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30 March 2022

Fire as friend and foe: what the public needs to know

The media often portrays fires in and around our national parks with pictures of roaring blazes and firefighters. These stories convey loss, destruction and threat to vegetation, property and human life, and a goal of suppressing fires at all cost. But fires are also natural and vital components of these ecosystems. Fire will continue to shape our environments and impact expanding urban areas, property and human lives.

Prescribed burning is an important management tool. Not only has fire important ecological roles to play, but without prescribed burns, plant material (called “fuel”) will build-up which can result in uncontrolled wildfires, which can be destructive and dangerous to human lives and infrastructure (© Izak Smit).

Wildfire risk can partially be mitigated by reducing available vegetative fuel through fire breaks, clearing alien invasive plants and prescribed burns under controlled conditions. However, proactive risk reduction by prescribed burning during suitable conditions is often not supported by the public. Negative perceptions towards fire may have been influenced by previous experiences and/or the negative portrayal of fire in the mass media where the choice of topics covered and their representation in text and images elicit particular meaning. Thus, media stories and images focused on negative and destructive aspects of fire evoke emotion and influence public knowledge, attitudes and intent towards fire.

Fires pose serious threats to infrastructure in fire-prone environments. This is exacerbated by an expanding and increasingly splintered interface where urban and wild areas meet which increases the complexity of fire management in these fynbos, grassland and savanna areas. An informed public is important for constructive and successful fire management. This requires broader balanced portrayal of fire and fire mitigation in the media, demonstrating the importance of fire for ecosystem health and opportunities for fire risk reduction and proactive fire management to safeguard communities and their possessions.

Burning this fynbos, in a controlled fire, protects the adjacent community from unexpected fire when conditions may have been dangerous, e.g. wind blowing towards the houses. (©Johan Baard).

Researchers from South African National Parks and Stellenbosch University investigated the importance of scientist involvement in communicating issues related to fires originating in or around South Africa’s national parks. The published paper, in African Journal of Range & Forage Science, found that scientists were quoted or involved in <9% of fire-related media reports over a two year period. It was found that stories with input from scientists presented a more balanced perspective of fires, including the necessity of fire in maintaining functional ecosystems, and the importance of proactive fire risk reduction.

Media headlines for fires within and around national parks often focus on destruction and threat, using negative emotive words like “consume”, “warning”, “fight”, “destroy”, “victims” (left), whilst media stories sharing lessons learned from fires, ecological and safety risks of continued fire suppression and benefits of controlled management fires are few and far between (right).

In Table Mountain and Garden Route National Parks fire stimulates seed release from mature protea bushes and encourages new growth. Seeds of many fynbos species, including ericas, restios, proteas and daisies, are also much more likely to germinate after smoke exposure. Additionally, old unburnt protea and fynbos shrubs show substantially reduced reproductive ability. Similarly, if fynbos burns too frequently, certain species don’t have adequate time to reach maturity and produce seeds between fire events. As many fynbos species are very restricted to a single park and nowhere else on earth, proactive management of fire, based on scientific insights, is critical to sustain diversity in this biome.

Some fynbos species, like the fire-lily (Cyrtanthus angustifolius) (left) only flowers after fire, whilst other species like Bobartia (right) need fire for their rejuvenation (©Brian van Wilgen and Johan Baard).

Similarly, fires are critical in savanna systems, such as Kruger National Park. Without appropriate burning regimes bush encroachment will smother open landscapes with woody vegetation. Denser, increasingly wooded landscapes will affects animals and plants that are dependent on more open and grassy habitats. For example a reduction in grass biomass leads to a decline in populations of grass-eating animals, such as zebra and blue wildebeest. Additionally, game viewing and associated revenue generation opportunities may be affected if vegetation becomes too dense and visitors struggle to view and photograph animals.

Without regular fires, savanna systems can become bush encroached, whilst regular fires are needed to reduce woody cover, creating habitat for grass eating animals preferring open habitats (©Izak Smit).

Fire is an important and natural process to conserve ecosystems in many fire-prone national parks. Here proactive fire management includes prescribed burning under safe conditions. At suitable intervals, prescribed burns ensure healthy ecosystems and prevent build-up of vegetation that can burn (fuel loads). Fires cannot, and should not, be continuously suppressed. Besides undesirable ecological outcomes of long fire suppression, it also leads to uncontrollable high intensity fires as burnable fuel material accumulates over many years. The spread of large wildfires across many continents in recent years attest to the fact that fires cannot be indefinitely suppressed, even in well-resourced regions such as Australia, USA and Europe: fire suppressed areas will eventually burn, often in large and dangerous fires.

In South Africa we must work together to live with fire and create fire-resilient communities to safeguard lives and livelihoods. This requires experts and skilled land managers to proactively manage fire to reduce risk and allow fire to play its natural role. Further, basic understanding of fire behaviour specific to landscapes where we live, is critical as savanna and grassland fires behave differently to fires in fynbos.

Scientists, practitioners and the media must work together to raise awareness and educate the citizenry on the nuances of fire and how to become fire-resilient communities. Thus, the media should take care not to default to emotive stories on the destructive nature of fire as is currently dominating the narrative. Meanwhile, scientists and land managers have an obligation to actively contribute through providing key messages and more nuanced perspectives and understanding of fires to the media. We hope this blog post is a step in this direction!

Further reading

This story was also published in the 2021/2022 Research Report.

Tercia Strydom

Tercia Strydom

Scientist: Abiotic Processes

Dr Stefanie Freitag-Ronaldson

Dr Stefanie Freitag-Ronaldson

GM: Garden Route and Frontier Research Unit

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Scientist: Marine Ecology

Johan Baard

Johan Baard

Scientist: GIS & Planning

Dr Izak PJ Smit

Dr Izak PJ Smit

Senior Scientist

Dr Nicola van Wilgen

Dr Nicola van Wilgen

Global Change Scientist

Dr Marna Herbst

Dr Marna Herbst

Regional Ecologist

Dr Dian Spear

Dr Dian Spear

Bioinformatics and Science Manager



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