 Welcome to this C4 aircraft webinar on wildfires in topical dry ecosystems, integrated fire management, emission abatement and end disease. My name is Rosa Maria Roman-Questa. I am a C4 associate and a research associate also at Wageningen University. I would like to thank, first of all, our donor US-8 for allowing us to do the research that is going to be presented today and supporting our research for the last three years. And I would also like to extend a warm welcome to everyone in this webinar. And a particular thanks to our panelists, particularly those that are in Australia, which is past midnight and are here attending it. So thanks, Wombly, also Mozambique, that is rather late for you as well. So without further ado, let's start with this webinar on wildfires in topical dry ecosystems, emissions abatement and end disease. The background of this webinar and our gratitude goes to US-8 for having supported C4 aircraft in running research that contained fire components in it for the last three years. So three of these projects are listed here. One related to forest landscape restoration and overcoming key barriers for effective implementation in the frame of that research, we were focusing on how fire acted as a prominent risk in Latin America and how that prominent risk was affecting the areas available for restoration and the final mitigation potential in an S scenario where an assisted natural regeneration could have broad sequestration power. Other two projects that have been running for the last two years on fire are also listed here. And one of them tried to investigate where are the hotspots of fire activity in the tropics. And we will see right now how we define hotspots. We will be discussing about this project today and the following project. And the idea was to be able to understand where these hotspots in the tropics are and try to foresee some action. And that's where it comes. The last project, which basically tries to integrate some type of fire management as a mainstreaming fire management into landscape decisions and trying to reduce fire emissions so that they couldn't be incorporated in NDCs and within countries national mitigation commitments. You will see during the chat today that fire management and integrated fire management was by no means thought for mitigating emissions or it was a collateral benefit. But in this webinar in particularly we will be focusing on the use of integrated fire management and specific activities within it for natural climate solutions for their use as a way to promote mitigation for reducing fire emissions. We will also see that this type of activities also promote adaptation. They reduce a buffer ecosystems against very severe fire years. We will see that. And they also promote carbon sequestration on soils and carbon sequestration on those fragments on the landscape that are being less affected by fire. So fire management in this webinar will be particularly focusing on climate mitigation. But certainly there are many other co-benefits adaptation by diversity, water control, etc. Let's start a bit with the facts. So the fact is that fire currently is almost everywhere present in the planet. And in this figure you can see the distribution of monthly fires from 2000 to 2009 using satellite data collected by the modest satellite. So the question here is yes there is fire almost everywhere but are these fires normal or are these fires desirable? Or what can we do or where should we act? So we can see in different colors the seasonality of these fires. And what is important as a starting point of this webinar is that from those ecosystems that there is fire, some of them are fire-adapted. They have co-evolved with fire. Fire is part of the ecosystem stability and is required. And in some ecosystems like humid tropical ecosystems, cloud mountain forests, tropical rainforests, matatlantica, some of these forested very humid ecosystems have not co-evolved with fire. Fire is not part of their dynamics and therefore their ecosystem stability is eroded by the presence and increased presence of fire that we are seeing in the last decades. So this should be the starting warning point that we are going to talk about prescribed fire but we're going to focus that into ecosystems that are fire-adapted. In the last decades and starting actually very strongly mediatic pressure from fires around the world starting in 2017. And also last year 2019 was a very fire severe year that was also heavily distributed by all the news on different parts of the world. So here we have the two million hectares that were burning in Australian fires. We also had Indonesian fires in 2019 with the haste health problems that affected the neighboring countries. We also had boreal fires in Alaska, Canada the year before. We had had fire emergencies in British Columbia in 2018. And also naturally we had the very mediatic, highly biased preference for tropical rainforest fires that we have seen in the media also in the last year. If you look at the media this year, some of these ecosystems are again on fire. We have emergencies in the boreal ecosystems. We also have emergencies again in Brazil. And for the first time we are seeing finally not the fire not only being promoted in the media as the rainforest fires but also fires that are affecting dry ecosystems. So the problem of the question to be answered about these fires is are these fires normal? And this is also a call to the journalist that might be part of these webinar. It is important to understand that the presence of fire in certain ecosystems is acceptable at certain thresholds and certain seasonalities with certain interval periods while in other ecosystems the presence of fire is absolutely problematic for the reasons that we mentioned before that these ecosystems are not adapted to the presence of fire and therefore are not resilient to the presence of fire. And then to answer the question of whether these fires are normal we are going to look at these triangles of fire ignition and fire spread that leads us to the key answer to this question. The normality of fire depends on the fire regimes, the ecosystems that are affected. And the fire regimes is basically a terminology that englobes a series of variables that define how these ecosystems interact with fire. So in a Mediterranean ecosystem we would have a fire regime where frequency is relatively high once every 10 years or once every 20 years depending on if it's grassland or frapland or forest led fires. The intensity depending on the frequency of this fire should be relatively low because the fuels accumulated a long time are lower. And then the severity of these fires have to do with the ecosystem resilience and with intensity of this fire. So in an ecosystem like the Mediterranean the severity of these fires is culturally important but then it recovers a long time. The different situation would be with the fire regime in a tropical rainforest or a cloud mountain forest where the frequency of fire should be once every 100 years or even more every once every 250 years and not the the frequency that we are seeing right now in certain parts of the tropical rainforests of the Amazon. We see fire once every 15 or every 10 years recurrent on the same science with the specificity that tropical rainforests have on feedback of fire. Also the intensity of these fires relatively high in this tropical rainforest when the years have severe drought and the severity of these fires ended up being rather high in tropical rainforests because there is these ecosystems as we said before not adaptive. So what is important to look at this graph is that there are fire acts at different scales. It acts on an especially scale we can see that on the y-axis and on a temporal scale and we can see that on the x-axis and there are at least two variables that are also important and are influencing fire regimes which would be the fire risk which relates to the ignitions of fire and then the fire spread which is related to the define as a fire danger. So once the fire has started how easily that fire spreads is defined as fire danger. The fire ignition depends on ignition sources and depends on fuels and these both are heavily impacted by humans. So fuels they need to be flammable so the weather conditions do play a role but humans play a role on ignitions. You can have heavily drought affected ecosystems that will not burn if the ignitions are not there and this is something that is currently also happening. So the inflammatory conditions of some of these ecosystems have already been high in the past but what we have now is an increased amount of ignition sources. Then the second triangle describes how fire spreads and this is heavily conditioned by weather. If you look at the news the 30-30-30 rule is always applied. If you have a fire that has already started ignition and you have winds that are above 30 kilometers per hour, humidity is below 30% and temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius you are going to have a very hard to attack fire and if this is prolonged a long time then you're going to have a very severe fire season. If you change the ignitions and if you change the fire spread then you are going to change the fire regimes. The weather conditions are very important for fire spread but also the configuration of the landscape the way that fuels connect on the landscape are also very important so even though weather is changing and it's playing a role human are playing a bigger role in many of these landscapes. So when we want to answer the questions of how this fire is normal what we want to understand is whether these fire regimes are changing from what they used to be before in previous decades. Our second question then understood this concept of what is normal and what is not normal our project tried to understand and try to act upon those hotspots in the tropics that saw an increased role as fire hotspots and we define fire hotspots in three different ways. We want to know the hotspots are those that have higher fire densities so per unit of area they have more fire and when you look at this variable obviously Africa is the fire continent and the continent at the global scale the fire continent is Africa. Africa is burning all the time. The thing is that these ecosystems in most of these ecosystems are fire-adapted. The Sabanas, Miombos ecosystems have cobalt with fire but as we will see right now the problem is not that they are necessarily adapted but that we are seeing a change in the burn area trends and this is actually our second definition of fire hotspot so we want to know which of these areas that are burning in the tropics are actually suffering for changes in the fire trends they're having more burn areas and this will at the end change the fire regimes and they will affect ecosystem stability they will affect carbon balances it will affect biodiversity levels it will affect human health and water balance as well and to answer these two questions this graph that was produced this picture produced by Andela et al in 2017 on the lower panel you can see how the burn areas have been changing from 1997 to 2015 and in blue you can see the areas where the fire has been the fire the burn area has been reduced and on a planetary level we have seen a decrease of burn areas from 1997 to 2016 now 15 but on red we see the areas that require our attention because those are the areas that are currently seen for have been seen an increase of these burn areas if we look closely at them what we can see is that these areas correspond to dry forests and dry ecosystems we see cerrado in brazil we see the eastern and western miambos in africa and we see the indochina dry forests so even though the media has biased and popularized fires in tropical humid rain forests one of the starting points for our discussion are going to be the areas where we are seeing strong changes in burn areas that are dry ecosystems not humid ecosystems you can see in blue the areas with the crease burn areas and in red the areas with increased burn areas and what is important of this one is that the blue ones frequently are affecting uh grasslands and not forest cover ecosystems uh so the sabanas of this world of the three continents are seen less fire but then in red we see areas where the fraction of forest cover is high or at least it's not grassland led fire so we do have a component of forest in these ecosystems that are seen within fritties we repeated the graph by andela trying to eliminate the starting from from 1997 and 98 which was a very strong a linear year and we wanted to see if that might have changed the trends and we started with 2001 and moved until 2016 we saw the same trends the ecosystems that are right now being more affected by increasing trends of fire and burn areas are dry ecosystems in the three in the three continents chaco uh chiquitania cerrado miambos eastern and western and then as we said before indochina dry forest and this is the reason why this webinar is going to focus on these ecosystems our third definition of fire hotspot was identifying future hotspots of fire activity and to do that we basically use the correlation between burn area and precipitation we also use temperature but temperature was not so clear for 2000 to 2019 and then we applied this correlation to the future weather conditions as defined by the cmi p5 and what we can see that and then we did that for three periods but right now i'm only showing you then these projected areas of future fire risk which would be for the period 2021 and 2045 and what we see again indicated by the arrows again are the dry ecosystems that one that are going to be that are projected to be suffering for more intense burn areas in the future we wanted to know which part of these activity was climate related and which part of this activity was human related even though as i said before these two are very much intertwined so if you have very flammable ecosystems because of severe drought conditions and you don't have an ignition source that ecosystem will not burn so and if you have mediumly affected ecosystems that heavily ignition source that ecosystem and that landscape will be heavily affected by fire so but it's important then to understand at least what is happening with this trend on climate for this area and what we see on the lower panel you see the parliament drought severity index for 82 to 2006 seen so this is a trend and on the other one you have also a trend of maximum temperature from the same period and you can see the aridity is increasing on ecosystems that in latin america is increasing almost everywhere but it is affecting these areas that have these dry ecosystems and in africa it's affecting the eastern miambosites and in australia it's affecting part of this eastern side that were so fire affected last year we validated this climate trends of higher aridity and increased um temperature for these dry ecosystems using this very nice research that jolly et al did in 2015 where they were looking basically at how the burnable areas of the entire planet had been increasing due to climate induced um conditions that uh that enhance uh the fire dangers to be high so basically in these two panels in red you see the areas where uh climate induced um increases in global wildfire have been observed for the period 1977 79 to 2013 and again they are again all the time um focusing or highlighting uh some of the areas that we have been identified were currently there is increased burn areas in the tropics so dry ecosystems um are very strongly impacted and you can see here the area open chaco you can see the serato you can see then again miambos and the indus sheen and dry forests and what it's important is that even though there has been a lot of media discussion about rainforest in the last two years the dry ecosystems have barely reached the media so we have a bit of a cinderella syndrome where the charismatic rainforest the humid rainforest for good reasons right are also being that the non-adapted uh fire ecosystems are reaching the media but we are not highlighting enough the danger that we are seeing in how these forested and open woodland ecosystems that have forest covers are severely being affected by climate by aridity by fire and part of this fire is driven by the expansion of agro commodities this is very clearly uh stated in the case of el sabado the moratorium for soya in the amazonian in the wet amazonian extracts basically brought the um the forestation into serato and a lot of the fire that we are seeing now are for expansion of our commodities okay so we do have both scenarios that are bad climate is bad and human ignitions are bad these are a few pictures of what you will be seeing later on this webinar how does a serato look and how does a miambo look i know colleagues that will be giving these presentations are probably horrified because serato has so many different ecosystems and miambo has so many different ecosystems that this is not very representative but at least you can see how there is a combination of forested fragments with grasslands and different gradients of fully forested cover from more much more um grassland um mosaics um therefore a continuation of our research what we did was then to select um countries that were holding these dry ecosystems as you can see here for uh latin america we focus on serato chaco chiquitania so brazil argentina bolivia ibarra why and then for africa we were focusing on western eastern miambo angola sambia butzuan amazon bick and then for indochina's