According to India State of Forest Report (IFSPR) 2021, India reported around 3.5 lakhs incidents of forest fires from November 2020 to June 2021. This is the highest ever recorded in the country for this period so far. Forest fires break out in India from November-May every year due to various natural and anthropogenic reasons including accumulation of inflammable materials such as dry leaves, twigs, pine needles, etc. Odisha reported the maximum fires among all states, followed by Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Causes of Forest Fires: More than ninety five percent of forest fires are caused either by negligence or unknowingly by the human being. The rest of the fires are caused by natural reasons.

• Natural causes:
  • Climatic conditions such as rising atmospheric temperatures, duration of dry spells and low humidity in soil and atmosphere make favourable circumstances for a fire to start.
  • Lightning, volcanic eruptions can trigger forest fires.
  • Other causes include friction of bamboo due to high wind velocity and rolling stones that result in sparks setting off fires in highly inflammable leaf litter like chir pine trees.
• Man-made causes:
  • Shifting cultivation, fires induced for flush growth of tendu leaves, good growth of grass and fodder, to encroach upon the forest land, to conceal illicit felling.
  • Source of fire from cigarette buds, electric sparks etc.
  • Fires lit intentionally around forests to ward off wild animals, recreation etc.

The forest fires lead to loss of livelihoods, natural capital, and biodiversity. The government has taken certain steps like Forest Fire Prevention & Management Scheme, National Action Plan on Forest Fire, 2018 and setting up of Forest Fire Lines to prevent forest fires in India. Measures to prevent forest fires:

• Fire risk zonation and mapping for identifying areas of priority for management interventions and allocating resources to priority areas.
• Stronger collaboration between the State Forest Departments, the disaster management authorities and research entities would enable states to innovate new science-based management approaches for preventing fires and rehabilitating fire-affected areas.
• Institutionalizing partnership with forest communities and preparing a forest fire forecasting system. Further, assessing indigenous knowledge and techniques to detect and suppress forest fire, and upgrade it with scientific inputs and research. A national forest fire knowledge network must be established to cover all dimensions of forest fire in the country.
• Forest Fire Management (FFM) needs to be an integral part of course curricula of forest department training institutes with updated and enriched latest information about forest fire detection, suppression and rehabilitation.
• There is a need to document good practices in forest fire management so that good lessons can be learnt from them and utilize them in making forest fire management systems more effective and practical.
• Monitoring to provide early warning and vulnerability maps through satellites like NASA’s MODIS (or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer).

Protecting forests from undesirable fires is crucial to sustaining India’s progress on meeting its global pledge to create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030 and achieving SDG -15 (Life on land- Sustainably managing forests).