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).

Recently, the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) prepared a Coastal Vulnerability Index (CVI) for the entire Indian coast. It determines the coastal risks due to future sea-level rise based on the physical and geological parameters for the Indian coasts. The CVI uses parameters like tidal range, wave height, coastal slope, coastal elevation, shoreline change rate, geomorphology, and historical rate of relative sea-level change.

Significance of Coastal Vulnerability Index: It helps in coastal disaster management and building resilient coastal communities by addressing the following factors:

• Sustainable development: Indian coasts are under threat due to multiple stresses like global climate change and human intervention. It will help in planning and sustaining the high productivity of the coastal ecosystem.
• Climatic vulnerability: Sea level along the India coast has been continuously rising leading to loss of land to coastal erosion and placing people’s livelihood and homes in jeopardy.
• Long-term displacement: More than 26% of the Indian population live within 100 km from the shoreline. Sea level rise and flooding might lead to increased relocation in major coastal cities.
• Informed policy making: While most of the existing policies in India address displacement from rapid onset disasters such as monsoons and cyclones under disaster and rehabilitation policies, displacement due to slow onset disasters such as coastal erosions has yet to find a place at the policy level.

Initiatives taken to enhance the resilient against coastal vulnerability include:

• Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) Project: Its nodal agency is the Society of Integrated Coastal Management.
  • At the national level, it has the objective of establishing and supporting an appropriate national institutional structure for guiding and coordinating coastal zone management.
  • At the state level, its objective is to develop and empower the state-level authorities to adopt appropriate ICZM approaches consistent with the national strategies.
• Enhancing Coastal and Ocean Resource Efficiency (ENCORE):
  • In 2020, the World Bank approved a 400 million dollars multi-year-financing to help India to enhance its coastal resources, protect coastal populations from pollution, erosion and sea level rise and improve livelihood opportunities for coastal communities.
  • The first phase of this multi-phase approach (MPA) will provide 180 million dollars for ENCORE.
  • In phase 1, ENCORE will cover eight coastal states (Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal) and three coastal UTs (Daman and Diu, Lakshadweep and Puducherry).

India’s coastal regions are on the front line of a shifting climate and are increasingly experiencing sea-level rise, erosion and natural disasters such as tropical storms and cyclones. In this context, the CVI will aid in improving the design and implementation of policies for making coastal regions resilient to any anthropogenic or natural vulnerability.