dry forest we focus on cambodia laos vietnam and thailand and with these countries what we did was to assess the evolution of greenhouse gas emissions using the global fire emission database and we separated those emissions by ecosystem types so here you have the case of serato and you have here the forestation and degradation fires focusing only on co2 we should also we also have this grasp for non-co2 remember that in areas where uh there are no booty vegetation only non-co2 gases should be accounted because grassland recovers uh and regenerates on the next um on the next year and therefore there is an assumption of carbon neutrality for co2 for non-booty vegetation but what i want to show you is that even though of the there was a strong media um outrage for the fire in the amazon which was uh rightly so but it was again biased uh in the sense that compared to the um long term distribution of fires and emissions in in brazil it was a moderate peak um also here you see the distribution of fires uh on the red and blue as serato fires unfortunately these are not area ratioed emissions and because seratos is smaller than the amazon then you have lower um emissions because they are absolute emissions but if we ratio this uh this this grasp would change and on the lower part you have the pantanal the pantanal has been in the news this year because it was 30% of this very valuable endemic ecosystem has been severely burned part of it for conditions of climate part of it also promoted fires to expand livestock to spine uh agro commodities um so what we also wanted to do here is to start analyzing fire emissions for these ecosystems and try to start understanding the baselines of how fire has evolved in the last in the last year trying to see how this could contribute to a potential analysis of mitigation um targets and emission abatement for these countries for a specific ecosystems another thing that we did was to visualize where these fires had happened for each year starting 2000 to 2019 I am only showing you 2019 where the anomalous fires had happened so what I'm showing you here is for each of the quarters so December January February March April May June July August September October November where the standardized anomalies of fire occurred which represent the areas that have fires that are not normal that are above the means and above the standard variability of of of those pixels these are pixel-based anomalous fires and this gives a lot of information when we are trying to manage fire at the landscape so we are not treating every area as if it was all the same fire we see that there are certain regions in Brazil that were burning like Roraima at the beginning of the year also seasonalities are different on on the June July August panel you can see the fires on the Trans-Amazonian highway and then you can see the very severe Cerrado fires of 2019 that barely made it to the east okay so this also we have this for all the countries for all this season for all the quarters for all the years which allows us also to start thinking of where and in which seasons and whether there are out of season fires that need to be managed uh we could start working and thinking of integrated fire management very briefly I'm only going to show this one um even though 2019 ended up being a very mediatic fire year for different fires happening in different countries from a drought perspective it was not a very drought year in Brazil uh it was very drought in Australia but not it was not particularly dry particularly in Brazil particularly on the rainforests and the moist ecosystems so in this graph you see the anomalies so the variability of precipitation in blue and maximum temperature in orange from 2001 to 2019 as a standardized anomaly so compared to this period which are the ones that picked more and which picked less so for the dry ecosystems which is the Apopano yes indeed it was a drought it was a dry year and for both um the dry ecosystems on the Apopano and the moist ecosystem on the lower panel it was a very hot year and this is something that also is starting to raise our interest there is a hypothesis that future fire activity is going to be driven by temperature not by precipitation and um we start seeing some teams of temperatures starting to have a bigger role in areas where ecosystems are already degraded and where ignition sources are not limited so not particularly dry for the moist ecosystems in 2009 19 in the June July August neither in September October November it was particularly dry for um for the dry ecosystems for Cerrado and it was very hot gear in in all these ecosystems analyzed after having this picture then we can start thinking of which type of fire management activities we could start applying into these landscapes and landscape configuration so that we could promote mitigation action and I'm presenting very briefly these riskums figures where fire management is mentioned to our understanding a big conservative value so there are 250 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per year that have been identified as potential mitigation for the entire planet and we will see with our Australian speaker that in their research just for Savannah mitigation and emission abatement those values were already 89 so this this fire management requires more research um these are my a few my last slides there are three more but basically in order to promote emission abatement with fire and with fire management the first thing that we need to do is to estimate these emissions the fire emissions every year so that we can then look at the evolution we can define the baseline and then we can apply activities that allow to compare the resulting decrease of emissions after the application of the activity and to do that even this this um equation that I'm showing here is based on the IPCC refinement of the 2006 a follow guidelines but the structure of this equation is the same for any carbon market so in order to estimate emissions you need to understand how much area has burned how much fuel you had and how much of that fuel was flammable through the emission factors in these speakers coming later on we will be looking at all these variables what I would like to say here is that all these variables are available um in standard tables uh for reporting in tier one with the exception of area but area is available also in international fire uh datasets even emissions are available if you don't want to calculate that so for us the the rationale behind countries not including fire emission abatements and mitigation targets into their indices is not technical this is not more complicated that what they have already done in other affolux emissions in their national communications is not more complicated but um we believe that there is more a bit of a governance issue associated to this and the the implementation of fire activities that gets difficult it's not not necessarily the technical part of estimating this because as I said before emissions are already available in the global fire emission database if countries want to start comparing trends right um and they also can use this tier one standard values for fuels and for emission factors and only applying areas of their countries and these are examples of how these data are available on the standard values of tier one once we have estimated the emissions the next step would be definitely to implement fire management activities that would allow to reduce emissions from fires and to reduce emissions from fires we would have to reduce the area burnt the fuel loads or to affect the fuel flammability so the emission factors um integrated fire management will be nicely discussed by our next speaker Ania but basically you can affect these three variables from any of the three processes of any fire management prevention suppression or restoration each of these phases are different cost benefits and are more useful than the others but in this webinar we're going to focus on prescribed burning as a fire management activity within fire prevention that will affect area burns fuel loads and fuel flammability it is not the only one right that's something that is also very important but because of the expertise that we have today we will focus on prescribed burning you could also have fire banning which is also something that has been done in many countries and that brazil also applied when the situation of fire bought in the amazon was out of control and actually the banning affected the amazon but it didn't affect the serrador which was under far more fire than normal um again as a as a Cinderella syndrome for these dry forests policies are not necessarily applied because the international pressure is not the same on dry forests and that's something that i hope to raise from this webinar please if there is any journalist in this webinar raise the attention of dry ecosystems um final two slides the intention of being prescribed burning as a way to abate emissions basically focusing on shifting the emissions from the dry from the um the late dry season into the early dry season we will see that in many examples in the case of el serrador and in case of of australia but the idea is not necessarily to reduce the number of fires but the idea is to move it out of season so that the fuels in that time are less flammable and therefore you reduce your burn areas you also reduce your emissions factors which will also be discussed for gozana and at the end you have less emissions as a result another important activity of fire management and prescribed burning is to buffer fires from uh very severe years we have this fragmentation process going on in the landscape that is promoted by this prescribed burning that then um reduces the risk of catastrophic fire and these are the pathways that countries can incorporate their emission abatements uh through carbon offsets in different markets the first two correspond to the u and f people see and the other two responds to carbon markets so uh under nbcs we need to wait for the article six to have better understanding how carbon is going to be traded among countries but the idea is and the encouragement is those of you who have interest in start incorporating fire as part of your mitigation and adaptation targets please start working on creating um under your national greenhouse gas inventories for the Apollo sector um uh the the emissions that are co2 uh and the emissions that are non-co2 coming from fire so start creating separated lines of reporting for fire that would allow you to start moving toward mitigation targeted and increasing uh compromise in in in the future entities uh resubmissions the frail is another opportunity for having fire incorporated into forest mitigation uh reductions the problem with many frails is that all forest types are mixed together and all degradation sources are mixed together so it makes it rather difficult to separate fire from the frail and then uh and have a significant reduction of the overall degradation with with that but that could also be an line of action focusing on reducing degradation fires within the frail frameworks right now many countries are reporting deforestation fires but they are not reporting degradation fires frail are the opportunity to focus on that and then we have examples of voluntary carbon markets uh as other ways of putting uh these carbon offsets into uh into this market with the standards that are having similar variables of the ones that we were showing uh and there are two available methodologies the eastern yombo created by Tanzania by reducing fire and fire degradation but also improving the sequestration of soil carbon in grassland as i said before the mitigation component can come by reducing the emissions but also by incrementing sequestration on soil and on above ground biomass and then we have the very interesting case example of australia with their national regulated carbon markets that will show us how they have sold or they are selling their abatement emissions carbon offsets through 13 standards but they are selling it within their into their regulated carbon markets so this is the opening of the webinar so that you understand a bit more why briacal systems why mitigation targets and why prescribed burning and i'm going to open the floor now to ania hoffman ania hoffman is an integrated fire management specialist she has worked over 20 years as a consultant for various international development cooperation organizations on three different continents she has gained in-depth knowledge and extensive experience on integrated fire management and elements as well as in the planning and implementing efm strategies and policies for the conservation and management of natural resources as a member of the science forum global observation of forest and land cover dynamics she connects scientists practitioners and policy makers in the area of satellite fire monitoring worldwide welcome ania the floor is yours thank you osa and thank you colleagues for letting me join in into this session and thank you for the audience and i can see we have already 137 participants in this audience and i quickly looked through the names and i can see names from brazil i can see names from tanzania from people i do know and just that i cannot greet them all personally but i would like to greet them why this seminar in tanzania in brazil and in other countries um let me share my video and my screen hello here i am this is how i look like nowadays um in my home office and now i share the screen a second here we are so which one are you seeing now okay can you share the screen let me take your time um in the meantime to all the participants there is a recording of this audio uh sorry of this webinar and the presentations and the recorded audio will be uh uh edited and then it will be posted online on the same web page where the registration site was and i will put that on the on the chat so that everyone has it also the way we are going to organize questions is we will have a space at the very end and then we will also have a bit of a space after each chat so that you can ask origin questions okay still this is the problem of having two screens to share take take your time no worries on you take your time yeah okay so now now now now now excellent okay and you see the big screen now the one slide okay um i was asked to talk about integrated fire management and the elements of integrated fire management as rosa was saying the entire webinar is focusing more on the fire emission abatement side of integrated fire management but i would like to set the scene of what is integrated fire management all about what does it mean because there is no international agreed definition of course there are some documentations like the fao integrated fire management standard which is quite old by now it hasn't been updated and in the literature and published papers you find various definitions of what is integrated fire management all about and i would like to share um this is not my personal definition but what i've kind of learned over the the years what what are the elements of integrated fire management and where does prescribed burning or controlled burning fit in this cycle of integrated fire management so rosa has said um the scene already of the global role of fires um i just repeated again the global role of fire is quite big in the meantime when i started to give this kind of presentations a couple years ago the annual area burned globally was 360 million hectares of vegetation i recently updated looked at the literature um what is the more or less agreed uh area burned globally and it has it has increased to 40 430 million hectares of vegetation by now as rosa was saying fire the fire continent is africa with about 200 million hectares burning annually which amounts to 40 of the biomass worldwide um yes fire is an important ecological driver in fire depending ecosystems in uh dry forest ecosystems such as the sehado or the the mihomba woodlands or the indus sheena sheena dry forest such in mihomba but it is a negative disturbance in fire sensitive countries since fire sensitive ecosystems such as the tropical rainforest of the amazon region or the indonesian tropical rainforests i've been living and working in both types of ecosystems over many years so in both ecosystems fire is a tool it is a tool in forest management and it is a tool in land is a land management tool and worldwide we do see a paradigm shift from the strict fire suppression or the zero burning policy to more integrated fire management but what does it mean more integrated fire management so often fire management is equalized with fire management is fire suppression so but this is not the case is this much more complicated um the elements and the implementation of activities of integrated fire management i want to come back a little bit on the negative impacts of fires and of course we do hear about them quite a lot and pretty sure we all know it so we do have of course the problem of smoke and haze emissions but we do also have a problem too due to smoke and haze on transport and tourism these are all pictures of the fire seasons in indonesia of course health impacts are negative impacts done of the economic impact on the forestry and agriculture sector and last but not least the ecological impacts on flora and fauna and socioeconomic impacts on the local rural people but on the other hand as we've heard especially in the dry ecosystems we do have a lot of positive fire impacts we do have fire impacts on the plant level such as