Wildfire has been an important process affecting the Earth's surface and atmosphere for over 350 million years and human societies have coexisted with fire since their emergence. Yet many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence, severity and resulting losses. However, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends.

The recent episode of an oppressive smog that blanketed Southeast Asia highlights an entirely new kind of problem in contemporary international relations, namely, the complexity of transnational governance when traditional remedies--from bombs and missiles at one extreme, to diplomatic démarches and summits on the more polite end--are of no use at all.

North East India (NEI) has 17.2 M ha under forest cover, which is ~25% of India’s total forest area. Of the total forest cover, 1.5 M ha is currently managed by shifting cultivation in NEI. Shifting cultivation, an integral part of culture and tradition of tribes of NEI, is presently unsustainable because of the populationdriven reduction in the duration of the fallow cycle (3–5 years).

Original Source

In this study, researchers explored the relationships between the satellite-retrievedfire counts(FC), fire radiative power(FRP) and aerosol indices using multi-satellite datasets at a daily time-step covering ten different biomass burning regions in Asia.Wefirst assessed the variations inMODIS-retrieved aerosol optical depths (AOD’s)in agriculture,forests, plantation and peat land burning regions and then usedMODIS FC and FRP (hereafter FC/FRP)to explain the variations in AOD characteristics.

The Reang tribe in Tripura, which practised shifting cultivation and still does to an extent, faces serious problems with the state government implementing measures to turn them into settled cultivators. This essay points out that government programmes have widened social disparities among the Reangs and brought in alternatives that cannot sustain them round the year. It argues that shifting cultivation, which aims at self-sufficiency, is still remunerative compared to other forms of cultivation if traditional forest and land rights are restored to the tribal people.