Leverhulme Wildfires Centre Leverhulme Wildfires Centre

Protected areas (PAs) play an essential role in safeguarding unique ecoregion habitats, endangered and threatened species, and ensuring the maintenance of ecosystem services for humanity, despite being key tourist attractions contributing significantly to countries GDP. However, the ability of PAs to maintain these services is under threat due to anthropogenic driven land use changes, encroachment to protected areas and climate change around these ecosystems which have altered fire regimes and temporal patterns.

Although fires are important to these protected areas, climate changes are expected to alter and catalyze wildfires frequency and severity reducing protected areas resiliency to changing fire regimes influencing human wildlife interactions. This project aims document spatial and temporal patterns of wildfires in key protected areas in Kenya, explore the impacts of wildfires in wildlife habitats and how wildfires and weather variability influences human wildlife interaction in the  increasingly human dominated landscapes.

 

Photo Credits: Amos Muthiuru, KCL

This project is supervised by Dr. James Millington,  Dr.Emma Tebbs and Dr. Kris Chan

 

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This post project will contribute to the analysis of human-fire interactions and specifically explore the role of fire in mediating the relationship between cultural diversity and biodiversity. It will examine the ecological impacts of different forms of human fire use, e.g. cultural burning / livelihood fires, and how knowledge of these practices is shared, adapted, and affected by other changes, such as in vegetation (e.g. fragmentation, plantations, invasive species), climate change and governance.

 

Duration: 2024-2027

Image: taken by Adriana Ford in Brazil

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This post will contribute to the analysis of fire governance in the wider context of the governance of land and resources. It will look at multi-level governance and whether and how fire is represented in international agreements and national laws, and how these constrain and/or enable local level fire governance. Using an equity approach, we will evaluate the differing agendas and motivations in fire management, the importance and challenge of partnerships, and how different actors perceive just outcomes and processes in different forms of fire management.

 

Duration: 2024-2027

Image: by Adriana Ford, taken in Brazil within the Fire Adapt project

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Understanding both the physical drivers and human dimensions of future fire regimes is vital for identifying appropriate contemporary policies and governance to achieve sustainability and conservation goals. Dynamic physical feedbacks between fire, vegetation and climate cannot be ignored if accurate assessments of future ecosystem service provision are to be made. Similarly, the values, knowledge and livelihoods of residents cannot be ignored if equitable and just decision-making processes – likely incorporating physical assessments – are to ensure sustainable landscapes. While many technical tools have been developed to model spatio-temporal processes, their use for enabling change can be ineffective where they are untrusted because of poorly-understood, incomplete, obscured or contested representation of processes and decisions. Stakeholder-centred and participatory approaches can improve engagement with modelling tools, and narratives have been proposed as an intermediary between formal (simulation) model structures and aggregated (statistical) summaries of model output to improve interpretation, understanding and learning by non-modellers.

Taking a socio-ecological systems approach, this project will investigate the use of simulation (e.g. agent-based) modelling and spatial valuation of nature tools in participatory ways and to generate narratives about desired, possible, and avoidable future fire regimes and governance. For example, many landscapes of southern Europe have experienced rural outmigration and associated land abandonment in recent decades. The resulting changes in vegetation, combined with increased climate variability and wider policy agendas, is posing challenging questions about how land and fire should be managed for multiple economic, social and environmental benefits into the future. What land and fire uses should be permitted, incentivised or banned? Who benefits from these different options? Developing novel approaches to explore trade-offs and to generate narratives of possible future landscapes are central aims of this interdisciplinary project. The project will likely require a combination of qualitative, quantitative and simulation methods – utilising spatial, environmental, social and economic data – to represent environmental processes and human decisions through modelling. Participatory research with local stakeholders and collaborators will lead to the most innovative and valuable outcomes.

