Fires on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia
 
 
Ten hectares of the world’s forests are destroyed every minute, amounting to 4.9 million hectares a year. Between 1990 and 2005, 72.9 million hectares of forest vanished. Forests cover a total surface area of 3.69 billion hectares, or 30% of the Earth’s land mass.
These are the latest figures published by the FAO on 30 November 2011, which also reveal that the rate of net loss of forested land is speeding up, rising from 4.1 million hectares between 1990 and 2000 to 6.4 million hectares between 2000 and 2005.


Between 150 and 250 million of the 1.8 billion hectares of tropical forest go up in smoke every year.
Out-of-control forest fires also contribute to global warming, pollution, desertification and the loss of biodiversity.
Climate change contributes to the increase in mega-fires all over the world, which in turn contribute to global warming.
This is one of the findings of the FAO report “Findings and Implications from a Coarse-Scale Global Assessment of Recent Selected Mega-Fires”, presented to the Fifth International Conference on Forest Fire Research in May 2011.


Download image: Fire in Schultz, Lewis, Mason, West Virginia, Immage IKONOS, 22 giugno 2010
 ;
Download image: Fire in Athens
Immage GeoEye 23 ottobre 2009


The report examines recent fires that broke out in Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Indonesia, Israel, Greece, Russia and the US. Nearly all were started to clear land for agricultural and developmental purposes, but drought and warm, dry and windy climate conditions also played a significant role.

In 2010, the FAO launched a new web portal to provide information on and real-time monitoring of fires. The new Global Fire Information Management System (GFIMS) identifies the fire hotspots using satellites operated by NASA.

Developed in conjunction with Maryland University, the GFMIS provides a web fire mapper that shows the fire hotspots in "near-real" time, i.e. with a delay of around 2.5 hours between the satellite recording the data and the data becoming available.

Satellite technology allows for even more immediate territorial monitoring and enables more timely alerts to be raised. As an example, the COSMO-SkyMed satellites, which have been fully operational since November 2010, make a significant, high-tech contribution to the ongoing monitoring of forests and woods, helping to assess damage in the case of fires, keeping deforestation under control and studying biodiversity.


 
Download image: Fires on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia
This Landsat image was created with the false-colour technique using infrared bands (RGB=752), which show the fire (red-yellow) and distinguish the smoke (in blue) from the clouds (in white). The fire visible on the right affects an area of around 16 km2.
 



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