Fire Fighting»
Could forests in African tropics be burning more than Brazil? When the wildfire engulfed part of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, a global outcry ensued. But new data now shows forests in the African tropics also catch fire
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hen it comes to wildfires, the spotlight has been on Amazon forest or Australia which recently experienced massive bushfires. But data released by NASA this week shifts the attention to Sub-Saharan Africa. According to NASA’s satellite images, the size of the forest fires in central Africa appears alarmingly large. It looks like a red chain, with fires extending from Angola across Congo and Mozambique to Madagascar, similar to the flames in Brazil’s Amazon that have triggered global outcry.
The NASA satellite is said to have detected 6902 fires in Angola and 3395 in Congo. However, in Brazil, 2127 fires were detected during the same period. According to this, Brazil ranked only third according to the current number of fires, said US media company Bloomberg. But to some, fire is an essential part of the savannah. “The first thing to know is that the impact of a wildfire depends more on where and what it is burning, than on how big it is, or indeed
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how many fires there are,” says ecologist Colin Beale. Moreover, he says, fires are usually lit by cattle farmers as part of their traditional management of the savannahs where their animals graze. Some fires are started to stimulate new growth of nutritious grass for their animals, others are used to control the numbers of parasitic ticks or manage the growth of thorny scrub. Mr. Colins makes a key observation, that around half of the grasslands of the Serengeti
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