that many plants are fire and smoke stimulated to germinate the seeds even some plants need fire to stimulate their flowering and it is used to stimulate grass and plant regrowth or is needed this sejado in brazil is a quite good example for that where the golden grass of the camping dorado is used for example for making handicrafts of the local people and generate the income so without using fire they cannot stimulate the grass and plant regrowth of this type of grass at the landscape level fire has a positive impact when we implement prescribe or control burning to reduce or remove fuel to pre-empty dangerous wildfires and with such of course we also want to mitigate the emissions of these dangerous and large-scale wildfires but it is also used in african countries to reduce bush encroachment and thus enhance wildlife and livestock management with that so it is used in basically all over the world for pest control to for example in tanzania get rid of the ticks that transfer diseases to the livestock and as said already it is used as a land management tool for forestry to reduce the fuels in agriculture to prepare agriculture fields or to burn the agriculture waste and for conservation reasons so is fire now a problem or is it a solution so traditionally as i've said fire management is rooted in forestry and there it has long been considered as an enemy so the forest had to be protected against fires so fire fighting was perceived the main approach within fire management because we wanted to protect our forest resources and we have neglected in many ecosystems that fire is part of the ecosystem we also have neglected that fire is not only part of certain ecosystems but it is part of the land management techniques and for local people so fire is essential for rural people in many parts of the world it is the cheap and most economic tool to do their land use and natural resource management so that's why we have to ask ourselves before we we go into into considering what is fire management all about where is burning what is exactly burning when it is burning and who is burning for which objectives and are these fires we are looking from above we are looking with the satellite is this an unwanted or is it unwanted fire and all these questions of fire manager has to balance and that's why we have to look in a more holistic way on what is integrated fire management because unwanted fires whether they also are considered as fires producing a lot of smoke and haze hence emissions so we want to prevent these large scale destructive fires are these out of control fires we have to have a set of certain prevention measures to prevent these unwanted fires from happening at the very beginning and we do have a set of activities early burning or pre-square burning belongs to prevention measures at the community level of course the typical and traditional awareness and environmental education measures belong to that you have to look at land tenure who owns the land how can we make how can we transfer ownership for certain land areas we have to look at law compliance and law enforcement as prevention measures and we have to look at alternatives uses of fire alternative income generation generating activities such we find in aquifer street types of systems if we talk about fire prevention at community level but nevertheless all our prevention activities will never be as good so that we don't have unwanted fires and for these fires we have to be prepared with a set of trained people equipment with monitoring systems with detection and communication systems that we can take a decision based on mandates policies and laws regulations values we want to protect we have to define these values we want to protect so that it is clear okay this is an unwanted fire and who goes and tackles this fire with what sort and what type of fire equipment which fire crew is it from government this is from villagers is it from the private sector and tries to initially attack this fire for all we need for all that we need to be prepared as I said with trained people with the respective logistics and communication and equipment and warehousing and the maintenance of all that we also have to have management plans we have to look at our plans conservation management plans and so forth and so on the list is almost endless but nevertheless even if we try to initially attack we might fail and we become large-scale fire events which we want to avoid by all means and if this happens we have to do even more mobilization of people equipment and coordination and we do know that even countries like the US or Australia which have let's say an almost industrialized factory of fire suppression they are failing quite often or not able to suppress these large-scale fires that's all belongs to fire suppression and response and once the fire is out we have to look at the area whether whether and how we want to restaurate rehabilitate what are the measures again is it replanting regrowing is it like in the Sahato even using fire to restaurate large areas of large burned areas to do all that in a proper manner of course we need the support of the research institutions we need to know the fire ecology we want to know fire danger rating information we want to know where our fire fighting resources and so on and so forth and all that underpins each and each and every individual element and comes will be informed from from those from this element so integrated fire management is a holistic framework for managing fires in different land uses while providing poor benefits for local communities and it is prevention like I said it is preparedness it is suppression and it is restoration underpinned by research and analysis of the data to be then in a multi-stake stakeholder effort be used to successfully prevent unwanted fires in which way and at which level ever has to be decided from the fire management state by the fire management stakeholders this concept there's another concept which is quite similar integrated fire management concept after Ron Myers he considers as well the technical fire management elements like prevention preparedness the use of fire and suppression and of course as well the culture and history of the fire used by local people local communities the socioeconomic need to use fire for their natural resource management and of course to consider the fire ecology of the given land system and the benefits and the damages to the ecosystem as I'm quite tight with my time because I have to leave you in seven minutes I raise a little bit through to go in a little bit more into detail on pre-squared burning and where does it come from and that it is a tool for various purposes and not new only in forest management but it is accomplishes quite a lot of land management objectives like pre-squared burning is used to construct fire breaks I'm quite sure that my colleague Lara style might talk about it it is used to reduce the fuel load and the fire hazard this is a picture of the fire hazard in 2007 in Botswana after 2006 there was a quite heavy rainy season producing quite a lot of amount of fuel which we try to reduce by pre-squared burning controlled burning and of course hence this does also in reduce and the fire emissions of the of the late season fires it is as I mentioned used for controlling pests and invasive alien species it is in Africa used for wildlife management to enhance grass regrowth and attract the wildlife for in the tourism industry and again also examples for Africa domestic livestock and pasture management bush encroachment which is quite of a big problem in Africa in the meantime especially for livestock keepers as I see that I do not have much time left I want to skip these slides I want to quickly come back to restoration purposes this is a picture of the sahadah of the ecological station in Tocantins where Jonas later on will talk about and how the fire managers there have tried with those elements of integrated fire management such as pre-squared burning working with the local communities but also with fire suppression to try to shift the the fire regime in these vast areas this is a landscape that has been burning quite over and over again in the late season so the woody biomass has had been quite reduced and with controlled burning pre-squared burning over the last five years now they were quite successful to change the fire season from late season dangerous hot fires to early pre-squared burning fires so in summary integrated fire management includes technical elements of fire management but also the use of fire for rural people and it considers the cultural ecology of fire but we still of course need to distinguish fire dependent far versus fire sensitive ecosystem systems and understand that each requires different fire management approaches I have a family needs to balance between conservation protection development livelihood goals and emission reductions and I have needs to understand the underlying fire causes to find appropriate fire management solution at various levels and that might be not really always the case that pre-squared burning is the solution for the fire problem successful integrated fire management looks at the involvement of local communities considering the rules socioeconomic conditions and needs and of course it needs the coordination of actors and stakeholders in the implementation of fire management and emission goals it is cross cutting and there is no single department there is no single institution that is able to really apply integrated fire management successfully that means you have to work together with a lot of other actors and stakeholders and normally good cooperation is quite an art as we all do know so I have needs to have enabled in policies legislations and regulatory frameworks at the various administrative levels and also this is quite an art to have them all in place and be applied with that I say thank you and I will join you later hopefully for the discussion wonderful thanks very much thanks for this presentation and I'm going to give the floor now to our next speaker who is seriously sleep deprived because it's very late for him in Australia right now thank you Jeff for your patience so Jeff is a formerly TNC climate specialist and now he's the manager of knowledge and partnerships Cape York natural resource management in Queensland Australia he's got a phd in tropical rainforest ecology from James Cook University and has worked in a range of in a broad range of conservation capacities over three decades ranging from field assistant wildlife biologists ecologists conservation planner to CEO in his capacity as climate specialist on the TNC where he worked for the 14 years job courses on climate change adaptation and mitigation initiatives and spent many years working with indigenous people in Australia and the Pacific partly on integrated fire management the floor is yours thanks very much thanks Rosa and I guess my little title here is emissions mitigation opportunities for Savannah ecosystems in Australia methodologies and enabling factors but I guess so I'm going to actually talk to get my screen to work here two seconds there you go I'm basically going to outline a brief history of Savannah burning carbon projects in Australia so what we've actually done to reduce emissions because it's been happening here in Australia for quite a while I'm then going to talk to briefly briefly to the key enabling conditions that have supported the proliferation of our carbon projects and to some extent I'm going to touch on some key opportunities for other Savannah countries as Rosa mentioned a little while ago incorporation of these sorts of approaches in NDCs but also starting that down that pathway of the path that we've taken in Australia to successfully reduce emissions and provide some real opportunities for our certainly up for our indigenous landholders I'm going to take us back in time now for because I guess Australia like many countries of the world has been subject to the vagaries of immigration and various changes that all countries have faced so obviously Australia like many 200 plus years ago indigenous landholders wandered Australia lighting fires in their traditional way for 50 000 years and so Australia was very much shaped by indigenous fire management now with the arrival of white man that fundamentally changed and indigenous landholders were removed from their lands and so the pattern of fire went from a very nuanced process wherein the fire managers who would move around their country lighting small fires for a whole host of reasons to then if you remove people from the land and remove the normal sorts of fire practices practices that then occurred you get late drisies of wildfires in Australia so our fire patterns in Australia shifted from one of lots of different fires throughout the year through to which sort of protected the country to a large degree to massive late drisies and wildfires so I guess we had a number of our scientists in this part of the world realised that fairly early in the piece so they started down the pathway of exploring how we might go about reducing emissions and how we might go about thinking through the mechanics of how we might do that in a practical way but also how we might do that and measure that in a way that could be meaningfully applied in real-world projects so back in 2006 we had a project called the Walfa project which was the first project in Australia effectively our first voluntary carbon offset for savannah burning where a groups of folks in in western land set about lighting cool early dry season fires which fundamentally reduced the late dry season profile and these folks are still operating to this day that project is still active but now the project is is under the Australian regulatory carbon market Australia then obviously moved on from we had a proof of concept project through the Walfa project that gave us how this might work and was actually already offsetting emissions in very real terms but then the Australian carbon market was established formally in 2011 and that provided a pathway for the development proliferation of carbon projects pretty much across Australia so back in 2010 the nature conservancy along with Pew and the Australian government and arranged for the partners purchased a station called fish river station 180 000 hectare property this particular property had a massive late dry season wildfire pattern of fires in the previous 10 15 years and so this was a real opportunity to start implementing the same sorts of practices that had occurred for Walfa but under Australia's regulatory carbon market at the same time we had a formal savannah burning methodology just dealing with reductions in nitrous oxide and methane that was formally approved under the under the Australian government at that time and that then allowed us to set about the process of conducting the early dry season fire management this is me as a much younger person conducting early dry season fire management with the local traditional owners and I guess the the the great benefit of that was that we had this property was established as a conservation property for to be handed back to the traditional owners but what was going to be the revenue stream for these folks so the baseline for fish river station was emissions of around 23 000 tons annually in that late with the late dry season wildfire pattern of fires but once we started setting about the implementation of the early dry season fire management we fundamentally reduced that by about half so you can see the blue bars to the right is once we started implementing our early dry season fire management and we've we sold our first set of carbon credits back first two years of carbon credits for around half million dollars to to caltex at the time which was a an absolute windfall and a new economy in areas where we previously didn't have incomes other than pastoral incomes which was a paved the way for indigenous protected areas across northern Australia to to really capitalise on a new revenue stream but equally to provide some fantastic co-benefits for for those for those particular areas I guess the beauty beauty of that now is that we we had a proof of concept project and the proof of concept project both welfare and fish river demonstrated what was possible and and so then we set about seed funding a whole stack of different areas and with that we had a proliferation of savannah burning projects across the country ultimately around 19 million hectares of savannah burning projects offsetting a million tons of emissions annually and then over and above that providing more than 10 million dollars to indigenous land managers to continue the ongoing management of their of their of their land so it was a huge windfall for for our part of the world I guess the the crucial thing in Australia at the time for us with our regulatory carbon market it went through some changes as well so when we first started out with fish river station we had a carbon price of between $23.50 to $24.50 a tonne which is you know a really really good price for carbon then with the change of government to the Liberal National Party we end up with a least cost abatement approach that was developed so the regulatory market fundamentally changed but it fundamentally changed to a practice where we would only end up with between $11 and $16 a tonne so a massive reduction in price but the actual benefit of the new approach was they then also provided for long-term contracts so a lot of these projects were then able to secure 