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Fire has the capacity to make or break sustainable environments. Today some places suffer from too much fire, some from too little or the wrong kind, but everywhere fire disasters appear to be increasing in terms of both severity and damages, with serious threats to public health, economic well being, and ecological values (Pyne 2001). Thus, fire ecology in the recent Anthropocene has evolved to a science of the biosphere with strong multi-disciplinary interconnectedness between natural sciences – notably ecology, biogeochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, meteorology and climatology – and the humanities – anthropology, cultural history, sociology, and political sciences (Goldammer 1993, Goldammer and Crutzen 1993).

The primary concerns of policy makers focus on questions regarding the regional and global impacts of excessive and uncontrolled burning, broad-scale trends over time, and the options for instituting protocols that will lead to greater control. Other key questions involve determining under what circumstances fires poses a sufficiently serious problem to require action; what factors govern the incidence and impacts of fires in such cases; and what might be the relative costs and benefits of different options for reducing adverse impacts? The elaborations in this paper reflect the rationale and the scope of work of the Working Group on Wildland Fire of the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) (Working Group on Wildland Fire 2002), in association with international wildland fire research programmes of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and other research organizations.