Threats and Strategies for Global Biodiversity Conservation

Analysis:Fire’s Ecological Role is Threatened by Human Land Uses, Climate Change and Public PoliciesGlobally, based on results of regional expert workshopsfor ecoregions in the Neotropic, Indo-Malay, Australasiaand Nearctic realms, the top threats to maintaining theecological role of fire in habitats are:• Urban development;• Livestock farming, ranching and agriculture;• Fire and fire suppression;• Resource extraction (i.e., energy production, mining,logging); and• Climate change.Table 1 summarizes the top sources of threat 3 to theecological role of fire by realm. The remainder of thissection discusses each of these threats and the extent oftheir influence across ecoregions, describing the variousways they can affect fire regimes and explaining whythese threats are so prominent today.Urban DevelopmentUrban development is a top threat in the majority of majorhabitat types (13 of 14) and more than 25% of all terrestrialecoregions assessed worldwide. Urban development directlyand indirectly causes loss of biodiversity through land conversion,creates vectors for human-caused fire ignitions andinvasive species, and encourages fire management policiesthat exclude fire from fire-dependent ecosystems. Firemanagement policies that accompany urban developmentare typically focused on fire suppression and communityprotection and are a direct threat to fire-dependentFigure 6. Distribution of fire regime status by major habitat type.In many places, housing developments are expanding into firedependentecosystems, putting human values at risk and complicatingefforts to let fire play its natural role. The community of Goode Beachnear Albany, Australia narrowly avoided destruction in 1997 when awildfire burned through shrublands and woodlands in the adjacentnational park. © Klaus Brauneco-systems (Hassan et al. 2005). More often than not, firepolicies for community protection at the wildland-urbaninterface are implemented to the detriment of biodiversityconservation. Urban developments often preclude the useof ecologically-appropriate “let burn” or “wildland fire use”policies, which allow natural fires to run their course underspecified environmental conditions.Multilateral, national and local development policiesgenerally do not adequately address the need to considerhuman relationships to natural fire regimes. These policiescreate barriers to conserving fire’s role, or even createincentives to directly alter fire regimes through development.These policies often pose barriers to the use of fire in9