Fire use and prevention by traditional households in the Brazilian Amazon

Maria S. Bowman, Gregory S. Amacher and Frank D. Merry

Ecological Economics, 2008, vol. 67, issue 1, 117-130

Abstract: Fire is an important land management tool for smallholders in the Brazilian Amazon. However, when fires are not properly controlled they can give rise to large-scale wildfires that threaten forests, agricultural plantations, and settlement areas. We use data from a survey of 220 households to examine fire prevention and the scale of fire prevention and burning activities among traditional subsistence households in the Tapajós National Forest in Pará, Brazil. We find that in traditional households, economic variables such as the opportunity cost of household time, market conditions, and the hiring wage are important predictors of these decisions, as is household reliance on standing forest resources for non-timber products. Our results confirm that traditional households actively engage in fire prevention, and suggest that fire prevention is motivated by a desire to protect agricultural plantations as well as standing forest reserves. The results suggest that increased income, improved infrastructure, and improved access to markets for labor and agricultural goods will encourage fire prevention among smallholders in communities with education and planning programs.

Keywords: Fire; prevention; Household; model; Floresta; Nacional; do; Tapajos; Brazilian; Amazon (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921-8009(07)00604-0
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:67:y:2008:i:1:p:117-130

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().