Climate Change and Early Warning Systems for Wildland Fire - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 131

Early warning at the scale of minutes to hours, which could be used for evacua-
tion and is typically understood as “early warning” in other natural disaster disci-
plines (tsunami, fl ood, hurricane, mudslide), may be more accurately described as
“very short-term” early warning in the context of wildland fi re. It is an area of rela-
tively recent research and experience. The Advanced Fire Information System 2 is
the fi rst operational system providing near real-time warning of fi res to desktop
computers and cell phones. Warnings are provided based on satellite-detected hot
spots (MODIS and MSG) and user-selected location. It was developed in South
Africa and has been running there operationally since 2004.

7.3.2 The Global Early Warning System for Wildland Fire

Following the recommendations of the UN World Conference on Disaster Reduction
(WCDR) in Kobe, Japan, January 2005, and the proposal of the UN Secretary
General to develop a Global Multi-Hazard Early Warning System (GEWS), a call
for project proposals for building a GEWS was issued in preparation for the 3rd
International Conference on Early Warning (EWC-III) (27-29 March 2006, Bonn,
Germany), sponsored by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster
Reduction (UNISDR) and the German Foreign Offi ce ( www.ewc3.org/ ). An inter-
national consortium of institutions cooperating in wildland fi re early warning
research and development (de Groot et al. 2006 ) submitted a proposal for a Global
Early Warning System for Wildland Fire (EWS-Fire), and it was selected for pre-
sentation at EWC-III. The outcomes of the discussions reveal the high interest in
and endorsement by government and international institutions. 3
The global wildland fi re community recognizes that no individual country is capa-
ble of solving the problem of increasing fi re activity and disaster fi re occurrence on its
own, and that greater international cooperation is required. The Global EWS-Fire is
one component of A Strategy to Enhance International Cooperation in Fire
Management (FAO 2006 ). The objective of the Global EWS-Fire is to provide a sci-
entifi cally supported, systematic procedure for assessing current and future fi re danger
that can be applied from local to global scales. The system is not intended to replace
the many different fi re danger rating systems currently in use, but rather to support and
build on existing national and regional fi re management programs by providing:

• New longer-term predictions of fi re danger based on advanced numerical weather

models

• Common global fi re danger metrics to support international fi re management

cooperation, including resource-sharing during times of fi re disaster

• A fi re danger rating system for the many countries that do not have a national

system in place

2 More information is available at http://afi s.co.za .
3 Documented on the GFMC Early Warning Portal ( www.fi re.uni-freiburg.de/fwf/EWS.htm ).