This case study summarizes the use of the CARiDRO tool to assess how climate conditions are related with agricultural forest fires by using drought indexes. The focus geographical area is the Maya Golden Landscape (MGL) area in the Toledo District of Belize. The results demonstrate that CARiDRO and the drought indexes it produces can provide a useful contribution for warning about escaped agricultural fires and forest fire management. Thus, we suggest that the tool should be improved to facilitate the inclusion of updated climate data in order to use it for realtime monitoring of dry/wet conditions

Forest fires are strongly connected to weather and climate. In southern Belize, forest fires, primarily escaped agricultural fires, are one of the main causes of deforestation.

Efforts to address this issue are ongoing to assist in the management and planning of burning activities in the community. Other ongoing efforts are related with the assessment of the risk of such burns getting out of control due to the influence of changing weather patterns. The latter is precisely the context in which this case study intended to contribute. Thus, the objectives of this study were:

• to verify if there are some kind of relationships between fires and drought indexes; and
• to identify the potential use of CARiDRO in the evaluation of forest fires risk and suggest the possible modification of the tool to achieve this goal

Picture: Ishan Khosla