Fire is a natural feature of the Cape, a process that shapes the structure and composition of its vegetation communities, and should be managed as such, writes fire ecologist and fynbos specialist Brian van Wilgen
News reports describing the recent fires in the Cape Peninsula have referred to vegetation being “destroyed”, “ravaged” or “laid to waste”.
Nothing could be further from the truth. While the damage to houses and other structures is regrettable, the fires actually did the vegetation a favour.
The problem is that a large area was burnt all at once under conditions extremely difficult to control.
If the area had been managed by strategic burning over the past few years, much of the cost and damage could arguably have been avoided, helping Cape Town’s citizens to co-exist more amicably with the fire-prone and fire-dependent vegetation in which they have chosen to live.
Conservation agencies would like to manage the inevitable fires that occur on average every 12 years by conducting prescribed burns in late summer or early autumn. This would break the large blocks of vegetation, which have accumulated fuel since the last fire, into a mosaic of different post-fire ages.
Large fires such as those we have just witnessed would then not have been able to spread everywhere, as some areas would not yet have accumulated enough fuel.
It is, however, exceptionally difficult for conservation agencies to obtain the necessary permits to burn, because Fire Protection Associations (FPA), which must grant permits for prescribed burns, are extremely risk-averse.
In addition to a permit from the FPA, the conservation agencies require a separate smoke pollution permit from the city. This creates a bureaucratic environment in which it is near impossible for them to do the necessary burning.
The consequence is that the inevitable fire occurs under very dangerous conditions – without any permits, doing far more damage and generating far more smoke than would be done by prescribed burns.
We need a more nuanced approach to fire management that will help preserve the extraordinary rich biodiversity of the fynbos region while not posing risk to communities and local economies.
This region has been burning for hundreds of thousands of years. Fynbos requires fire in order to rejuvenate, therefore managing fynbos equates to managing fire.
The same goes for animals. Animals have persisted in this fire-prone environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Some may be killed in the fire, but many escape and the species persist.
In the past, animals displaced by fire would probably have moved to unburnt areas. But now the natural vegetation is completely surrounded by built areas, leaving no place for animals to disperse after large wildfires.
If we were to rather divide the area that has just burnt into, say, six blocks, and burn one every second year, then if a wildfire did occur only parts of the area would burn and the animals would be able to disperse to unburnt patches.
Because we have altered the environment, we need to manage it more closely for their ongoing persistence.
Alien plants such as pines and hakeas that invade the fynbos also exacerbate the fire problem by increasing fire intensity, leading to soil damage and erosion.
SANParks, in conjunction with the Working for Water programme, have reduced the cover of these aliens on the Peninsula, but their management is also tied to fires.
These alien trees are killed by fires, but for every one killed another 100 come up from seeds released after the fire.
The way to deal with this is to fell the trees, leaving the seeds to germinate and then to burn the area after about two years, killing the seedlings before they can in turn produce new seeds.
This works very well, but again the problem is that SANParks struggles to get permission to do the necessary burns, so we are left with wildfires spreading the alien trees and undoing the past valuable clearing work.
It is a cycle we need to break.
Ideally, Working on Fire should focus more on doing prescribed burns and less on preventing and extinguishing wildfires. If we are to co-exist with nature in fire-prone environments, we need to start thinking beyond the paradigm of only doing wildfire control.
I am really impressed by the ability of fund-raisers to gather millions of rand in just a day or two for the fire effort.
If we were to try to raise this type of money to support a prescribed burning programme in eight years from now, when it will again be necessary, I predict we would fail to raise even a few thousand rand.
So here is an off-the-wall proposal. Let us invest the money raised now into inflation-beating equities so that when we really need it eight years from now to do the management to reduce the impact of the next inevitable fire, we will have even more money to support this.
It will probably never happen, but we have to start thinking out of the box.
Fire is a natural feature of the Cape, a process that shapes the structure and composition of its vegetation communities, and should be managed as such.
I invite anyone who thinks that the land was “laid to waste” to hike in the mountains in the coming spring, when there will be a glorious display of flowering bulbs that is seen only after such fires, and that provides emphatic evidence of the value of fires in the fynbos.
l Professor Brian van Wilgen, from the Centre for Invasion Biology ( C·I·B) at Stellenbosch University, has over 40 years of experience as a fire ecologist in southern Africa.