Fires are burning landscapes, incinerating psyches, and consuming lives. Since January 7, 2025, according to the Cal Fire incident archive, 177 wildfires affected Los Angeles metro area and surrounding regions. The fires took their toll: 40,696 acres burned; 26 people killed; 27,799 emergency responses; 12,105 structures, both damaged and destroyed.

It’s all dissolving in the heat and fire, people in Los Angeles and people elsewhere, at the moment when we’ve officially blown past 1.5C rise in global temperature. Lest we forget, the US-abetted Israeli bombing of Gaza left children, women and men there incinerated.

The faraway fires have Indian experts thinking what lessons India can draw from the continuing calamity.  

Professor S. P. Singh, former vice-chancellor of HNB Garhwal University and founding chairman of not-for-profit Center for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) has been researching the Himalayan ecosystems for more than 50 years and he believes India has to improve its fire preparedness. 

Assistant professor Vivek Vaishnav of the Department of Forestry, Manipur University, Imphal, works on the science and conservation of forests. He researches the genetic traits of tree species, selecting those that can enhance the economic value of a forest. 

“Whatever threat or problem we face in forestry, we try to develop adaptable forestry species or the tolerant forest species,” Vivek says.

In the words of Singh, fire is an evolutionary force. 

He says, “Fire is not external. It’s a part of ecosystem. It should not be treated that way. Species have evolved over millions of years in relation to fire.”  For example, pine developed its bark thickness in response to fire. When bark is thicker, it resists fire.

Fire, of course, destroys things; in overall ecosystem functioning, it’s not external. “You have a certain species composition in a forest because of fire.”

Forest structure, species, all these are partly governed by fire. For example, pines (130 species), oaks (400 species)—all of them adapted in some way to fire.

Fires in India are mostly surface fires, not those fires that consume forest canopies. Forest fires in India mostly don’t alter forest structure, unlike the huge conflagrations in the US and Australia. Indian fires may affect gradual changes in forests.

A note by the ministry of environment, forest and climate change states that in the forest fire season (November 2023-June 2024), the total number of forest fires detected by the Forest Survey of India was 2,03,544 while in the previous forest fire season (November 2022 to June 2023) the number was 2,12,249.

In Uttarakhand, fires flare up in April and May, when conditions are ripe. Concentrated litter falls in March and April. If there is less pre-monsoon rain, then the conditions get dry and create an enabling atmosphere for fire. 

“You need litter. You need humans. You need temperature. You need dry. Then all these are combined,” Singh says. “That’s why I always say that we predict only the monsoon, but you should also predict pre-monsoon conditions so that we can prepare for the coming fires.”

For ages, people grew crops in the hills, collected fodder for their livestock, cleared litter with small burns to ward off animals, especially cobras, and on the whole, things have gone on. 

Singh draws attention to one specific problem in the hills. People are leaving the mountains. The livestock population has declined. So, there are fewer animals grazing, and more litter collection. Biomass has increased over the recent years.  Because of warming, the situation is made for more and bigger fires.

Moreover, fires emit black carbon that gets deposited on the glaciers.  “Now, it is a serious issue. So if you have more fire, you have more black carbon, more black carbon deposited on glaciers, so melting will be faster. It also is source of pollution,” Singh tells Hot Rock.

In the Northeast, fire season is from January to April, whereas in Uttarakhand, fires occur in April and May. Manipur University’s forest-fire researcher Vivek says that’s because farmers do shifting cultivation and get their fields ready for sowing. They slash-burn the grasses in dry months of January and February, and the fires sometimes leap off and burn larger areas.

“Basically, in India, wherever you have more of dry deciduous forest, those forests are most vulnerable to fires,” he says. The deciduous forests are more in South and Central India. 

When the British came here, they brought German forest officers to oversee India’s forests and India follows the German model of forest management called silviculture. Its objectives include maintaining biological integrity of forests, timber production and sustainable use of forests. Control-burning is used in India as silvicultural tool to develop forest-fire lines, to barricade the spreading of fire between the forest patches.

While Santa Ana winds—extreme dry gusts blowing from inland to coastal southern California—are the biggest driver of fires in the United States right now, in India, it is human intervention.

“Manmade slash burning is the biggest challenge in India,” Vivek says.

India has a remote sensing system of detecting fires and controlling them. The Forest Survey of India (FSI) uses a satellite-based “Forest Fire Monitoring and Alert system”. When a fire breaks, satellites pick it up and send the information immediately through SMS to the divisional forest officer of that region.

Vivek says forest fire is a common, universal phenomenon.

More than 40 percent of people in Northeast  and Central India are tribals, and they directly depend on forests for their livelihoods and life.

Significant forest fires have been reported in the Nilgiris region of Tamil Nadu in South India. Recently, fires in the Coonoor forest range have been quite severe and have been burning for almost a week.

It has been observed over the past five years that when forests are burning in summer, the heat is transported to urban centres spiking temperatures there too.

Vivek says the fire’s impact reach extends to soils, water, ecology, socio economic issues and human health. Fire leaves nothing unlicked.

He says global warming increases fires because high temperatures suck moisture. “It (moisture) cannot stay either in at the peak with the soil surface or in the canopy or in the atmosphere. So, the intensity of the fire will increase. The frequency will increase. That is the situation we face in the NE (the Northeast) between January and April.”

Post-fire, in the West, they use ammonium phosphate to staunch the fire. The pink powder, ammonium phosphate, breaks oxygen’s contact with the burning material. Starved of oxygen, the fire dies down. It’s used in the small cylindrical fire extinguishers also. However that cannot be a solution for India because spraying ammonium phosphate may make the forest produce non-consumable for the forest dwellers.

Vivek says he was in for a surprise as a fire researcher when there was fire in a hillock of Manipur in 2022. The fire burned and burned for more than fifteen days, and nobody had a clue why it was burning. They finally found that inflammable gas was leaking from the rocks and that caused the fire.

“You’re in for surprises, and underground fossil fuels can still wreck things.”

As Singh notes, we need fire. But how to manage it? 

“People participation, government and forest department cooperation and coordination go a long way,” he says