Firefighters, for example, have been affected by these political and economic processes. The organization that used to manage forest fires, Fundaincendios, was eventually centralized into the National Unified Fires Command in 2021. This unit merged forest firefighters with urban firefighters. “This weakens the branch that fights forest fires,” Lozada says. “Firefighters trained for structural fires are not necessarily trained for forest fires.” Similarly, the creation of brigades against fires and preventing training in communities has vanished. Firefighters, Lozada says, lack uniforms, boots and equipment while waterbombing aircraft seem to be no longer working. “Venezuela has not been modernized,” Lozada says. “In fact, it has gone backward.”
For Vilanova, “high temperatures and drought are combining with a lack of serious policies to manage and control fires.”
The government has responded by using the fires as a political tool. Maduro, whose government is increasingly repressive and is facing a revitalized opposition before the July presidential elections, is blaming the forest fires on “ ” by “fascists,” a moniker he’s used against the democratic opposition before.
Meanwhile, the government has said “climate change” is affecting water repositories feeding Venezuela’s already underfunded hydroelectric dams, which power around 70% of the country to explain the deepening of Venezuela’s ongoing electric crisis. By January, blackouts had gone from weekly to daily for 54% of Venezuelans, a local watchdog. In some western states, blackouts can last up to 13 hours per day.
Image courtesy of Henry González.
Nevertheless, the drought “has little to do with the reservoirs’ levels,” says José María de Viana, a civil engineer specialized in public services who was director of hydraulic resources of the Ministry of the Environment in the early 1980s. “The problem is in our weakened systems” after years of underinvestment, mismanagement and corruption. For example, in Maracaibo, the country’s second-largest city, reservoirs are full but water scarcity is common, he tells Mongabay.
Venezuela also lacks a reliable monitoring system that will allow preventive actions, according to Vilanova. A lack of environmental planning can also lead to fires destroying tree cover that work as natural protectors of soils, Lozada says, generating erosion and even landslides during the rainy season. In October 2022, for example, heavy rains caused two landslides in the state of Aragua that land destroyed more than 750 houses. The erosion of soil can also pollute water access, Lozada says.
The Venezuelan fires are also destroying local livelihoods. For 10 days in March, fires ravaged the Caribbean pine plantations in Uverito, in eastern Venezuela, which were planted in the late 1960s for commercial use and to prevent desertification of the plateau. According to Lozada, around 36,400 hectares (almost 90,000 acres) out of the around 110,000 hectares (about 272,000 acres) that remained after years of governmental mismanagement — which resulted in fires or non-sustainable felling — were affected. “It’s the worst fire in the history of the plantation,” he says. While the fires were likely human-made, Lozada says, the authorities in charge didn’t prepare firebreaks and 315 families had to be evacuated.
“The solution for fires is to manage them, not to control them,” says Bibiana Bilbao, a researcher of tropical savannas and fire ecology in Simón Bolívar University in Caracas. “There has to be prevention and [natural] fuel has to be managed.” Vilanova says he also believes that, in the face of more extreme weather, Venezuela must develop “a serious strategy for mitigation and adaptation to climate change where fires are undoubtedly a central element.”
Banner image: Wildfire haze, locally known as calima, covers the otherwise blue-skied Caracas. Image courtesy of Andrés Rodríguez.
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Biodiversity, Conservation, Environment, Fire Management, Fires, Forest Fires, Forests, Impact Of Climate Change, National Parks, Protected Areas, wildfires
Latin America, South America, Venezuela
Source link : https://news.mongabay.com/2024/05/amid-ravaging-wildfires-in-venezuela-experts-cite-institutional-collapse/
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Publish date : 2024-05-14 03:00:00
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