Every dry season, thousands of wildfires sweep across Nigeria’s forests, savannas, farmlands, grazing lands, and protected areas, causing significant but often underreported economic and environmental losses. Beyond their impact on livelihoods and ecosystems, wildfires pose growing public health and climate resilience risks. Drawing on transnational practices, this article examines key strategies Nigeria can adopt to strengthen wildfire preparedness, improve early warning and response, and build more resilient communities and ecosystems.
Wildfire is often overlooked in discussions about environmental and disaster risks in Nigeria. Public attention tends to focus on flooding, erosion, drought, and other climate-related hazards with immediate, highly visible impacts. Yet every dry season, thousands of fires burn across Nigeria's forests, savannas, protected areas, farmlands, and grazing lands.
A regional assessment using satellite fire-detection data found that Nigeria recorded over 35,000 individual fire detections in 2018 alone, the second-highest count among 14
West African countries after Ghana, concentrated heavily in shrubland, deciduous forest, and cropland-mosaic areas. While many of these fires are intentionally set for agricultural and land management purposes, they often escape control, causing environmental degradation, economic losses, and threats to public health.
Historically, wildfire has been viewed as a routine seasonal occurrence rather than a national policy concern. However, this perception may no longer be adequate. Climate change, population growth, expanding agricultural frontiers, deforestation, and increasing pressure on natural resources are creating conditions that can increase wildfire frequency, intensity, and impacts.
Around the world, countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Portugal, and South Africa have spent decades developing systems to reduce wildfire risk and improve preparedness. Their experiences demonstrate that effective wildfire management extends far beyond firefighting. It requires prevention, planning, public education, community participation, early warning systems, and resilient landscapes. Nigeria has an opportunity to learn from these experiences and adopt a proactive approach to wildfire management before wildfire-related losses worsen.
Understanding Wildfire Risk in Nigeria
Fire has long been used as a land management tool across Nigeria. In many rural communities, controlled burning remains a common practice for clearing agricultural fields, managing grazing lands, controlling pests, and facilitating hunting activities. While these practices may provide short-term benefits, they can also lead to unintended and uncontrolled fires when weather conditions, vegetation, and human activities combine to create high-risk situations.
Agricultural and grazing-related burning in Nigeria does not happen in a vacuum. In the Middle Belt and increasingly in southern states, competition between farmers and pastoralist herders over land and water has become one of Nigeria's most serious security challenges, with thousands of deaths recorded over the past decade as desertification and shrinking grazing land in the north push herders further south into farming territory.
Burning is entangled in this conflict in a direct, practical way: herders burn old grass to stimulate fresh growth for cattle, farmers burn fields to clear land ahead of planting, and disagreements over whose fire damaged whose land or livestock can themselves become a flashpoint in an already volatile relationship. A wildfire strategy that treats agricultural burning as a purely technical problem, solvable through better timing or general public education alone, risks missing that, in much of Nigeria, decisions about when, where, and whether to burn are bound up with a far larger and more dangerous contest over land.
Wildfires occur across multiple ecological zones in Nigeria. The Sudan and Guinea savannas experience widespread seasonal burning driven largely by agropastoral ignitions during the dry season, a pattern consistent across West African savanna landscapes more broadly, while forested regions in southern Nigeria also face fire risks associated with land clearing and agricultural expansion. Protected areas, forest reserves, and biodiversity hotspots are particularly vulnerable because fires can threaten valuable ecosystems and wildlife populations; at Gashaka Gumti National Park, Nigeria's largest protected area, forest fires ignited by cattle herders are identified as one of the park's principal ongoing threats, alongside poaching, logging, and artisanal mining.
Research increasingly suggests that climate change may amplify these risks. Rising temperatures, longer dry seasons, and changing rainfall patterns can increase vegetation dryness and create conditions more conducive to fire ignition and spread. At the same time, growing populations and expanding land-use activities increase the likelihood of human-caused ignitions.
The result is a complex wildfire challenge that sits at the intersection of climate change, environmental management, agriculture, conservation, and rural development.
