Environmental and socioeconomic impacts of forest fires: A call for multilateral cooperation and management interventions

Fire is one of the dominant disturbances in forests that widely impacts the ecology, environment, and socioeconomics of nations across the globe. In view of setting priorities of nations for combating and mitigating the adverse impacts of forest fires, a review of literature was carried out to examine various environmental and socioeconomic impacts of forest fires. The G20 nations were selected for the present review study because together they represent 60 percent of the world population and about 80 percent of world GDP, apart from having a strategic multilateral platform connecting the world's major developed and emerging economic countries. The present review illustrates that the contribution of G20 nations in world forest is quite significant (69.26%) yet they are impacted adversely due to forest fires and so that the environment and diverse forest types they possess. In view of mitigating the forest fires impacts on environment and socioeconomics the countries should come forward for establishing and strengthening bilateral and or multilateral co-operation and co-ordination, and also share adequate financial resources, technologies and training among themselves.