Wildfires; A World-wide Problem in 1997
By Paul Anderson, ERRI Analyst
People in Sydney, Jakarta, Kenya and Brazil are all feeling the adverse effects of the world's worst year for fires. More forests burned in 1997 than at any time in recorded history. The fires brought death, respiratory illnesses and pollution.
Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud, head of the World Wide Fund for Nature's forest program and co-author of a report on the fires, said, "This was the year the world caught fire."
Up to 12.4 million acres of forest and other land burned in Indonesia and Brazil, where the Amazon region alone had more than 45,000 fires. Most of which were not reported on the world media. Vast areas of Papua New Guinea, Colombia, Peru, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and other parts of Africa also burned, and large-scale fires were reported in Australia, China, Russia and several Mediterranean countries.
The El Nino phenomenon is being blamed for delayed monsoon rains which usually extinguish many naturally occurring forest fires.
According to the WWF report, at least 80 percent of the fires were set deliberately, often by multinational companies trying to clear land for planting or development. Some reasons for setting the fires included: timber speculation, insurance fraud, arson and setting fires as an act of political defiance.
The report said the fires in Indonesia that spewed vast smoke clouds over southeast Asia this year destroyed more than 4.9 million acres of forest. More than 40,000 people were hospitalized with respiratory problems when the haze was at its worst.
In Brazil, fires destroyed about 5 million acres in several states. Fires were up by 50 percent from 1996 to 1997, with 44,734 recorded between 1 July and 22 November of this year.
A number of other countries suffered from large fires. They included:
The WWF report also warned that in the United States, where naturally occurring forest fires are routinely suppressed, "ecological processes are disrupted and the accumulation of flammable materials in forests poses a serious risk of greater and more destructive fires in the future."