The Environmental Cost of Wildfires
The environmental consequences of wildfire extend far beyond the immediate destruction caused by flames. Repeated fires can alter ecosystem structure and function by changing vegetation composition and reducing biodiversity. In many forest ecosystems, young seedlings and regenerating trees are highly vulnerable to fire damage. Frequent burning can prevent natural forest regeneration, reduce species diversity, and contribute to long-term forest degradation.
Protected areas are particularly susceptible to these impacts. Gashaka Gumti National Park, Nigeria's largest national park at roughly 6,400 square kilometres, spans savanna grasslands, montane forests, and Nigeria's highest peak, and is recognised as one of the most biodiverse conservation areas in West Africa, home to over 100 mammal species and more than 400 recorded bird species, including some of the last remaining populations of the critically endangered Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee.
Uncontrolled fires threaten these habitats and complicate conservation efforts. Similarly, forests such as Omo Forest Reserve in Ogun State, a 130,500-hectare tropical rainforest reserve that includes a UNESCO-recognized biosphere reserve and strict nature reserve, provide critical ecological services, including biodiversity conservation, watershed protection, carbon storage, and climate regulation. Fire-related degradation in these landscapes undermines both conservation objectives and ecosystem resilience.
Wildfires also affect soil health. High-intensity fires can reduce organic matter, disrupt nutrient cycling, destroy soil microorganisms, and increase erosion susceptibility. In regions already experiencing land degradation and desertification, repeated burning can further reduce land productivity and ecosystem recovery potential.
Perhaps most importantly, wildfire impacts often accumulate gradually over time. While a single fire may not appear catastrophic, repeated annual burning can fundamentally transform landscapes, making ecosystems less productive and more vulnerable to future disturbances.
Economic Implications for Communities and the Nation
The economic impacts of wildfire are often underestimated because many losses occur in rural areas and rarely enter formal reporting systems. Agriculture is among the sectors most vulnerable to wildfire damage. Uncontrolled fires can destroy crops, damage irrigation infrastructure, reduce pasture quality, and threaten livestock production. For smallholder farmers who depend heavily on seasonal harvests, even a single fire event can result in significant financial hardship.
Forestry resources also suffer substantial losses. Fires can damage valuable timber species, reduce forest productivity, and increase forest management and restoration costs. These losses may affect both government-managed forest reserves and community-managed forest resources.
The economic consequences extend beyond direct damage. Governments often incur costs related to emergency response, post-fire rehabilitation, reforestation, and ecosystem restoration. Conservation organisations and protected area managers may face additional expenses associated with habitat recovery and wildlife protection.
Wildfires can also undermine emerging opportunities in ecotourism and nature-based development. Protected landscapes such as Gashaka Gumti National Park, Yankari Game Reserve, and Cross River's forest ecosystems contribute to tourism, conservation, and local livelihoods. Fire-related degradation can diminish their ecological and economic value.
International experience consistently demonstrates that investing in wildfire prevention and preparedness is far less costly than responding to and recovering from wildfire disasters after they occur. Australia's 2019–2020 "Black Summer" bushfires, for example, are estimated to have cost the economy more than AUD $100 billion, including direct firefighting and recovery costs and longer-term losses in tourism, infrastructure, and productivity.
Public Health and Climate Consequences
Wildfires are not only environmental and economic challenges; they are also public health concerns. Smoke from vegetation fires contains fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and other pollutants that can harm air quality. Exposure to wildfire smoke may increase the risk of respiratory illnesses, aggravate asthma, and contribute to cardiovascular complications, particularly among children, older adults, and individuals with pre-existing health conditions. Globally, fine particulate matter from landscape fire smoke is associated with more than 675,000 deaths annually, primarily through cardiovascular and respiratory disease.
In some cases, smoke can travel considerable distances, affecting populations far from the actual fire. This means that wildfire impacts are not confined to rural areas but can also affect nearby towns and urban centres. Wildfires also contribute to climate change. When vegetation burns, it releases carbon stored in trees, grasses, and soils into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. These emissions contribute to global warming and reduce ecosystems' capacity to function as carbon sinks.
This creates a feedback loop. Climate change increases wildfire risk through higher temperatures and prolonged dry conditions, while wildfires contribute additional greenhouse gas emissions that further intensify climate change. Breaking this cycle requires investments in both climate adaptation and wildfire risk reduction.
