Prescribed burning and integrated fire management in the Brazilian Cerrado: demonstrated impacts and scale-up potential for emission abatement

Abstract Fire management has proven successful in reducing deforestation, preserving biodiversity and mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. After years of zero burning policies in fire-adapted ecosystems, and resulting increases in fire hazards and risks, countries are moving towards Integrated Fire Management (IFM) including Prescribed Burning (PB). With a primary focus on biodiversity, Brazilian governmental organizations endorsed this paradigm shift in 2014, with the introduction of IFM in a number of protected areas (PA) of the Cerrado. Reducing high intensity Mid/Late Dry Season (M/LDS) fires through PB in the Early Dry Season (EDS) has proven successful in other savanna ecosystems, with demonstrated mitigation potential as EDS fires are associated with lower GHG emissions. In the present study, Earth Observation data were used to analyse the seasonality of active fires, burned areas and fuel loads. A dynamic performance benchmark (control-treatment paired sample test) was applied to assess the effectiveness of existing IFM activities in promoting emission abatement over the pre-Covid period 2014-2019. Compared against the responses of PAs without IFM-PB, the PAs with IFM-PB showed significant increases in EDS fires (+137% hotspots) and EDS burned areas (from a share of 11.2% to 29.5% of the total yearly burned area). Fuel fragmentation through EDS-PB, tracked through calibrated fuel load maps, also led to a 62% reduction in burned areas in the IFM period 2014-2019. Combined M/LDS burned areas decreased from 85.1% of the total yearly burned area to a share of 67.7%. When applying the observed shift in fire seasonality and the effect of burned area reduction to all the protected areas of the Cerrado for the same period, we estimate an emission abatement potential of 1,085,764 tCO2e/y. Given the fact that IFM followed a biodiversity-centred approach in the Cerrado, an emission abatement-centred approach could result in even higher abatement potentials.