Warming the heart: identifying how transforming tropical fire discourses can contribute towards more effective and equitable governance

Scientific background: Tropical wildfires are increasing in extent and frequency and are projected to worsen with climate change. Uncontrolled fires drive enormous burdens to people and nature-yet their governance has proven an intractable challenge. This difficulty is partly explained by the considerable benefits(and savings) derived from some fire-based activities (e.g. pasture maintenance, land clearance), and the drivers of flammability itself (e.g. fragmentation, timber extraction).

Another factor potentially slowing progress towards equitable fire management is the way in which tropical fires have tended to be understood, and the discourses employed to report them. Scientific understanding and associated discourses largely focus on the carbon emissions, biodiversity impacts or to a lesser extent-the economic costs incurred. Yet, despite being under-researched and communicated, the actual place-based, lived experience of fire and flammability is acute for forest-based communities.

These groups suffer irreparable damages across all dimensions of human well-being when their territories are threatened by flammability, and degraded through fire. Crucially, empirical evidence suggests that this human-dimensions discourse would be more powerful across diverse sets of stakeholders to garner support towards the necessary transformation in fire governance.T his project will assess media discourse, capture lived experience and empirically test the ways in which different messaging corresponds to environmental decision-making across diverse groups of stakeholders.

The focus will be on two increasingly fire-prone centres of biocultural diversity-the Brazilian Amazon and Indonesian peatlands.

Research methodology: A combination of behavioural sciences (quantitative survey and lab-in-the-field experiments), media discourse analysis and field-based methods (interviews and photo story)