10-year contracts to reduce emissions which was again for many of these groups where often funding for indigenous range of programs in the part of the world is you know can be hot and cold this provided really a fantastic fantastic foundation for a lot of these projects project areas so the ERF in its long-term contracts proved to be quite secure so I guess what we've seen since basically 2006 and the Walfa project is we've seen a really significant increase in the area of projects which you can see the darker line there you can also see a really significant increase in the incomes for our indigenous land holders and you can also see a fundamental reduction in the late dry season burns and these are the late dry season wildfires that can be quite destructive in our part of the world so it's been it's been absolutely transformative for a lot of our areas in northern Australia and certainly for a lot of our projects in northern Australia so it's fundamentally changed the business models for a lot of these folks from a dependence on government to development of projects that generate incomes but also provide a great many other benefits so the other the other thing that's occurred in Australia in more recent times so the focus in projects originally was on savanna burning abatement which is really just as I said earlier dealing nitrous oxide and methane reductions as a consequence of preventing late dry season wildfires but we also realised as a consequence of the the scientists doing the great work that they've done um Jeremy Russell Smith Gary Cook et al and their teams we we start to understand that sequestration components with the change in firemage was also substantial so we also ended up with our first sequestration and combined avoidance mission mitigation method that was approved in 2018 now I guess the challenge with moving from abatement to sequestration is your projects then have to have a permanence component so your permanent you need a 25 year commitment to reduce those emissions and today we haven't had much uptake of the sequestration methodologies because folks are still trying to understand how they might manage the risk there's risk reversal buffers and things built into the the methodology and into the regulatory market in Australia but at the moment we've had fantastic uptake of the emissions avoidance method because it's an annual activity but once we move to sequestration it becomes a little more complex and they try to understand how how they might engage effectively in that but the the fundamental benefit of the sequestration component is it provides um at the moment we only have one that's specifically for the dead woody component that accumulates and that's about three times three times the emissions abatement for a particular area the living biomass component can be three to five times um the abatement so you can start to see if you can start to combine both your sequestration and abatement components they can be provided significant windfalls provided you can manage the risk and the same is also true for soils less so in Australia but apparently clearly beneficial for Africa with some work by Mark Ritchie and others so that's that's kind of where we're at at the moment so the emissions avoidant piece has gone through its scale up we've sort of reached not capacity but the it's kind of stalled at at 19 million plus hectares where and I guess now it's it's trying to work out how we then proceed to to start to consider effectively sequestration the uptake of sequestration projects so I guess that the great benefit of these projects in Australia has been we realised that the co-benefits were fantastic so improved biodiversity and landscape outcomes reinvigorating cultural and social traditions for many indigenous Australians they have a cultural obligation to conduct fine management on country many have many haven't been able to access country so this has provided a vehicle for them to re-engage with their traditional obligations enhanced economic development for folks increased employment for indigenous arrangers climate climate change adaptation benefits by reducing the risk of wild late drosses and wildfires but if you think of somewhere like the serrano or miyombo or areas that might be adjacent to other rainforest systems preventing or helping to prevent the loss of red projects so I think these these shouldn't be underestimated in terms of the benefits that can be gained over and above what you might achieve in your own particular area and the community and social cultural development and empowering communities components have been just wonderful in Australia so I guess the key enabling conditions that have enabled us to really scale up and and develop these projects and had to have them proliferate as they have the key ones have been we had a really strong scientific foundation in the first instance so so the scientists were quite visionary at the time and they they sort of preempted how this might work and they'd done a huge amount of work in terms of you know emissions factors all of edge mapping fire scum mapping and getting a really strong understanding as how as to how that might be applied in the context of a formal methodology the development of the proof of concept projects in both welfare and fish river station provided clear evidence that how it could be done and the fact that it could be done and so that was really paved the way for other groups to engage we've been very fortunate in Australia to have a whole stack of indigenous ranger ranger programs that where folks already have a solid sound knowledge of IFM both cultural burning in other ways and also the skills to apply that and obviously for us the regulatory carbon market was huge to actually have the finances to incentivize projects and for projects to be formally developed and to be paid for those emissions reductions has been a massive win for obviously as part of all of that the fundamental basis for the measurement of the emissions reductions is the approved savannah burning abatement and now sequestration methodologies and I wouldn't I would also really express the value of some of the key tools that we've had in Australia that have helped us do both the fire planning but also to calculate the baselines and emissions reductions so we actually have tools readily available to everybody where they can do their fire planning so naffy is the site and savannah are some tools are linked to naffy that were developed by the Australian government that allows to do the calculations of baselines for any particular geography and the emissions reductions was projects underway so they're kind of a key enabling conditions that I would I guess I'd focus on so I guess the the great success that we had in Australia made myself in a range of others my colleagues nick wall for an eddy game people well okay so that's what's possible in Australia how might it apply elsewhere in the world so our methodology only applies down to 600 millimeters rainfall so we this is 600 millimeters rainfall above and also we only applied it to tropical savannahs as formally classified so areas like some of the the southeast asian forests don't occur on this but that would be equally relevant to them but anyway this gives people a snapshot of where the opportunities sit so in the upper upper figure the areas that are red are clearly where where there's basically a really preponderance of late dry season wildfires so these are really the opportunities that exist around the world right now we've done some very you know back of the envelope preliminary calculations as to what those emissions reductions might be and folks can freely use those if as preliminary estimates for NDCs should they choose as a pathway to help them move down down the same path that we've been in Australia options for global scale up as I said provisions to use these these values we've already calculated as I say they're very simplistic but they're still a starting point for inclusion in NDCs but the other piece I guess I would flag is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel here we have a number of methodologies that have been developed here in Australia that could be readily adapted for other parts of the world and populated with the parameters and emissions factors relevant to their geographies so for the Serato or Miomba so these could be developed under the VCS or similar and the 2015 methodology would be the one that would be probably easiest for folks to digest and understand and to adapt so that's kind of where I'll leave it there for folks to consider I've added an extra slide with some of the key resources so people can access those when they choose and I might stop there thank you very much because it's so late because it's so late for Joe let's participants if you have a quick question for him please put it on the Q&A otherwise I'm going to ask you something and thank you so much for this very very informative presentation one of the problems that we have with national regulated carbon markets is the cost of verification so we have been discussing that written for blue carbon and because all these carbon offsets need to be additional and then they need to be verified in order to be receding the payments how did you solve the verification process of the abatement of the emissions so we our projects are audited here in Australia they might be done once every two or three years depends on the project but so ours are formally audited by accredited auditors in Australia so that's the that's the current process as it stands so you know the every minute the obviously the tools that we're using already are using national carbon accounting but they're also they've been proven the the tools and the and the estimates that they provide provide credible results we also do a whole stack of validation of veg maps as part of our projects and things as well and and the fires that have occurred as well so but the the auditing process is is is comprehensive and every project is subject to that excellent excellent um let me open the questions to the panelists while I look to the Q&A in case uh some of you have any questions okay um Jeff I actually done founded no it's actually I do have so many questions let me just ask you one more question someone just a question about Pantanal and I think Pantanal is a very very interesting question and a bit of a drama to have to discuss how much it has burned this year uh but Pantanal is a wetland uh the same way that Indonesian fires are wetlands and many of them would also have grasslands and and non-nationally budi vegetation and one could say well um when we talk about um the scalability of your method what would be the warnings that you would be so that it's not only um that you need to focus on uh non-budi vegetation but also you need to make sure that you are under the same ecosystem time could you give some warning for this scaling up well I I guess you know part of it's you know doing the math I think that the important thing with this is if if the patterns in the Pantanal are for a preponderance of late dry season wildfires then your opportunity to reduce those is probably significant you know um in terms of using your integrated fire management in a meaningful way so I think I think I think um you know anywhere where the if you look at the I guess the fire profile for the for the year where you see so just do this thing if you if you look at the fire profile if the if there is a tendency and you look at it from the standpoint of a baseline where you can say well legitimately the fires in the Pantanal over the last decade have been extremely large and they've been in the late dry season then I don't know the Pantanal personally but um but if that's if that's the case then that clearly speaks to the opportunity for emissions reductions if you can fundamentally reduce that pattern of the late dry season wildfires which by and large have very large emissions so that's you know I would say wherever whatever the system that Savannah systems that might exist out there in the world where that pattern occurs there is the opportunity to significantly reduce emissions yeah thank you thank you Jeff fully fully agreed like analysis of how are the fire patterns before um also if Anya was here I'm sure she would say well remember that um integrated fire management need to adjust different options for different ecosystems and see which of these options would be the best but um that it's also very very interesting Anya we have two questions wait so and we'll let you go to rest yeah thanks it's it's 1.22 am here yeah I think I think it is time for you I think uh I'm happy to answer someone asked for the carbon credit but I think I think we're gonna okay very quick question from um Karam Khan could uh any of you please elaborate about the carbon credit um how how did the well the question is how it could be sell and buy this is a too long of a question but I think what it's interesting is how Australia defined the cost of or the price of the carbon credit and with that we will finish and let you sleep well I think the price of the carbon credits is an interesting one I think I think industry when when the so when we effectively had a carbon tax under the carbon farming initiative I think the industry probably had some discussions with government saying well we could live with about this this level of taxing so that was when I think at that stage it was between actually between $23.50 and $24.50 a tonne um once the so that was under the Labor government once the um Liberal National Government got in that they went to a much more conservative approach and a least cost abatement so that's when we suddenly went to a price so the government's setting the price is I guess the the fundamental fundamental answer to that the government set the price for the tax in the first instance under the under the CFI but then under the emissions reduction they fundamentally reduced the price of carbon uh to between 10 and 16 dollars a tonne so that's that's where it fell after that but so government has set um the price excellent yeah Jeff okay I think it's time for you to sleep thank you so very much everybody thanks so much good good luck with the rest of the call thanks bye bye see you okay well thanks kindly to Jeff it's 1 30 for him in Australia so uh a warm thanks our next speaker um please um Jonas could you start sharing your screen let me introduce you we're going to have two speakers in one in one chat we're going to have Lara Steyl from the Brazilian national centre for prevention and fighting wildfires uh Lara holds a phd in civil engineer and she joined Prefogo Ibama in 2005 as an environmental analyst uh she comes on 15 years of experience in fire management and she is the coordinator of the interagency department promoting national and international cooperation and the development of activities related to integrated fire management with indigenous and rural communities Lara will be explaining us a bit the governance setting for prescribed burning in in the Serato ecosystem so Lara please go ahead uh thank you uh Rosa and uh good day to everybody I would like to to say thanks to the organizer of the event and the greetings to the audience it's a pleasure for me to to be here and and share this presentation I will uh together with Jonas later share some information and thoughts regarding integrated fire management in the in the Serato ecosystem uh Jonas if you can go to the next please slide oh thank you you have 15 minutes Lara okay I think it it will be like 10 minutes because uh I planted for that okay so for for starting I will show you this quick view of Brazil uh Brazil is a huge country with a total area of 80.5 million square kilometers about half of this area is covered by natural vegetation and in Brazil we we have five human ecosystems and I will focus my presentation today in in Serato next please uh 5 percent of the area of Brazil is covered by Serato and in Serato we have many protected areas 8.2 percent of the total area is protected by conservation units uh also in Serato we have uh 4.3 percent of the total area occupied by indigenous lands it's important to highlight here that indigenous and traditional communities play an important role on environmental protection in Brazil uh Serato is a has a a a long history with with fire it's a an ecosystem adapted to fire and also Serato is considered the the richest biodiversity savanna in the world and it has many different physiognomies as you can see in the in these photos in these slides and Jonas will talk talk about this a little bit more later next please along the years Serato has been affected negatively by changes in fire regimes and wildfires with many extensive and frequent late season wildfires in uh estimators uh carried out in 2012 was found that 60 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions related to land use and related to fire in the forest station came from Serato with the lack of an effective program for fire protection and the apolly apollies of zero fire where the total suppression of fire from the ecosystems was the focus we observed biodiversity loss and increasing in GAG emissions in addition to that and considering the zero fire policy and the presence of many indigenous communities in Serato we also met losses of traditional and indigenous uh knowledge on fire use and with this situation situation we started to rethink our strategies next please um we carried out activities with the indigenous communities in order to understand their knowledge