sheer incompetence either as the cause of the blazes or for their extent.

Just two weeks ahead of a parliamentary election, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis has come under severe criticism for his government’s handling of the worst fires in memory.

Paraguay declares emergency as forest fires rage

11 September 2007

published by www.alertnet.org

Asunción, Paraguay — Paraguay declared a state of emergency in three northeastern provinces on Tuesday due to forest fires that have ravaged thousands of hectares (acres) of forests, crops and grazing pasture.

The fires have spread in recent days, destroying dozens of rural homes in the poor South American country and forcing some flights to be diverted from the biggest airport earlier this week because of the smoke.

“At the moment, we’re trying to resolve the problem, tackle the crisis and deal with the circumstances,” Trade and Industry Minister Jose Maria Ibanez told reporters after a cabinet meeting amid growing criticism of the government’s response.

The regional state of emergency was declared in the provinces of San Pedro, Concepcion and Amambay, giving authorities extra resources to fight the fires and help victims.

Meanwhile, the Agriculture Ministry said 400 soldiers would be sent to the worst-affected areas where troops and firefighters are already working to control the fires. Aid trucks stocked with food and tents were sent for evacuees.

“With these measures, I think the situation can be brought under control, though not 100 percent until we get some rain,” said the government’s farming chief, Alfredo Molinas.

The fires were initially started by peasant farmers clearing wooded areas and renewing pastures — a common practice in Paraguay, but dry conditions have caused them to spread over an estimated 100,000 hectares (247,100 acres), officials say.

 A Climate Bomb Defused?

20 September 2007

published by sciencenow.sciencemag.org

Millions of square kilometers of frozen plant material stretching across Canada and Siberia were long believed to be a ticking time bomb of climate change. As temperatures rise, the thinking went, these permafrost-entrenched peatlands would thaw and exacerbate global warming by triggering soil bacteria to release enormous quantities of methane–a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide. However, new research shows that the thawing also fosters the growth of plants that suck up carbon, potentially offsetting rising methane emissions.

Nearly one-tenth of Earth’s vegetated land is in Canada’s and Siberia’s high-latitude forests, roughly a third of which contain peatlands. To find out just how these depositories of billions of tons of carbon-rich plant material contribute to climate change, ecologist Merritt Turetsky of Michigan State University in East Lansing and colleagues studied peatlands at three sites in Canada. The sites contained areas with intact permafrost inhabited by spruces and other peatland plants, as well as expanses of recently thawed permafrost. Over a 5-year period, the team used on-site measurements, aerial surveys, and other methods to monitor changes in carbon storage (as measured in new plant growth) and methane emissions.

As expected, thawing led to wetter conditions, which fostered the growth ofSphagnum mosses and other water-loving plants. “Peatlands previously underlain with permafrost turn ‘from terra firma to terra softa,’ ” explains Turetsky. These conditions were ideal for bacteria, which began decomposing thawing plant material in the peat, tripling methane emissions. But plants came to the rescue: Seeds and spores blown in by the wind and in thawing soil led to an explosion in new plant growth, allowing the peatlands to accumulate more than three times as much organic matter–about half of which is carbon–as before thawing. This carbon sequestration more than balances out the greenhouse impact of methane release, the researchers report in this month’s issue of Global Change Biology.

Still, plants will provide only a temporary fix. The team’s peat cores–records of thousands of years of climate history–indicate that carbon storage will decline as the wetlands fill in and soil accumulates, allowing the return of drier-adapted, slower-growing plants.

The study does a “stellar job at pulling together the links among carbon, water, and plant ecology,” says arctic biologist Jennifer Harden of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. But the benefit of thawing peatlands could be even more ephemeral in the future. Increasing fire activity in boreal and subarctic regions–almost certainly a direct result of enhanced summer drought over the past 50 years–“doesn’t bode well for peatlands,” she says, noting that if peatlands dry out rapidly and burn, they could release loads of carbon dioxide.