What International Experience Teaches Us
Countries that have successfully reduced wildfire risk have generally adopted a common principle: wildfire management begins long before a fire starts. While ecological conditions, governance systems, and resource availability differ across countries, several recurring lessons emerge from international experience. These lessons are particularly relevant for Nigeria as wildfire incidents become more frequent in forest reserves, savannah ecosystems, agricultural landscapes, and protected areas.
Prevention Is More Effective Than Suppression
Historically, wildfire management focused primarily on extinguishing fires after ignition. However, countries that experienced devastating wildfire disasters increasingly recognised the limitations of this approach.
Today, prevention measures such as public education, vegetation management, prescribed burning, fuel reduction, and land-use planning are central components of wildfire policy. For example, Australia has invested heavily in fuel management programs; Victoria's Reducing Bushfire Risk program uses planned burning, mechanical fuel treatment, and risk-based targeting across public land, alongside upgraded fire towers and access roads, to support early detection and suppression after major bushfire disasters.
Similarly, Portugal has strengthened vegetation management and landscape planning efforts after experiencing repeated catastrophic wildfires; following the deadly 2017 fires that killed more than 100 people, the government created a dedicated Agency for Integrated Rural Fire Management (AGIF) and adopted a National Plan for Integrated Rural Fire Management, shifting policy from a primarily suppression-focused approach toward landscape-level fuel management and prevention. These countries learned that relying solely on firefighting resources often leads to escalating costs and greater losses during extreme fire conditions.
The lesson for Nigeria is clear. While firefighting capacity remains important, preventing unwanted fires offers the greatest return on investment. Reducing ignition sources, promoting safer agricultural burning practices, and managing combustible vegetation can significantly lower wildfire occurrence and severity.
Communities Are the First Line of Defence
One of the strongest lessons from international practice is that wildfire resilience depends heavily on community participation. In countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, communities play a central role in wildfire preparedness. Residents receive education on fire risks, safe vegetation management practices, emergency planning, and evacuation procedures.
Several African countries have also implemented successful community-based fire management programs that empower local residents to participate in fire prevention, monitoring, and response. In Namibia's Caprivi region, where fire scar mapping in the mid-1990s found that between 50% and 85% of forests, woodlands, and savanna burned each year, a community-based fire management program supported by the Food and Agriculture Organization helped reduce the annual area burned by more than half, from roughly 840,000 to 400,000 hectares, over five years, an approach that has since been extended to Zambia, Mozambique, and other countries in the region.
Community involvement is particularly important because local residents are often the first to detect fires and can respond quickly before fires spread. They also possess valuable indigenous knowledge about seasonal fire patterns, vegetation conditions, and traditional land management practices.
Nigeria's traditional institutions, community associations, and local leadership structures provide a strong foundation for similar approaches. Engaging local communities as active partners rather than passive beneficiaries can significantly improve wildfire prevention and response outcomes.
Technology Improves Situational Awareness
Advances in technology have transformed wildfire management worldwide. Satellite monitoring systems can identify active fire locations in near real time. Weather forecasting tools help predict periods of elevated fire danger. Geographic information systems support risk assessments and strategic planning.
Countries such as the United States, Canada, and Brazil routinely use satellite imagery, remote sensing technologies, and predictive modelling to monitor fire activity and allocate resources more effectively. Early warning systems allow authorities to issue alerts during periods of extreme fire risk, enabling preventive actions before fires occur.
Platforms such as NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) already provide wildfire monitoring data that government agencies, researchers, and land managers in Nigeria can use. FIRMS distributes near-real-time active fire and thermal anomaly data from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite instruments, typically within three hours of satellite observation, free of charge to any user worldwide. The challenge is not technology availability but the institutional capacity to use it effectively. Strengthening technical expertise, improving data-sharing mechanisms, and integrating fire monitoring systems into decision-making processes would significantly enhance Nigeria's wildfire preparedness.