about the the use of fire in the ecosystem together with them we developed monthly calendars showing the key natural resources and associated damage potential caused by uh fire according to the period of the year as you can see in the chart in the next slide next thank you uh if we use fire at the end of rainy season or at the beginning of dry season season represented by the green uh arrows the main resources of the environment are not badly affected unlike some of them can be positively influenced by this good fire on the other hand the later the later season fire represented in the chart by the red arrows will damage most part of the environmental uh resources next uh taking to account all these issues brazil started a paradigm shift from fire management the main focus on fire suppression we began to look to fire as a management too thanks to an international cooperation project with Germany the Cerrado Jalapão project brazil is advancing to the integrated fire management approach including one of its strategy uh the prescribed the burnings the integrated fire management approach and the prescribed prescribed the burnings started in a few indigenous lands in the conservation units as you can see in in this figure of the Cerrado Jalapão project and next uh soon with the the project uh the active the activities of integrated fire management were expanded to other areas we initiated in only three indigenous lands in Cerrado Cerrado nowadays integrated fire management occurs in 52 percent of the total indigenous lands in Cerrado in the same way integrated fire activities began in two conservation units and by uh 2019 36 conservation units were involved in this process next for uh indigenous lands we developed a methodology starting with indigenous traditional knowledge about fire in the ecosystem it's a participatory methodology that includes technological strategies as the few load maps the definition of of objectives and priority areas for conservation the implementation of prescribed the burnings and the evaluation and monitoring of the effects of fire as a follow-up of the the process next uh specifically for indigenous lands we defined the periods of prescribed the burnings according to this chart so we have what we called early prescribed fire in rainy season need prescribed fire at the end of rainy season and late prescribed fire at the beginning of dry season each one of them with its main objective in this context the fires at the late dry season are considered and controlled fires and they are to be avoided next please uh the preliminary results for indigenous lands indicate that increasing prescribed the burning approach means to decrease areas affected by wildfires as you can see in these two graphs next please analyzing the mortality of trees in in the graph of at left side we found that along three years of evaluation the areas managed with prescribed the fire presented the lowest mortality rate when compared with the fire exclusion and the areas affected by wildfires the areas affected by wildfires presented the highest mortality rate in the graph at at the right we are comparing the three prescribed fire regimes and what we can see as the early prescribed fires show the lowest mortality rate compared to mid and late prescribed fires next please results of the integrated fire management in conservation units show a tendency of decrease of areas affected by wildfires represented by the red in the bars when fire management is is applied represented by the green and the and the gray bars in in in in the graph next one please in the specific case of ecological station serra geral do tocantins in the left the graph uh the the analysis of the presentation of burning the area shows clearly that at the same time that the early dry season fires are applied represented by the green line the area affected by late dry season fires represented by the red line decreases uh in the yes sorry to interrupt two more minutes no problem okay thank you okay yes it's also part of these results are going to be shown by Jonas so let's move quickly from these results and focus on I have just one more slide let me finish thank you thank you comparing the largest fire area along the years we can see that the before integrated fire management that means 2010 to 2014 only one wildfire could hit an area of 100,000 hectares and after the integrated fire management activities implementation from 2015 to 2019 this pattern changes next please so what are our challenges and what do we expect it for the future in 2016 brazil adopted paris agreement and established our nationally determined contributions and for contributing to brazilian commitments fire issues must be tackled by multi stakeholders including government agencies, private sector, communities, NGOs, indigenous and traditional people therefore our challenge in the near future is to improve integrated fire management in the holy country and in coordination with all these stakeholders we need to understand the impact of fires on the GAG emission it's mandatory to have a fire emission baseline and estimate it's crucial to develop a free government level competence if we want to be effective and efficient brazil needs to have a national policy on integrated fire management and indeed we have a proposal for this policy since 2018 and the proposal is at the national congress but until now the document was not discussed inside the congress and finally the coordination among all the agencies involved is very important and as well as with the civil society well i finished my participation and i leave the stage to Jonas thank you thank you Lara um we're going to open the space for Jonas and we will open some questions for the panelists i for the participants later on Jonas let me introduce yourself Jonas Frank he works for remote sensing solutions and holds a phd on geography from the University of Bonn and his expertise lies on earth observation and environmental monitoring for a wide range of applications such as fire management, sustainable agriculture, forestry, public health or renewable energy. His focus is to implement innovative methods into operational practices that support policy development. He advises organizations on conservation, risk assessment and monitoring techniques and he has been working on so far a few months since 2014. The floor is yours Jonas. Thank you very much Rosas thank you very much Lara for setting the seado scene here um it's a pleasure to share a presentation with you so um i will start my presentation with a look back to the year 2014 when actually integrated fire management was introduced into seado um back then i was involved in a brazilian german cooperation project um prevention control and monitoring of wildfires in the seado which was funded by the german ministry for environment bmub so our role was to figure out together with my brazilian colleagues how earth observation can support the process of ifm implementation so on what we find is so we identified a high demand for geospatial data on fuel loads and fuel distribution for the planning of the early tri-season pre-scrub burning so that was the time when the fuel load mapping approach was developed that uses a special type of a spec for mixed analysis for lenset data later also sentinel tool that maps the amount of green and dry vegetation and also their densities so the planning of the fuel management could be directly supported by the fuel load maps in terms of where when and how to burn so the fuel load maps were quite a success and through capacity development the approach could be established as an operational tool in this seado um so um and it was also kind of incorporated into drafts of ifm policies in Brazil so next slide there we go so the benefit of the fuel load maps um i don't go into the methodology methodological details here there's a paper on it if you need some details i'm happy to share the paper with you but the main benefits of this fuel mapping approach for the integrated fire management was that there's up to the geospatial information on the fuel condition fuel load and also fuel connectivity that helps to plan and prioritize the early tri-season pre-scrub burning in the field but also to evaluate the effects of the ifm strategies and that's particularly what i would like to talk about today about the effects of the ifm what what we see today so um we had now the question in the in the kinds of six years later there's this kind of interesting project funded by c4 and ds8 and um and ziga um where we are now evaluating the effect of the ifm operation also in terms of the chronos gas mitigation potentials so uh we are actually addressing some main questions here so was the fragmentation of the fire regime successful so was pyro diversity achieved could the ifm and particularly the increased early tri-season pre-scrub burning changed the seasonality of fire we've heard about that important aspect earlier and if yes did that also lead to reduction of the mid and late tri-season burn areas another question was uh jeff was already mentioning that regarding to toward secret situation is there also a change in the amount of biomass or combustible fuel in the areas with ifm and we are applying the ipcc approach um in order to find out if those ifm operations could abate greeners gas emissions so first step to do so is um to allow kind of a large-scale mapping of the fuel loads um our colleagues from from ecmb and also ibarma um translated that approach into the google earth engine in order to provide the fuel load maps much large much for much larger areas and much faster to the protected areas managers so that was a great first step um for for this large-scale mapping what we did we modified that a little bit so uh that we can also have a combustible biomass model in order to translate the values from the fuel load map into quantitative quantitative tons per hectare combustible biomass values so for that we used pre and post fire collected biomass samples from the university of brazilia um and um to actually establish that combustible biomass model which is sejado specific so that was the first step to allow the analysis of the ifm mitigation potentials at a large scale so this map shows you actually the status of the pre-script burning in protected areas at at 2020 so we did an inventory of who's doing what in the protected areas here so you see the here the biome of the sejado with the national parks and ecological stations which are mainly managed by ecmb and you see the indigenous indigenous areas with the red and the yellow shows you those areas which already have a pre-script burning activity in 2020 so from these kind of areas we picked them with the longest history of integrated fire management activities so these were mainly the indigenous land of sherenche that is the ecological station of serra geralto to conchines the national park chapata does miss us and park estadualio shalla pow and now we are looking back the six years is i of m history to compare the results and the effect how i of m was effective and compared that to protected areas without i of m these protected areas which were selected were also based on similar characteristics like size amount of rain for location and things like that so the first thing we analyzed was the fragmentation so the question was actually how did the process of fragmenting the fire regime go over the last six years so you can this actually this process can nowhere better be seen as in the ecological station of serra geralto to conchines i also saw some participants marco and carola in in this webinar here so these are the heads behind the fire management in this area this area was one of the largest is a large area which was one of the most frequently burned areas in the seado so it's kind of pretty some parts of very degraded degraded places so here you see a fuel out map from 2014 so you see very large burned areas in this blue colors here in the fuel out map and also large areas that have a similar high amount of fuel that are prone to burn pretty soon so six years later you actually see the success of this fragmentation so the whole fire regime was changed into a mosaic style small scale fragments of different fire regimes so prior diversity was kind of achieved here and the large scale high intensity fires do not longer occur so carola marco this is your your success here well when we are talking about emissions we also have to talk about let's say the the seasonality of the fire for that we compared for the four protected areas with integrated fire management and the protected areas without integrated fire management about more than 20 000 hotspots over the last six years what you see here in bold you see the protected areas without IFM and with the dotted line you see the protected areas with IFM and besides the fact that even after three years or two years of integrated fire management catastrophic fires and mega fire years like 2015 or 2017 could be mitigated through integrated fire management you see a clear shift in the seasonality so from the late mid and late dry season fires more fires early dry season which are mainly due to the pre-square burning there but talking about emissions when we would like to calculate emissions we have to talk about also the effect of IFM on the burnt area because the burnt area is one factor in the equation of the IPCC approach when emissions are calculated so here all put areas from the motors burnt area product I'm sorry I'm still talking about I'm still talking about the hotspots from the motors hotspots are characterized early mid and late dry season fires and you here see there's a significant trend of increased early dry season fires by also reduced mid and late dry season fires for the protected areas with IFM okay you can argue that of course that that might be related to climate but when we compare the same same period for protected areas without IFM we don't see any clear trend so that is definitely the effect of integrated fire management that that there's a shift in seasonality also in terms of burnt area here we calculated the early dry season in brownish colors and the mid and late dry season burn areas in blue and there's a significant trend of reduced mid and late dry season burnt areas through integrated fire management which indicates a reduction of minus 66 percent of the mid and late dry season fires and the early dry season fires were increased from very low levels by about 69 percent so this is kind of the baseline so here is a kind of a potential for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions in order to calculate non-CO2 related greenhouse gas emission potentials we were using the IPCC approach it must be mentioned that CO2 emissions are not reported under IPCC for Savannah type non-forest fires due to the assumption that the CO2 emissions would be counterbalanced by the CO2 removals from the subsequently growth so but methane and nitrous oxide emissions are persistent in the atmosphere and are thus accountable here so this is the reason why under the IPCC approach we calculated the non-CO2 greenhouse gas mitigation potentials using that decoration that Rosa already showed in her first slides so for defector A which is the burnt area we are using the earth observation data from the burnt areas for modus and then for MB which is the mass of fuel available for combustion we are using the fuel load maps so usually you can use default values from the tables IPCC is providing but with having kind of a sehado specific combustible biomass model using the fuel load maps we can even have higher tier levels maybe going to tier two or tier three so we have up-to-date information about available combustible biomass per pixel at 30 meter special resolution yes thanks and so for the combustion factor and the emission factor these are default values from IPCC so let's say the math is still ongoing so this is a kind of calculations we are doing these days but we tried to upscale the estimated greenhouse gas mitigation potentials using this IPCC approach so given that baseline that we found with the shifted burnt areas from the four protected areas with IFM the following non-CO2 greenhouse gas abatement potentials through IFM estimated so the abatement potential of for all PAs for all protected areas in the sehado would be about 1.7 megaton CO2 equivalents over a period of six years that is approximately 0.3 megatons per year and the abatement potential for the whole sehado would be 17.8 megatons CO2 equivalents over the same period equals to almost three megatons CO2 equivalents per year but saying that we are calculating that in more detail these are preliminary results and must be confirmed through one last thought picking up Jeff's idea about not talking about abatement but also about sequestration we were also analyzing the effect of integrated fire management on the late trizes and fuel loads so what's after fire year what's still there in terms of combustible biomass and we analyzed that using the six years we were looking at and here you see that there is actually 0.3 tons per hectare accumulation of combustible biomass in the protected areas with IFM so that means that the fragmentation leads to longer regeneration cycles and longer fire return intervals which means that vegetation can kind of accumulate biomass so this total for the four protected areas that sums up to a total increase of approximately 350 000 tons of biomass which is approximately 150 000 tons of carbon stored on top so this is that's because of the fact an idea that additional