Northern Ireland: Reducing Wildfires in the Countryside


Another day, another wildfire meeting.  Yesterday, I was in Northern Ireland as part of an international cast advising Northern Ireland wildfire stakeholders, led by the NI Environment Agency and NI Fire & Rescue Service, about the development of a wildfire strategy.  The other members of the  cast were:

  • Ciaran Nugent, Forest Service (Ireland)
  • Michael Bruce, Firebreak Services and the Scottish Wildfire Forum
  • Chuck Bushey, International Association of Wildland Fire (USA),
  • Colum McDaid - organiser (Northern Ireland Environment Agency)
  • Rob Gazzard, Forestry Commission England
  • Jordi Vendrell, Pau Costa Foundation (Catalonia)
  • Alex Held, European Forest Institute (Germany)
The meeting took the form of a workshop with group working by the 47 delegates to assess the best approach to adopt in Northern Ireland to develop a wildfire strategy.  It was pleasing to note that there was a high degree of consensus.  The establishment of a mechanism (a wildfire forum?) to bring together the unique range of knowledge and experience offered by the different sectors will be essential.   Greater levels of training in wildfire management will help reduce the risk of damage and good communications will need to be established across all sectors to raise the profile of the threat.  

The wildfire planning and preparation that has taken place in the Mourne Mountains following the massive wildfires that occurred, during the wildfire season in 2011, was quoted as an exemplar on many occasions.  This detailed approach is costly and there was an awareness that resources will be restricted.  It was recommended that a way to maximise impact from limited resources would be to use this approach for high-value or sensitive areas, while adopting a less intensive approach for other areas.


Many other options were debated that included: the increased use of tactical burning, monitoring, remote sensing, the need to incentivise burning, penalties for bad practice and finally the application of a fire danger warning system.  Michael Bruce demonstrated that the level of fire risk in Belfast yesterday afternoon, had exceeded the threshold for giving consideration to issuing a fire danger warning.

Thank you to NIEA for the invitation to attend and for organising an interesting day.  It was a great opportunity to get the NI wildfire threat into focus with a view to increasing the level of planning and preparedness for the next wildfire season.  It is not if, it is when!


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