Principal Investigator
Project Description
Chile is on fire. More than 500,000 hectares of wildfires have affected cities, towns, and rural areas, including Chile’s national parks and reserves. Scaled to the U.S., it would be as if 16 million acres were burning. The social, economic, and health impacts of these fires will be severe. Hence, there is a real need to understand the causes and consequences of these fires, and implement innovative approaches to preventing them from taking place. The aim of this research is to get a strong picture of (a) the climatic and anthropogenic causes of these fires, (b) the ecological and socioeconomic consequences once they occur, and (c) how we will apply The Rainforest Standard Protected Area Credits™ (RFS|PAC) system, a science-based financial mechanism, to incentivize their prevention. To do this Columbia University (CU), through its Center for Environment, Economy, and Society (CEES) and its Global Center in Santiago, Chile, and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC), through its Department of Ecosystems and The Environment in Santiago and its Center for Local Development in Villarrica, will deploy a team of researchers from CU, UC, and other U.S., Chilean, and Canadian universities, who are leaders in wildfire assessment and modeling, below and above ground ecology, forest and biodiversity conservation, sociocultural and socioeconomic analysis, and environmental policy and climate change adaptation. An essential part of this collaboration will be the implementation of the RFS|PAC system, designed by CEES, as an innovative tool to provide long-term sustainable funding for comprehensive, best practices forest management, including fire prevention, in two adjacent protected areas of temperate rainforest in southern Chile. The demonstration of the RFS|PAC as a fire prevention mechanism will serve as a model to be replicated throughout Chile, and other countries where fire has become a major driver of deforestation.