greenhouse gas mitigation potentials through secrets the sequestration can be very interesting on the left hand side you see a typical burned area approximately two months after a burn so there's actually not much organic material in the upper soil layer there's no litter nothing and even the small three species trying to grow but can only do sprouting and sprouting because they get a cannot be killed after two after three years all the time so they cannot really grow above certain thresholds and having more fragments into the situation which you see on the right hand side there is a good potential of sequestration through the dead carbon litter pool the soil carbon and also the woody thickening part so this must be also an interesting part of a sequestration not only abatement so thank you very much thank you Jonas and thank you Laura I think Brazil has shown an spectacular example of governance of fire management governance and I actually think that from what Lara was mentioning for all the efforts that have been done to train the indigenous communities to the very successful implementation rates and then the results that both Lara and yourself were showing this is a spectacular spectacular implementation policy success um two questions please one goes to Lara um Lara what would be your recommendation in terms I mean I don't think I've ever seen such a successful implementation program for fire management that has led to such excellent results two questions in terms of governance what would be your lessons learned for other colleagues that may want to start applying some integrated fire management and the other is how would emission abatement affect the frail the red plus frail commitment for the Cerrado do you think it could be incorporated somehow within the frail mitigation targets and this goes to Lara Jonas thank you Raza well uh regarding the first question I think that we are still learning the lessons because we are in the process of implementing integrated fire management in Brazil but by now what I would say is that the integration of agencies and also to be connected with the communities it's two key points for implementation of integrated fire management because I um you said that uh we have many trainings to indigenous people but we have many lessons from them to us we learned a lot from them because they have been in Cerrado area for thousands of years and they know how to manage uh to manage that regarding the second question I think that we needed first of all as as I said in in in my my last slide we need to have a baseline of the emissions regarding fire and we don't have this yet so first step is to have this baseline of emissions caused by by fires in in in Brazil and so after that we can see what to do with this information and and we will be able to measure how much we are avoiding emissions with this approach of integrated fire management I don't know if I if you are very much very much actually it's actually very interesting and I put one more question and I move on we need to move on uh one also will go to Jonas um for the baseline the way that Australia has estimated the basin has been the difference between the late dry season and the early dry season but I guess there might be other ways of doing it do you have any hints of of what would be of preference or because you already have enough information from from the chief shift of emissions from late dry season into early dry season right now yeah I think that we we started the integrated fire management in 2014 2015 depending on on the area that we are talking about and um we well I I think that we we we we need to to to really understand how these uh uh emissions that we are avoiding the late dry season indeed I mean we we we need to measure uh how much we are avoiding you know we we don't know this properly you know we need to have this with there are many methodologies to do it but at state level I mean at the government level we are not doing that for fire and so we need to to have a methodology for that understood thank you um for Jonas two questions for you um some colleagues of yours are asking if the GEE codes for the fuel loads would be shared that was one and then someone asks what is the difference between combustible biomass and just fuel available and and biomass basically um well so first question I cannot answer because this is actually um the ownership is with the Brazilian colleagues and ecmbu and ebama who actually implemented that in the google earth engine um so no answer here sorry for that but the second question is um the fuel load maps are showing the fractions of dry biomass green biomass and let's say that their densities per pixel in percentage kind of um that doesn't relate directly to a kilogram per square meter but by using these pre and post fire biomass samples which we got from the university of brasilia they actually took biomass before fire and after fire then they tried it um so they exactly know what part of the biomass which we see in the satellite data pre and post fire actually was combusted so and we use that data to set up this model transforming the values from the fuel load map into the combustible combustible biomass map in kilograms uh per square meter tons per hectare whatever and this can be directly used for this IPCC formula to calculate emissions the emissions thank you so much Jonas I know Lara needs to go and thank you so much Lara I know you're very busy and it's also the working time for you someone is asking you um could you please comment the participation on the ministry of the media ambiente on the implementation of the fire management project in the brasilian serrano yes of course uh uh ebama and the ECME bill we are two agencies linked to to the ministry for environment and they are with us and the the ministry for environment are responsible for implementing the policies so in the national policy for integrated fire management that i mentioned was built together with the ministry for environment here in brasil so they have participation in the holy process and in the in the in the international project cooperation project with the head with Germany the serrano jalapun project the coordinator of the project from brasil side was the ministry for environment so they are full involved in in in this process very much enjoyed thank you so much Lara thank you for your time thank you for fantastic presentation and congratulations for amazing implementation of prescribed burning thank you so much thank you very much okay um let me offer the open the floor then to our next speaker who would be uh the coordinator of the southern miambo network if i said that correctly natasha rivero uh from the university eduardo montlain she was born in maputo mozambique and she holds a phd on environmental scientists from the university of virginia in the u.s excuse me she comes on 25 years of experience on forest restoration and she's coordinated the miambo network of southern africa since 2011 and also she's running long-term ecological research in the niasa national reserve northern mozambique we are looking forward to hearing about miambo thanks very much natasha thanks loza um can you see my screen i'm not sure if i i'm sharing yes yes we can you need to maximize it okay is it fine now it is perfect now natasha go ahead many thanks much wasn't i would like to also thank the organizers of this webinar it's a pleasure to me to be here and be able to share my experience uh on fires in the miambo lands of mozambique so i apologize in advance for long title but basically i'm going to be talking about fires in the context of the miambo lands in mozambique um a part of the presenting the miambo network i'm also working for the miambo land university so let me first introduce you to the miambo lands of southern africa they are the largest dry tropical forest ecosystem in the world as you can see in the top map the green areas are the dry forest ecosystems and miambo southern africa by far the largest ecosystem so the the recent estimations of miambo points to 1.9 million spectrometers across seven countries in southern africa i should say that this is a one third decrease in the area since the the last estimations in from white in 1983 well a part of its extension miambo are also very important ecologically and socially they are called social woodlands they are very diverse in terms of plant species and very high levels of enemies as well and they represent habitat for important wildlife species such as the mega herbivores and the wide variety of carnivores uh interesting about miambo and comparable to the cerrado it's that it's a very disturbance driven ecosystem being fired the topic of our discussion today just one of the the factors socially the miambo provides goods and services for a large proportion of the population both rural and urban population in southern africa and because of this long-term relationship the miambo there are interesting interactions between people and the woodlands and these interactions need to be taken into consideration and managing the animals so the pictures is just are just a few illustrations of the the resources from the miambo providing the support to the livelihoods of the our population um well fires are part of the miambo ecology they have been there since many times many years now they they have probably arrived with people we always say that the people are the natural causes of fire in miambo and they use uh they use the fire as the the major management tool for almost all activities such as hunting, shipping, cultivation, hunting, gathering and other activities so because of these uh long-term relationship really most plant species in miambo are adapted to fires and rather even depend on fires to regenerate to germinate to flowering etc the thing is that the fire regimes are very important and they are changing as Rosa mentioned and Annie also mentioned in the beginning the fire regimes are changing but very few experiences in IFM exist in the region and in Mozambique there are non IFM experiences so when I talk about fire regimes in in miambo we say that the normal fire frequency it's every two to three years when the gas fuel on the in the understory burns and these are important to maintain the ecosystem as it is known miambo but a change in to hot annual fires can degrade the ecosystem and impose several structural and um compositional changes to the ecosystem so now let me talk about the Miasa Special Reserve which is the place where I've been working for the last 16 years now uh so the the Miasa Special Reserve is not just the largest protected area in Mozambique but is also the largest protected area in miambo with lands worldwide so Miasa is located in the very north of Mozambique in the border with Tanzania and it has undergone several management systems since its creation in the in the future so what's so special about Miasa well the combination of factors vegetation covered mostly by miambo lands wildlife a part of elephants there are other mega herbivores and also a large population of the herbivores well as any other protected area in the country there are population with human population living in Miasa reserve 60 000 people and depending on forest resources and of course using fire as a management so with this inspiration in mind I started my my research back in 2004 where I established permanent sample plots and I've been monitoring the vegetation according to the fire regimes so I'm presenting some of my results here the top map is the fire frequency map from Maldives from 2000 to 2012 showing that the most of the reserve burns with the normal regime of every three years but there is a large proportion also 45 percent of the reserve burning annually so the regime is all kind of changing the result the graphs on the bottom they show results from the four-mind gap model which was calibrated from our field data and basically it shows that changing the fire regime from no fire on the left so the graph shows the net ecosystem exchange over the 600 years of our simulation and the left graph is the no fire regime in which the ecosystem is carbon natural like maturity but then if the the system burns annually the the system can be converted in a carbon source so showing that fire management it's important in the system of course we don't want a situation of no fire so maintaining the three the fire frequency of every three years it's probably the best option in this one the modeling data agrees well with our field data showing in this graph that the fire frequency the farthest to right is the annual fire frequency in which the carbon annual increment is significantly reduced compared to the low fire frequencies um we also have shown I'm not I'm not showing here the results but we have proved also that there are also compositional and structural differences linked to fires across the Nias reserve and they are shown here in these pictures um well I would like also to briefly mention about this USAID funded project that it's bringing now new elements to our research basically you want to explore more in depth the relationship between fires and elephants as engineers of the ecosystem as you can see on the bottom pictures but also we want to bring the the dimension of the human population living in the reserve understanding their practice since their traditional knowledge is on fire management and as Lara said it's very important that we understand how they use fires so we can better frame ISM programs on this uh so this is a very uh we it's a still ongoing project so we don't have results to show here but we'll be having the results soon so fire management in Mozambique here it's a bit of a sample of the legal framework in Mozambique as you can see in general the the legal framework is very prohibitive the forest law and its regulation talk about fire prevention and state fire fires as a crime um there's a bit of fire management in the regulation but just mentioning fire breaks the recent forest policy from 2019 also talks about coercive measures measures to avoid the fires but the states they need to prevent controlling a lot of fires our Mozambique our action plan on preventing and controlling fires is out of date now but again it's very prohibitive and it doesn't mention the fire management at all in the in the document so uh uh fire ISM and our NDCs Mozambique has submitted the NDCs to the UNFCCC it states that the the national strategy on the adaptation adapting and mitigating climate change is the main document and the document identifies strategic actions towards creating resilience to climate change and it also includes the national action plan for climate change there are 14 strategic actions but none of them are directly related to fire management and the national strategy also mentions fires very briefly very vague it says include fire control in regeneration protection whatever that means for me it's very vague so but the potential is there and this is preliminary results from a gap fire model when we apply the the dm 0029 uh for the answer is there this is a preliminary results but basically the top table shows the baseline scenario in red and then the project scenario in green and the results from the gap fire model indicates that the first the second column I would say it's the busy business as usual uh emissions uh and uh the last column is the reduction in emissions from shifting the business as usual to the project scenario basically the project scenario it's reverting the situation of having more the late racism fires to having more early dry season fires and reducing the late racism fires and the results show that we can get a 60 percent reduction in the emissions from the fire so in summary we I should say that first policies in governance need to be revised and clearly fire management has to be given the the right emphasis the needs the red plus system in muslim needs taking into consideration that the the market is not only carbon but there are other non-carbon benefits and fire is it's very important for those non-carbon benefits so needs to consider IFM as well we need to get on the ground and from policies and governance we need to actually have experiences as brazil has in place so I would say that for now we don't have any experience but the meaça special reserve is hitting the first steps towards IFM problems and of course research needs to be a continued action needs to be better coordinated and also aligned with decision-making and IFM initiatives but before I finish I would like to briefly mention the neomonetwork of southern africa which is the all the stock seagull the network it is well it covers more than one other people across the the world not just the patreon but other places of the world as well as the neomonetwork so here you can see the webpage for updated information our portfolio of action it's very diverse we promote collaborative research action we have several projects going on right now we also link with other systems and networks in southern africa such as the south net or southern africa fire network in which which is the fire network for the region and we collaborate with south net in several ways we also work on disseminating information not just in terms of scientific publications but also policy briefs and I should mention our recent publication on the neomonetwork that was a couple of months ago and I think I'm done I would like to acknowledge all my partners for funding sources and also people working with the over the years and with these I would like to thank you and I'm very open to