Indicator Code: BURNED
Objective: Ecosystem Vitality
Policy Category: Productive Natural Resources
Subcategory: Agriculture
Indicator Short Name: Burned Area
Indicator Full Name: Percentage of Country Area Burned
Indicator Description: Biomass burning has long been recognized as a significant source of carbon emissions that contribute to climate change, and as an important source of airborne particulates, especially in developing countries. Thus, from atmospheric perspective, it is unambiguously negative. From a land management perspective, however, the role of biomass burning in soil fertility management and ecosystem processes is more difficult to assess. For example, controlled biomass burning in the agricultural sector, on a limited scale, can have positive functions as a means of clearing and rotating individual plots for crop production, and in some ecosystems, as a healthy means of weed control and soil fertility improvement.
In a number of natural ecosystems, such as savannah and scrub forests, wild fires can help maintain biotic functions. However, in tropical forest ecosystems, fires are mostly human induced and environmentally harmful, killing wildlife, reducing habitat, and setting the stage for more fires by reducing moisture content and increasing combustible materials. Even where fire can be beneficial from an agricultural perspective, fires can inadvertently spread to natural ecosystems, setting the stage for further agricultural colonization. Hence, we have chosen to asess fires as, on balance, a negative phenomenon from an agricultural natural resource management perspective.
Units: Percentage
Country Coverage: 160
Reference Year: 2005-2006
Target: 0
Target Source: Expert Judgment
Short Source: L3JRC,2000-2007, CIESIN, 2007
Source: Joint Research Centre’s Global Burnt Areas 2000-2007 (L3JRC)
CIESIN Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) land area and country grids.
Source URL: not available
Methodology: The EPI team assessed the extent of burn scars by downloading and processing data for 2000 (representing April 2000-March 2001) and 2005 (representing April 2005-March 2006) from the Joint Research Centre’s Global Burnt Areas 2000-2007 (L3JRC)product, which identifies burnt areas using the SPOT VEGETATION sensor at 1km resolution. These data were simplified to a boolean surface of burnt (1) and non-burnt (0) areas and subsampled from 0.009 degree resolution to 0.008 degrees to match the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) land area and country grids. The total burnt area was calculated by multiplying the boolean burnt area grid by the GRUMP land area grid (land area in ha) and summing the results. The country totals were generated by calculating the unique combination of countries (from GRUMP) and burnt areas, then summing the land area grid for the country-burnt area zones.
We calculated total land area burnt for the 12 months from April 2000-March 2001 and April 2005-May 2006 in order to assess land burning during two years under different climate regimes: for the winter of 2000-01 there was a strong La Niña signal in the Pacific Ocean, and for the winter of 2005-06 neither El Niño or La Niña played a role in global climate patterns. We calculated the land area burned as a percentage of total land area in both years, then averaged the percentages.
Additional Citations: Tansey, K., Grégoire, J.M.C., Defourny, P., Leigh, R., Pekel, van Bogaert, E., Bartholomé, E., Bontemps, S. 2008. A new, global,multi-annual (2000-2007) burned area product at 1 km resolution and daily intervals. Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 35, L01401, doi:10.1029/2007GL031567