Duration: 2024-2028

 

Image by Ted Erski from Pixabay

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People have been using fire for pastoralism in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland for thousands of years, though the way has been done has changed in different economic, social and political conditions. Before the Highland Clearances, burning (known in Scotland as muirburn, or falasgair in Scot’s Gaelic), on a small-scale, was involved in maintaining communal pastures for a variety of livestock. After the clearances, fire was used more widely to manage landscapes for sheep, and new uses of fire related to grouse shooting emerged. Today, crofters (small-scale farmers, largely managing rough hill grazings for sheep and cattle) are one group using fire to maintain what are largely common grazing areas.

There is heated political debate over the use of fire in landscape management in twenty-first century Scotland, especially in the context of peatlands. In response to calls for tighter regulation of grouse estate management, new legislation, the Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill, has been introduced, which will, among other things, tighten regulatory control over burning. While the Bill was largely designed with grouse moor management in mind, it will also affect crofters. The crofting population has not been vocal in national debates over fire, and crofting fire use has been little researched.

In this context, this research project aims to explore how fire and crofting are related, highlighting perspectives that are commonly missing from national debate. It looks at how and why crofters use fire, how fire knowledge is gained and passed on by crofters, how fire use has changed in living memory, how the new muirburn legislation might affect crofters’ fire use, and with what implications for small-scale agriculture and wildfire risk.

Project duration: 2023-2026

 

Photo: left – recently burned, with fresh growth; right – not recently burned , with dense heather. Location: Skye, Source: C. Smith

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Despite the scientific evidence as well as the nuanced cultural, spiritual, ecological and economic importance of fires for local communities in northern Ghana, government policies still embrace the simplistic narrative that fire constitutes a disturbance to savanna ecosystems. The antifire policies and programmes instituted by the Government of Ghana and Non-government Organisations to promote conservation in savanna areas have induced a growing sense of injustice and resentment among those whose livelihoods depend on these fires.

Therefore a scientific and traditional ecological understanding of the drivers of fires and how fire management policies impact wider efforts to mitigate conflict between different resource user groups in these areas is necessary for developing more equitable approaches. Hence, the main objective of this study is to understand the complex trade-offs of shifting fire regimes and policies in the savanna woodlands of northern Ghana and whether these policies result in social inequities. By prioritising the perspectives of local resource users, a better understanding will be developed of whether farmers and herders, particularly, are differentially impacted by statutory fire management approaches. The study will involve mixed method approaches including remote sensing, in-depth interviews, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, cause and effect diagrams and seasonal calendars.

Project duration: 2021-2025

Photos: Savanna landscapes in Ghana with burnt patches. Source: Rahinatu Sidiki Alare

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Controlled fire use plays an important contemporary role in sustaining human cultures and livelihoods and fire-dependent ecosystems, as well as reducing wildfire risk. This post-doctoral project involves gathering and analysing information about human fire use practices worldwide by two means.

The first is a global review of literature on fire use and mitigation practices within smallholder and subsistence-oriented livelihoods. Qualitative and quantitative information collated from these studies will be used to inform our understanding of the social and environmental drivers of change in fire use, the spatiotemporal patterns of fire set for different livelihood purposes, and the governance of human fire use. The review will also highlight data gaps to direct future case study research.

The second is a survey of experts, including fire academics and practitioners, covering reasons for burning, seasonality of burning, and fire governance, for a pre-determined set of regions of the world. The survey will be used to map fire use and point to key fire uses for different regions and biomes of the world. Survey participants will also be engaged in workshops to explore the dataset.

One envisaged outcome of the work is the development of a framework and methodology to integrate local level fire knowledge and information into larger scale models of fire dynamics. The project involves working closely with other researchers in the Centre, crossing the social and natural sciences to strengthen interdisciplinary understanding of fire, its drivers, its impacts, and its social and ecological importance.

Publications:

Smith, C., Perkins, O., & Mistry, J. (2022). Global decline in subsistence-oriented and smallholder fire use. Nature Sustainability, 5(6), 542-551.

Project duration: 2020-2026

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