thank you so much Natasha um this was spectacular actually spectacular the results that appear from the modeling process of moving fire from uh late right this and into the early right season um I have a couple of questions for you first it's a bit more ecological someone asked me at the very beginning of this webinar how do I define uh dry ecosystems and the the question is absolutely valid and my question to you is would you define neombo as a dry ecosystem yes I saw that question and I also really get a question that neombo as a dry forest ecosystem although when you get to the western side of neombo angola in southern drc you get the more wet neombo but the seasonality is there in the precipitation changes of uh you know for the dry forest ecosystems are there so they don't get more than 1500 millimeters a year so I would say yes it's a dry forest ecosystem yeah yeah I mean I I also answer that question the same way that it is a recurrent even though the question probably needs more thinking but the um for for this webinar the way that we are defining dry ecosystems is a recurrent drought period uh through seasonalities um so that is for us the way to sorry in this chat to discuss that um also regarding the governance setting and I think that's very interesting compared to brazil because probably brazil also has a fire no fire policies in the sense that using prescribed burning uh might not be easy to apply but somehow there was a way to solve this issue so there's one one question then to Lara in terms of governance um is would you be able to share some lessons learned on how the situation of Mozambique right now where applying fire into the landscape is still not very policy clear right yeah yeah that's yeah please go yeah go ahead yeah no basically we are in the very very early stages as I mentioned the our policies are very prohibitive uh well the fire slow it's under revision and I'm hoping that the fire issue comes out very you know properly in this division of the fire slow in terms of forest governance they're still not very clear where fires are they used to be at or at where in the national disaster management institute so they are taken as a as a disaster as a natural disaster but at the point they just they haven't you know addressed the issue of fire so the forestry the the national directorate of forest will be I would say the the institution in charge of fires but for now there's no clear you know mandates where fire should be I would say mandate and actions actually on the ground very interesting there is a question from Kate Park um it see she's mentioning that it is great that you are considering non-carbon objectives too but she was wondering whether the focus of reducing fires in some areas of Nias of Niasa and that is probably the situation I'm not sure you said reducing fires might mean that you end up with greater homogeneity in vegetation structure and composition our work shows for that that biodiversity conservation greater pyro diversity is needed in wetter savannas like the mi umbo my concern is that the fire evasion activities might work against this objective can you comment yes I would say I I'm not I don't think reducing fires is the option I would say that fire management is needed now to maintain the natural fire regime of fire frequency in this case of every two to three years okay and I would also think that but you know since we don't have experiences on the ground with complete results results I would say trying to work on the early dry season fires to reduce the fuel load and reduce the intensity in the late dry season fires and I would say reducing it's an option in the very last question will be an issue because of these fires yeah I guess you were meaning for those areas where the increased fire frequency has moved away from the original interval period of three years you were saying that that was the normal interval period and now it's moving into one so what you would like to move back into that yeah I mean we saw a very clear aridity trend in Mozambique we see a very clear climate pressure on um on the eastern yeah on on the eastern part of the south african of the african continent have you seen an effect of climate interacting with fire are you measuring climate in your stations in Niasa? We haven't we haven't yet worked on on climate but actually on the four mind model we want to you know activate the module on on climate change to be able to get that feature but not yet but I should say that my plots are across a fire frequency gradient and the fire frequency is related to the aridity index so we might be able to get some potential. Thank you so much Natasha thanks a lot let me open the floor for the last but not least the speaker we have with us Roland I'm sure I'm not going to pronounce that well third noise from the Free University of Amsterdam apologies for your pronunciation of your surname Roland has a master on sustainable energy science from the Utec University and he has run research on carbon sequestration and storage his current research quantifies greenhouse gas emissions and higher results from fires in butyl and savannah in africa and southern uh in in brazil and southern africa to estimate emission factors and their variability the goal is to better capture emission factors in regional and global emission models let me very quickly um put your your your presentation into context um we were trying also to see some example of fire integrated fire management in the Botswana or Cabango uh river delta but it happened that this wetland area it has a very strict fire regulation it's not easy to work on on fire management on that area and then because of the complications of being um a wetland also um this this is right now uh integrated fire management in the delta is right now not happening but those of you who have interest there is a document and from the early 90s that was working on integrated fire management in the ocher bangle delta for your interest and um Roland will be focusing on one of those variables from the equation of emissions that is fundamental also to uh promote emission reductions from dry late season into early dry season Roland the floor is yours welcome well thank you Rosa for a nice uh elaborate introduction um well uh like shit uh my name is Roland Verneuil I'm a PhD student at the Freie University in Amsterdam and uh today I'll present some of my research to you on the spatial variable uh the spatial temporal variability of biomass burning and emission factors and then specifically focusing on the savannah biome uh Rosa also asked me to uh share some of the the work that we've been doing in the um in northwestern Botswana which unfortunately is not uh focusing on the ocher bangle delta um so at the bottom of the screen here you see a map that that is already showed a couple of times well this shows the carbon emissions from global biomass burning as calculated through GFET4S and the way these emissions are calculated uh is presented here at the top of the screen um which uh Rosa also already showed and I will focus on this last fraction the emission the emission factor which is often defined as the grams of gas emitted for each kilogram of dry biomass burned now in general we know that if we burn earlier in the season that this tends to burn less fuel um but we also know that burning earlier in the season uh if we burn too early in the season if the vegetation is still green or maybe even moist that these fires tend to emit more carbon monoxide methane and nitrous oxide as opposed to carbon dioxide um which are more harmful for the climate compared to uh compared to full efficient combustion um so if this is the case then this may reduce some of the emission gains that we that we want from burning less fuel so for this reason uh I would like to state it's important to always have combined measurements of the amount of fuel that's being consumed as well as the emission factors uh because models like the current way that we measure emissions um don't take into account this seasonality um and use biostatic emission factors basically um now the novelty of us uh one of the novelties of the way we've been doing this is we use drones this has the advantage of allowing us to follow the fire from front around so we can take a lot more measurements from a single fire we can also target specific areas within the plume that we want to know more about um so basically what you see here is uh this setup is consists of a drone that's fitted with a sampling system which fills up four bags in one flight so each bag fills for 35 seconds um after those uh bags are filled then we return back to the ground and we reload it with bags so this way we typically get about 60 to 80 samples from a single fire um at the uh currently we um uh we've been measuring uh CO2 carbon monoxide methane and nitrous oxide so the same evening after we take the measurements we analyze uh we analyze the bags using um cavity ringdown spectroscopy uh from now on we can also measure PM 2.5 and black carbon unfortunately all of the current uh fieldwork uh activities for 2020 were canceled so we don't have any data to present on that yet um besides emissions we also measure the fuel so we uh collect and weigh uh different classes of fuel uh so here you see a transect so before the area burns we tend to collect uh the the grasses the litter the coarse wood debris and um we uh we lock the the state of the trees and uh we calculate uh we uh and how many trees are there and then we do that again after the fire to see how much what the severity of the fire was and how much of the fine fuel was burned etc and we also take uh carbon carbon content and nitrogen content and isotopic values so so just uh for the people that that are not familiar with emission factors just uh to give a short introduction on how these factors are actually calculated um so to get the uh the emissions we use a background concentration which is determined before the fire and we uh uh subtract this from the concentration in the samples and the emission factors are then based on the uh the fuel the carbon content of the fuel which is a weighted average of the uh the total carbon that is combusted so the different fuel classes that we use and then there's a factor to compensate for the molecular mass of the species that you're uh that you're measuring at that point and then because we know that we for carbon that we that we actually capture a significant amount of the carbon that is being emitted so we capture about 95 to 99 percent uh then we also can see how much of this carbon was emitted as a certain species um now we also know that we don't capture all the carbon so for some fractions of the carbon like the pm 2.5 up till now uh and the non-methane hydrocarbons we base this so we estimate these values based on uh literature uh on previous literature so since these draw measurements are novelty um we um we compared them to uh measurements that uh that have currently been done before like mass measurements uh which basically have a continuous measurement uh at at one fixed point in the fire so here on the right side of the screen you see the measurement mass this is a fire uh in the Kruger National Park by the way um and this is what that looks like so on the left side you see a fire a time profile basically and uh then you see that when the fire front passes you see a sharp peak of uh predominantly carbon dioxide and black carbon for instance and uh as the further we the fire front passes the more we get into the residual smoldering combustion which is uh dominated by carbon monoxide and uh a methane as well as p in 2.5 so um comparing the measurements that we did using the our methodology using the drone uh comparing that to the mass um so here on the right side of the screen you can see uh fire average emission factors for the two methodologies and you see that they agree quite well um so over the past three years uh i've been looking at various vegetation types within the Savannah biome and uh the goal of this is really to capture the variability that there is in terms of emission factors so we've been looking at relatively dry savannahs like the Kruger National Park uh and uh northwestern Botswana and also looked at uh relatively uh high uh high rainfall areas like the Gelapun area which was previously discussed by Jonas and as well as the the Nelsa National Reserve which Natasha just talked about besides the the uh spatial variability we're also of course interested in the temporal variability since this is very relevant for uh for integrated fire management so we tend to revisit these places uh in the early dry season so roughly may uh June for these these southern hemisphere places and um as well as the late dry season so our measurements in roughly uh September October so this is still very much work in progress so um uh but this is pretty much uh what that looks like so we have uh we found a lot of uh variability within the emission factors in um for different savannah ecosystems so here on the top you see the carbon monoxide on the second graph is the represents the methane emission factors and then the bottom graph represents the nitrous oxide emission factors and you see that carbon monoxide and methane are very well correlated and for nitrous oxide we we we know a lot less so there's not a lot of measurements about that so far um on the right side you see the orange bar that represents the the biome for the study averaged emission factors as uh represented in uh savannah literature also some of them if if they mention it and we also uh separated them out for fire averaged emission factors um and the more what I want to say with this this graph is basically with the emission factor variability is substantial within the savannah biome however much of this mixture this variability typically occurs in small landscape features that that don't necessarily represent a lot of the burnt areas for instance the humid grasslands and the gallery forest in in the jalapane as well as domboes in the early dry season when they're still relatively green um but this may indicate that there's a need for a different approach a targeted approach for different vegetation types um now uh Rosa asked me to also uh tell you something give some introduction on the project that we've been doing in the northwest of Botswana led by the group of Jeremy Russell Smith um here the the picture you see uh you see a very diverse group of uh of people uh so some researchers from Australia and and the Netherlands as well as some of the uh indigenous landowners that uh were also starring in Jeff's presentation as well as the people um the son the young quasi son that uh that live in the northwest of Botswana um so this is roughly the area that that that we've been looking at again I'd like to stress that this is not the though it's close it's not the Okavanga Delta and it's not similar in terms of vegetation type fire management or uh or land use uh in fact this is a woodland savannah with mean average rainfall of about uh about 600 millimeters a year that mean annual rainfall here on the left side you see the fire frequency in the years 2001 to 2019 as derived from the modus modus burnt area and on the right side you see the fire emissions over the years 2003 to 2019 as a as calculated through GFET4S um so looking at this this it becomes clear why we chose this area um it's a it's an area that although it's it's relatively uh relatively dry so it's really at the bottom of the of the scale for the the australian fire management approach um it's still an area that burns a lot and uh although much lower than the uh than the more humid areas to the north it still has a very significant emissions so this is what it looks like on the ground so this is near the sodillo hills enclave and on the left side you see a fire which is uh lit by uh so it's a prescribed fire lit in june by the fire managers on the right side you see a non-prescribed burn that we've been measuring uh in uh uh september so what becomes clear is that the impact on the vegetation uh is is much more severe on uh in the case of the the late dry season fire and this was confirmed by our field plots of course um so here this graph shows on the left three uh box plots it shows the emission factors that we measured from uh dry savannah in uh in in Botswana um to put that into perspective we also show some uh emission factor plots uh that we've done the same year in uh more humid savannah in the Niasa national reserve uh in collaboration with natascha river and um what you see here is that uh the seasonal difference in dry savannah between uh the early dry season and late dry season although there the fires in the late dry season were significantly more severe is that the emission factors didn't change that much however you see for instance in other vegetation types like woodland savannah that these these differences can be very different so there you see an increase in in methane emission factors in the late dry season and uh you see that for instance uh smaller landscapes features like like tumble grasslands which typically uh were more determined by geomorphology and uh and soil type as well um that this this pattern is is uh very different over the season so uh our implications for integrated fire management in Botswana uh in the results indicate that uh that technically it's it's possible so it's feasible uh at least uh the um the emission factors are not significantly different in the early and late dry season um the also we found that that in the late dry season