Cut-and-dried Fire Hazard

摘要

We have turned the world's third-largest rainforest region Into a tinderbox that the warming world will help ignite. So concludes a new study of forest fires in Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia.rnRobert Field, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto in Canada, and his colleagues examined the fire history of forests in Indonesia by analysing five decades of visibility records at nearby airports. Droughts - usually during El Nino seasons in the Pacific - have triggered huge fires in Indonesia seven times since 1960. But Field's team found that until 1980 the fires were limited to Sumatra, where human activity and deforestation were greatest. Borneo's forests did not burn.rnHowever, after humans beganrnlarge-scale encroachment on Borneo in the 1980s - with deforestation rising above 2 per cent per year -its forests too suffered massive fires during periods of drought. Field says clearing vegetation for farming reduces the moisture in the ecosystems, leaving them vulnerable to wildfires (Nature Ceoscience, D0l:10.1038geo443).