Indigenous fire management. Lessons and challenges for the construction of a new paradigm of fire management with an intercultural vision.

Co-founder of the Intercultural and Participatory Fire Management Network. Regional case study lead for South America, on Indigenous fire management as land-use based mitigation technologies of LANDMARC -European Union, Horizon 2020 Call- project: Building a low-carbon, climate-resilient future.

Presentation

Worldwide, fire is a natural phenomenon of terrestrial ecosystems, extended to all the continents of our planet. It is estimated that currently, the area of ​​vegetation exposed to fires ranges between 300 and 600 million hectares. Fire is an essential component of the dynamics of many ecosystems and defines, in the short and long term, many of their characteristics, such as biogeochemical cycles, composition and species abundance, their capacity for adaptation, and regeneration of the vegetation.  Fire is known to have been associated with the evolution of man since prehistoric times in subsistence activities such as agriculture, hunting and the formation of cultural landscapes.

However, demographic, land and water use changes, deforestation to increase the agricultural and livestock frontier, together with climate change, have affected the occurrence of fire in terms of location, extension, frequency, intensity and severity. This new fire behaviour has translated into fires different from what is expected in a natural regime, generating catastrophic wildfires.

This new dynamic in the fire regime is generating severe impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, the emission of particles and greenhouse gases, the health and safety of the populations and socio-economic activities. The fire season is getting longer and drier and hotter, contributing to the combustibility of vegetation, increasing the risk of forest fires and the exposure and vulnerability of societies and ecosystems to these events, which exceed current technical and human capacities for its management and control.

The current challenges to reduce wildfire risk demand a paradigm shift in forest fire management policies. Developing a new vision and capacities for integral, coordinated and intersectoral fire management instead of just fighting it requires the inclusion of multiple perspectives, actors and the rescue of adaptive knowledge and practices of Indigenous cultures and the communities that inhabit natural areas. We need to build more fire resilient landscapes and communities.

There is growing scientific evidence that fire management and other sustainable Indigenous practices help mitigate climate change, protect the biological and cultural diversity of ecosystems, and promote resilience. However, Indigenous peoples’ participation in policy making and management of their own territories is very limited.

This presentation showed the main results and advances made during more than 20 years of learning and working with the Pemón indigenous peoples of Venezuela and other Amerindian communities of the region north of the Amazon. Our efforts were focused on studying the ecological and human dimensions of Indigenous fire management in their territories and the integration of different types of knowledge and actors (Indigenous, scientific and institutional) to create new paradigms of fire management with an intercultural vision.

Our results reveal a sophisticated Indigenous knowledge system about using fire for the main subsistence activities, especially shifting cultivation and collaborative burning practices in savanna-forests borders to protect the forest from catastrophic wildfires. Furthermore, ecological studies showed that fire-fighting exclusion practices promote more severe wildfires by fuel accumulation, enhanced by current drier and hotter climatic 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 issues, a shift of the fire paradigm was successfully negotiated that valorise the relevance of Pemón millenary culture in Venezuela for a sustainable resources management as well as adaptation to climate change. These actions have been and continue to be promoted to the neighbouring countries of the North Amazon and other regions of Latin America, with the collaboration and support of different organisations at the local, national and international levels.