Landscape Management Reduces Long-Term Risk
Wildfire risk is fundamentally linked to landscape management. Countries that invest in forest restoration, fuel management, prescribed burning, and ecosystem resilience generally see better wildfire outcomes than those that rely solely on emergency response. In many regions, decades of poor land management have allowed combustible vegetation to accumulate, creating conditions for larger and more intense fires. To address this challenge, countries such as Australia and Portugal increasingly use prescribed burning and fuel reduction programs, including strategic fuel breaks, renewed pasture and agroforestry management, and coordinated land-use planning, to lower fire intensity and restore ecological balance.
Landscape-scale approaches also recognise that wildfire risk extends beyond individual properties or protected areas. Effective management requires coordinated action across forests, agricultural lands, grazing areas, and human settlements.
For Nigeria, integrating wildfire considerations into forestry, agriculture, conservation, and climate adaptation programs could significantly reduce future risks. Sustainable land management practices can simultaneously support biodiversity conservation, ecosystem restoration, and wildfire risk reduction.
Multi-Sector Collaboration Is Essential
Successful wildfire management requires coordination across multiple sectors. Forestry agencies, agricultural institutions, emergency management organisations, conservation groups, public health authorities, researchers, and local governments all play important roles. Because wildfire affects numerous sectors simultaneously, fragmented approaches often produce limited results. Coordinated planning and information sharing are essential for effective risk reduction.
International experience demonstrates that successful wildfire governance often depends on clearly defined institutional responsibilities and strong interagency cooperation. Portugal's post-2017 reforms are instructive: a central finding was that many institutions' involvement in fire management, without a clear coordinating authority, left significant gaps in prevention and response that the creation of AGIF was designed to close. During major wildfire events, emergency responders, meteorological agencies, environmental authorities, and local governments must work together to ensure timely information sharing and coordinated action.
For Nigeria, strengthening collaboration among federal ministries, state governments, research institutions, conservation organisations, and local communities will be critical for building a comprehensive wildfire management system.
A Nigerian Model Already Taking Shape
Nigeria does not have to import every lesson from scratch; a version of community-based fire prevention is already emerging, without waiting for a national strategy. Cross River State, home to a significant share of Nigeria's remaining primary rainforest, lost roughly 493 hectares of tree cover to fire between 2001 and 2021, with 2020 accounting for nearly half of that total. In response, a Nigerian conservation organisation, the Small Mammal Conservation Organisation (SMACON), trained and equipped local "forest guardians" to patrol farmland and forest edges in partnership with the Cross River State Forestry Commission and National Park authorities.
The guardians worked directly with farmers who had previously destroyed their own newly planted crops by hand, fearing that leaving dry vegetation nearby would invite fire, showing them that controlled, well-timed practices could protect both the crop and the surrounding forest. Over five fire seasons, these community patrols managed more than 35 fire incidents, and at least one participating community reported no wildfire in its forest since the program began.
The approach mirrors the core logic of a Community Wildfire Protection Plan: local risk knowledge, direct engagement with the people actually doing the burning, and modest equipment paired with sustained trust-building, without requiring a fully built national framework to already be in place. This suggests Nigeria's path toward wildfire preparedness does not have to run only from the top down; it can also be built up from pilots like SMACON's, with national policy following behind to formalise, fund, and extend what is already working on the ground.
What Nigeria Can Learn from Community Wildfire Protection Plans
One particularly useful model comes from the United States through Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs). CWPPs are locally developed plans that bring together communities, emergency responders, land managers, government agencies, and other stakeholders to identify wildfire risks and prioritise mitigation actions. Established under the U.S. Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, these plans typically include wildfire risk assessments, community engagement activities, fuel reduction priorities, public education strategies, and implementation frameworks.
The strength of the CWPP approach lies in its emphasis on local ownership. Rather than relying exclusively on central government institutions, communities actively participate in identifying risks and developing solutions. A key feature of CWPPs is that they encourage collaboration before disasters occur. Stakeholders jointly identify vulnerable areas, map critical infrastructure, establish communication channels, and agree on practical measures to reduce wildfire risk. This proactive planning helps communities respond more effectively when fires occur.
Nigeria could adapt similar planning approaches for high-risk landscapes. Pilot wildfire preparedness plans could be developed in areas such as Omo Forest Reserve, Cross River forests, Yankari landscapes, and communities surrounding Gashaka Gumti National Park.
