Following the light: using 'brightspots' to avoid future Amazonian fires

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Responding to the reality of pervasive tropical forest fires is an urgent social and environmental challenge of our time. Tropical fires emit disproportionate quantities of carbon, harm public health and human well-being through smoke exposure, and damage the economy. Reducing their incidence, especially during droughts, has the potential to deliver benefits to people and nature, as well as contributing to climate commitments. Yet leading top-down approaches have failed, and underscore the need for integrated approaches that combine methods and scales of analysis across the natural and social science to inform management responses. This project will take the notion of brightspots to the case of tropical fire for the first time. Brightspots are sites where outcomes are better than predicted, apparently defying the odds, whilst darkspots have worse than expected outcomes (are fire-prone), and transformation sites are where historic fire-prone trajectories have transformed in to success stories. Locating sites in Amazonia across this brightspot typology will inform our understanding of how, despite high fire-risks, some endogenous local responses have been successful and provide evidence needed to contribute towards steering the Amazon away from a fire-prone future. This project offers an important and timely opportunity to inform adaptation and mitigation policies with locally grounded knowledge, experience and practice. Guided by a set of research questions, the student will first use geospatial analysis and regression modelling to identify, locate and quantify the brightpot typology across Amazonia. This desk-based analysis will guide selection of fieldwork sites, that will be visited in a field season using social science and participatory methods to understand the processes that explain fire prevalence. The funded student will receive support from a team of leading interdisciplinary researchers and non-academic partners at the forefront of risk-reduction in the Amazon (CEMADEM). The studentship comes with an exceptional cross-disciplinary training programme and will benefit from the dynamic research centres at UEA, including the Environmental Justice group, the Critical Decade DTC, and the Tyndall Centre.