Wildfire is not a future problem: it is already here

The wildfire threat is not recognised in all quarters.  I made this point as part of a presentation at an All-Party Parliamentary Group meeting organised by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust in Westminster on Tuesday.

As chairman of the England & Wales Wildfire Form, I had been asked to give the presentation to highlight the approach to wildfire being promoted by the Forum, following the wildfires of 2018.  Other speakers at the meeting were Professor Rob Marrs (University of Liverpool, President of The Heather Trust) and Clifton Bain (Director of the IUCN UK Peatland Programme).  Despite our varied backgrounds and interests, there was a high degree of unanimity amongst the speakers.

I was grateful for the support of EWWF members at the meeting, which included the chairman of the Scottish Wildfire Forum, two Wildfire Tactical Advisors and a representative of the Forestry Commission.

I mentioned that wildfire should be seen as a year-round threat and this point was endorsed by one of the Wildfire Tactical Advisors demonstrating an App on his phone that was listing 16 significant vegetation fires in progress at the time of the meeting.

I provided a list of issues that the 2018 wildfire incidents had highlighted:

• Fatalities – no deaths have been recorded in UK as a result of wildfire (yet);
• The adverse effects on Public Health from smoke pollution can be significant;
• There will be a negative impact on the ability to deliver the Defra 25yr Environment Plan, but this has yet to be quantified;
• Carbon storage & the provision of other ecosystem services, especially drinking water supplies, are adversely affected by wildfire, but again we need to be able to quantify this;
• A model needs to be developed to calculate the full costs of wildfire incidents; for example, this calculation should include the cost of: the FRS response, the impact on people and businesses, and the impact on ecosystem services;
• Knowledge of the total cost of a wildfire will make it possible to consider the benefit from investment in mitigation measures; and
• Support from the wildfire research community is essential to build the evidence base about the impact of wildfire.

A key part of my message stemmed from the intensity of the fires that occurred in the extreme conditions that occurred last year.  In these conditions the fires were beyond the threshold of control by the Fire & Rescue Services, which meant that they could not be tackled directly.  It is clear to everyone in the wildfire community that even though the capacity of the fire services to tackle wildfire has increased greatly in the last 10 years, we now need to improve the way that land is managed before a fire starts.  This is where Fire Groups can help.  

In short, we need to expect that wildfires will occur and plan accordingly, and we should be prepared for this to involve some management on sensitive / designated sites.  It is not ‘if’ wildfires will occur, but ‘when’.  We must accept that wildfire mitigation is part of sound conservation management.

I ended my presentation by outlining the four requirements for improving the approach to wildfire in England that I had first raised in a letter to the Home Office and to Defra in July last year:

1. Integrated support from Government, including the development of a Wildfire Strategy;
2. Develop an effective system to provide warning of high-risk conditions for wildfire through supporting the development of a UK-wide Fire Danger Rating System;
3. Establish a risk assessment approach by land managers to mitigating the impact of wildfire and encourage them to work with Fire Groups and local resilience structures; and
4. Develop and implement guidance for wildfire mitigation on open land, both managed & unmanaged.

If one were needed, the recent spate of wildfires, as a result of the unseasonal ‘winter’ weather in February, has served as a reminder of the wildfire threat.  It is clear to those in the wildfire community that work is needed to mitigate the wildfire threat before the smoke starts to rise so that when the fire services are called to attend they face a problem that is manageable.