These plans would not require large initial investments. Instead, they could focus on risk assessment, stakeholder engagement, public education, fire prevention measures, and improved coordination among local actors. Over time, successful pilot programs could expand to other regions and integrate into broader disaster risk reduction and environmental management frameworks.
The Current Institutional Gap
Much of the preceding discussion describes what other countries, and, in the case of Cross River, a Nigerian pilot program, have already built. It is equally important to be clear about what Nigeria has not yet built at the national level. Nigeria does not currently have a dedicated wildfire or wildland fire agency comparable to Portugal's AGIF or the interagency coordination structures used in the United States and Australia.
By default, wildfire responsibility falls to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) as part of its broader all-hazards mandate. NEMA's public wildfire guidance, however, closely follows generic international wildfire-preparedness advice, covering topics such as home construction materials, attic vents, and defensible space around houses, rather than reflecting Nigeria's specific mix of savanna burning, agricultural and pastoral fire use, and protected-area risk. Forestry functions, meanwhile, are split across federal and state agencies with no single body responsible for coordinating fire prevention across them.
This is less a criticism of any one institution than a description of a structural starting point: the recommendations that follow assume Nigeria is building wildfire governance largely from the ground up, not adjusting an existing system.
Policy Priorities for Nigeria
To strengthen wildfire preparedness and resilience, policymakers should consider several priority actions.
First, Nigeria should develop a National Wildfire Management Strategy that establishes clear institutional responsibilities, strengthens coordination mechanisms, and aligns wildfire management with climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction efforts. Such a strategy should provide a framework for prevention, preparedness, response, recovery, and long-term risk reduction.
Second, federal and state governments should invest in sustained public awareness campaigns that promote safe burning practices and wildfire prevention. Awareness programs should target farmers, pastoralists, forest-dependent communities, schools, and local governments, particularly in areas with recurring fire incidents. These campaigns cannot be designed as if agricultural burning were a purely technical habit to correct; in areas where grazing routes and farmland are already contested, an awareness campaign that ignores the underlying land dispute is unlikely to change behaviour on its own, and could even be perceived as taking sides in a larger conflict.
Coordination with existing farmer-herder mediation and peacebuilding efforts, rather than a standalone messaging campaign, is likely to be more effective in these areas.
Third, Nigeria should expand community-based fire management programs through training, capacity building, and support for local fire management committees. Empowering communities with knowledge, equipment, and organisational support can significantly improve early detection and rapid response capabilities, as the Caprivi experience described earlier shows.
Fourth, Nigeria should strengthen satellite monitoring systems, fire-danger forecasting tools, and early-warning mechanisms to improve wildfire detection and response. Investments in digital monitoring platforms and technical training can enhance decision-making and resource allocation.
Fifth, wildfire risk should be integrated into forestry policies, agricultural development programs, protected area management plans, and climate resilience strategies. Mainstreaming wildfire considerations across sectors will help ensure that risk reduction becomes part of routine planning and management processes.
Sixth, implement stronger land-use planning and vegetation management measures in high-risk areas. Establishing firebreaks, managing fuel loads, and protecting critical ecosystems can reduce the likelihood of large-scale wildfire events.
Finally, investment in research and data collection should be increased to improve understanding of wildfire occurrence, impacts, and future risk trends across different ecological zones. Reliable data will be essential for evidence-based policymaking, resource prioritisation, and long-term wildfire risk management.
Conclusion
Wildfires are often seen as a routine part of Nigeria's dry-season landscape. However, their environmental, economic, public health, and climate impacts suggest that they deserve greater policy attention.
As climate change and land-use pressures continue to reshape ecosystems, wildfire risk is likely to become an increasingly important challenge for environmental management, rural development, and national resilience.
The experiences of countries that have invested in prevention, preparedness, community engagement, and landscape resilience offer valuable lessons. Nigeria can learn from these experiences and develop a proactive wildfire management framework tailored to its unique ecological, social, and economic realities.
The question facing policymakers is not whether wildfires will continue to occur. Rather, it is whether Nigeria will invest in the policies, institutions, and partnerships needed to reduce wildfire risks and build more resilient landscapes for future generations.
Author
Grace Dominic / Climate Policy Analyst / Contact