A global inventory of burned areas at 1km resolution for he year 2000 derived from spot vegetation data

Biomass burning constitutes a major contribution to global emissions of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, greenhouse gases and aerosols. Furthermore, biomass burning has an impact on health, transport, the environment and land use. Vegetation fires are certainly not recent phenomena and the impacts are not always negative. However, evidence suggests that fires are becoming more frequent and there is a large increase in the number of fires being set by humans for a variety of reasons. Knowledge of the interactions and feedbacks between biomass burning, climate and carbon cycling is needed to help the prediction of climate change scenarios. To obtain this knowledge, the scientific community requires, in the first instance, information on the spatial and temporal distribution of biomass burning at the global scale. This paper presents an inventory of burned areas at monthly time periods for the year 2000 at a resolution of 1 kilometer (km) and is available to the scientific community at no cost. The burned area products have been derived from a single source of satellite-derived images, the SPOT VEGETATION S1 1 km product, using algorithms developed and calibrated at regional scales by a network of partners. In this paper, estimates of burned area, number of burn scars and average size of the burn scar are described for each month of the year 2000. The information is reported at the country level. This paper makes a significant contribution to understanding the effect of biomass burning on atmospheric chemistry and the storage and cycling of carbon by constraining one of the main parameters used in the calculation of gas emissions

Flooding: Prioritizing protection?

With climate change, urban development and economic growth, more assets and infrastructures will be exposed to flooding. Now research shows that investments in flood protection are globally beneficial, but have varied levels of benefit locally

The Disaster Risk Index: Overview of a quantitative approach

So far, the international community's response to disasters has been mostly reactive, with only a limited budget invested in prevention. One reason might lie in the fact that disasters get much more attention and media coverage than preventive measures. Prevention programmes will never offer the striking images that disasters do. When tragic events do get decisionmakers' attention, they are just as easily replaced by the next headlines. Even if there were willingness to invest in prevention, the question would be, where? Obviously such decisions cannot be based on media coverage. The floods that hit India, Nepal and Bangladesh in August 2004 killed 2000 persons and were given a mere 9,000 words in British newspapers, whereas the same day, Hurricane Charley killed 16 persons in Florida and got 19,000 words (Adams 2004). Clearly, there is need for a more objective way of comparing countries at risk