The UNDRR project Disaster Risk Reduction Capacity Building in Ethiopia: development of an information management system for early warning for forest fires in Ethiopia was dedicated to safeguarding public health and mitigating the environmental and socio-economic impact of fires in Ethiopia. The project was funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and AICS-Italian Agency for International Development Cooperation-with technical and scientific support from CIMA Research Foundation.
Fires are a very serious risk for Ethiopia, both in social, environmental and economic terms, also because forestry is among the main activities in the country. With increasing pressure of climate change, it is expected that drought will continue to increase in severity and frequency, thus the problem of forest fires is only expected to worsen in the coming years. To counter the deforestation of the past five decades, Ethiopia embarked on an ambitious afforestation and reforestation program that has seen the planting of over six billion trees over a three year period. This effort is expected to continue over the coming decades with increasing forest cover coming in proximity to settlements and farming areas; hence, increasing the likelihood of forest fire ignition.
The project, which began in November 2020 and ended in November 2021, was dedicated to mitigating forest fire impacts by acting on the systems and procedures of forecasting and warning. Therefore, on the one hand, forecasting models have been implemented for risk assessment based on certain parameters; on the other hand, operational procedures and Early Warning Bulletins have been developed to undertake risk mitigation and alerting actions.
In the framework of the project, CIMA Research Foundation has been responsible for the adaptation of two open source technological tools that allow to support local authorities in risk mitigation: the RISICO model, used to assess the hazard following a fire outbreak, and the myDEWETRA platform, used to integrate information from RISICO with global, national and regional data. In particular, an implementation of RISICO at national level, RISICO ETHIOPIA, has been delivered; static hazard maps at national scale have been produced using RISICO model and Machine Learning techniques; myDEWETRA.world has been configured with the different Forest Fire themed layers made available from the stakeholder community; a semi-automated Forest Fire Early Warning Bulletin has been set operational via the MyDewetra Bulletin platform. During the project, our researchers also conducted technical training and education periods for operators and developed standard procedures to collect information to establish alert thresholds and disseminate EW messages and mitigation measures to be implemented.
The contribution of several stakeholders (Environment, Forest Climate Change Commission, Disaster Risk Management Commission, Ethiopian Meteorological Institute) has been crucial in establishing synergies between different expertise at all stages of the implementation.