the the fuel loads tended to be higher mostly through an uh an input of deciduous litter and we found that uh in the late dry season the uh the fires were significantly more intense so thanks for listening if you have any questions please drop them in the chat Roland that was super interesting um and just to put this back into context um emission factors have a role on defining emissions uh the year by multiplying the area burn the fuel that it's burned and then the amount of of of that fuel that goes into different categories of gases I I wanted to ask you a couple of questions um yeah first how different are the values that you are getting from those that are in the refinement of the 2019 guideline are you finding uh very side specific responses for emission factors in the sense that if it is emission factors are very side specific it's going to be very hard to give something that is really scalable so uh how how would you improve the IPCC the refinement value so that that is something uh definitely uh it's not possible to get these these type of field measurements for uh on a global scale so that's something that we're working on now as well uh is basically looking at how we can scale these factors uh using satellite data if we can uh if we can uh understand this this variability and maybe even predict some of this variability uh so that would be a good a good start uh I agree I agree yeah yeah agreed perfect no I would say probably as as Georg was saying for Australia it was very important for them to get their own emission factors for their own vegetation uh in in Australia so that they have more targeted also reduce uncertainties in their own emissions right so that would be a good reason why some countries that want to enter the carbon market they might want to do some of the drone uh analysis that you are also doing for the ecosystem so it's it's definitely important to get more data and more yeah more variability perfect uh let me let me see what the attendees are saying do you have a question for Roland if not I have one extra for you Roland and we will open just the final session um I have a question regarding the combination of fuel of fuel types and vegetation types so when you are burning uh you need to assign that emission factor to certain bar well how would I say that to certain ecosystem type but you could have different vegetation types within the same definition right so how are you capturing the variability of the vegetation in your emission factors because I can see that to be hard you mean like different types of fuels within within within a fire imagine miambo you could have like a gradient of uh booty uh forested uh canopy covers within the miambo ecosystem so how would you be able to separate sabanas that have different percentages of canopy cover for it how do you so this is this is definitely something that is uh very difficult like at the moment these these um uh these separations are quite strict but um what we're trying to do now for instance is to um to couple the the emission factors that we measured at a certain uh uh location uh couple that to uh more uh uh remotely sense data so for instance then we uh we can combine the the um the fractional tree cover that we have from uh motors or even land set scale and combine that to uh emission factors from a certain pixel and that would be the way to scale this up I think or to capture this uh this variability uh with a combination of extra for satellite data uh loubert short has a question for you roland he says he asked uh so what are the primary sources of variation at the moment what have you find is vegetation type more important than fuel moisture content um it's a combination of the two I'd say so in some some vegetation types we see that uh that within the span of our our measurements uh we don't see that much of a seasonal difference uh in other vegetation types the seasonal difference is used but this this may also be related to just the time span that we measure so for instance in dry savannas which are already fully cured when we start started the the the measurements so in june uh when we started the integrated fire management uh damn you don't see this this huge seasonality whereas some some for instance um uh dombo's may be still green at this point and that's why we uh yeah that's why it's important I think to to look at uh to specialize to use a targeted approach for these kind of small landscape features uh because of course there might be other considerations that you still want to burn these these vegetation types under under these circumstances except yeah that is that is perfect okay roland that was fantastic super interesting thank you so much also you have given us together with Jonas some methodological uh tools to work on understanding mapping fuel loads and mapping emission factors um we are going to now close the webinar by I'm going to ask the panelists uh actually to share with the attendees um whatever lessons learned you would like to share with with them on your experiences with integrated fire management and um how it can reduce emissions and how that could be considered as part of mitigation targets that goes into different cover markets so uh those of you who would like to participate um just jump in um I would like to start by mentioning uh three of them um one is what I'd like to make a recall that this webinar has focused on dry ecosystems and it has focused on prevention activities within integrated fire management and particularly prescribed burning but as Anja said one needs to look at the whole portfolio of options prescribed burning might work for some places it might not work for others so we don't want to sell this webinar as his prescribed burning is the solution for reducing fire emissions any activity that reduces areas burned the fuel loads and the emission factors that would apply as valid and it doesn't have to be prescribed burn also another warning that when we think of the scalability we're talking about dry ecosystems and we already have discussed the dry ecosystems here is vaguely defined but basically we're talking about areas that have drought stress recurrent drought stress during annual seasonalities um but this type of activity would never be implemented into a wet non-fire adapted ecosystem so also be aware that this is not the lesson that you are taking from this webinar that this can be extrapolated to any ecosystem or that this has to be the right tool there is an interesting debate to be held on wetlands and I think because of the situation of the Pantanal and also because of the situation of the Paraná Delta which is a frequently burned area but this year got completely out of control and also for seaforce expertise also an interest in Indonesia the topic of how to reduce emissions in wetland areas would probably require further attention because as Jeff said you need to do the baseline if there was fire before and you can find a way to reduce the fire in relation to the baseline that would work but because wetlands have soil component that also burns it has to be carefully decided which type of integrated fire management it has to be applied and and and that would be my highlights for these webinar if for instance Lara that has if she's here because she had to leave actually but if Lara was here I think this expertise of of El Cerrado would be fantastic I think she left yeah she left okay so I think from Lara's point of view one thing that is also a very important lesson learned is the interagency collaboration you cannot do that alone with just one agency the same way that you when we are working right now with blue carbon and regulated carbon markets at national scales even though you might want to sell forest carbons as a banner carbon you still need to have a dialogue with the ministry of finance with the ministries of infrastructure with the mining industries you really want to have a very coordinated debate about this process of multi-agency collaboration and in the case of Australia what really acted as a very strong enabling factor was the fact that there was already a carbon price associated to an already ready to implement methodology so scientists in this webinar the the best way to support the movement of this type of activities is to make sure that we have all the data ready to start applying that and kind of pitching the the government to move ahead with that so Natasha Jonas Roland if any of you would like to add some comments about the scalability about issues to be concerned please go ahead I'm I'm back into the the session if I'm allowed to say something oh yes of course Anja thank you yeah I've just saw the last couple of minutes of Lara and then could see Natasha and Ronald so and actually thank you very much for this very interesting webinar and I'm and unfortunately couldn't follow Lara but I would like to highlight again and I've just kind of written it into the chat as well don't fall into the trap that IFM is only prescribed burning I really would like to caution you and to look at all the other elements and I've in hearing Ronald talking quite a lot of saying yeah IFM IFM and the and then referring to controlled or prescribed burning so it is it is one element of integrated fire management and we had very long discussions in Brazil to really break this cycle of thinking that now prescribed burning is the solution to many other challenges and problems on the ground so just yeah want to emphasize this again so controlled or prescribed burning whether it's on large scale with government agencies or whether it's controlled burning with communities is is one solution for the or can be one solution for a specific problem or challenge on the ground absolutely Anja absolutely thank you absolutely for reminding that and let me let me have the the opportunity also to ask you someone was asking about a mission abatement for wetland areas do you have some experience there no not a mission abatement I mean wetland areas have been connected in the chat with Diane I think is her name um yeah um we just finished a close to project on West Kalimantan on this is mainly peatland in West Kalimantan but we were not kind of highlighting or emphasizing their pre-squared burning for prevention measures it was more on the community based fire management side introducing introducing alternative use of fire for income but I've been in contact with Diana yeah perfect actually during the chat someone asked what about promoting agricultural activities with zero fire and I mean the question do have some interest in the sense that a lot of the fires or some of these fires that reach to the forest come from agricultural fires but depending on the continents many of them are just provoked to to to transform the land use and advance the the expansion of other land uses but the role of agriculture and fire we are not discussing it here although I would fully agree it does have a component also of connection with what we are discussing here for sure would you like to mention something on that Ania on the role of fire in agriculture I think that is worth an own webinar yes yeah because it is rather complex also looking in different countries and and different fire uses in agriculture and looking at traditional the traditional indigenous fire use on shifting cultivation or now kind of changing agriculture systems and the use of fire so like all these fires in a lot of fires in Indochina for example Myanmar India is and the smoke-haste pollution is burning of the agriculture waste yeah the the rice harvesting waste for example so yeah I would say we can open an own webinar on that I agree Ania and Rosa here is Lara I didn't leave yet the webinar I just would like to comment very quickly regarding this alternative to fire use in agriculture that is an interesting project that was carried out in Brazil and in Bolivia and now it's in Ecuador this project is called Amazon without fire and the focus of this project is to have trainings and and capacitation to small communities how to manage the the land without the use of fire so for people who are interested in this in this topic please search in the google amazon without fire project thank you wonderful Lara thank you so much sorry I didn't see you there sorry about that thank you let me let me open this space for Natasha Natasha would you like to share some experiences on on on what would be the lessons learned that you might want to talk to other beyond both colleagues in in the network about reinstoring um fire regimes and one question I have for you is why do you think fire regimes are changing in especially in a in a protected area thank you Rosa um yeah fire regimes are changing for several reasons I think one of the main reasons is population growth the the rates of population growth across the region are very high the two percent a year are less for the old region so and because most of the people are rural and depend on the forest resources shifting cultivation is one of the main activities you know fire being one of the main management tools then the fire frequencies are increasing but there's also your question about the climate change and how the the climate plays a role in changing the fire regimes I think there's also this issue although it's not studied in depth in the region but for sure climate change if it's not if not if not today it will play in the near future a role in changing fire regimes so my my I would say my lessons from the the what my experiences in Mozambique and in the region I would say that we have to include you know local people traditional knowledge in these IFM programs as as we have discussed here people are living in Myanmar in Sarada for many years now the experiences that we don't integrate with this knowledge I don't think will be successful in our the fire management and as I said also the the case of Mozambique governance and policies need to be adjusted and fire needs to be taken into consideration really in our in our policies and in our governance I should mention that in the region in the Myanmar region Tanzania I guess it's the only country with experience and and I would say successful experience in integrated fire management but we need more than that just you know spreading across the region actually that reminds me of the fantastic initiative that Roland was showing us with the with the bringing of the Australian colleagues into the Miombo region that that was a fantastic initiative how wonderful Roland and Jonas would you like to mention something yes I mean thank you very much well I'm not in the position to talk about the IFM implementation in the different countries in Mozambique Australia Brazil or elsewhere but because I'm a data person but my lesson learned was actually that there's excellent data set which comes from space so the Earth observation data can deliver data-driven arguments for IFM implementation not only pre-squared burning as as Anja said let's say the whole integral measurement of IFM effects can can in parts be well monitored using Earth observation data and well I'm happy to to support these local endeavors with these data-driven approaches so well I'm not in the position to talk about IFM implementation per se but there's a lot of excellent data there which can support communicate IFM activities totally Jonas and I actually think the few modeling that you develop for in collaboration with other colleagues is an fantastic example of how this can be directly implemented for implementation and for policy development so I think that that is a fantastic example that was that was totally excellent so that was a kind of a straightforward approach which was totally uptaken by the Brazilian colleagues so they really implemented on it on an operational basis they are doing that since many years in the meantime though so this is a great success story where data is also used to plan to evaluate the effects of IFM excellent totally thank you so much Jonas Roland you were the last so maybe you already said a lot of things but let me open in case you want to say something else um yeah sure no I thought it was uh it was very nice to see like uh uh the the huge amount of positive uh yeah effectiveness that there was uh there was presented and just the the amount of mostly like the the the the change that has occurred over the the last descent in Australia and Brazil and now also I think uh in Africa so I was uh yeah inspired I agree I think I think with those words I'd like to finish this webinar because inspiring is the word that the case examples that we've seen the the implementation work in in Serato was a spectacular the the positive results also that have been showed by Lara and by Jonas of the effects on on vegetation and burn areas and emissions are like like taking out from a from a from a book and um Australia also is a good example of how things can really move when they're at the right and enable conditions and have been a win-win situation so thanks very much to all the speakers I know you were all busy there are different timings Jerof is is an angel he stayed with us until one AM in the morning so our gratitude even though he's sleeping now and to all the rest of the panelists and the remaining attendees thank you so much we will be leaving the audio and the presentations sorry I should have put my video sorry uh we should have we will be leaving the audio and the presentations in the link that I placed on the chat and if you register you will receive this information so thank you very much to everyone and we'll see you in the next webinar thank you