Events

MINSK, 3 November (BelTA) – Belarus presented its experience of fighting forest fires at an international forum on preventing forest fires, which was scheduled to take place in Delhi, India on 1-3 November, the press service of the Belarusian Forestry Ministry told BelTA.

For several days international participants of the forum were busy presenting the systems they had developed and their national fire extinguishment methods. Belarusian First Deputy Forestry Minister Alexander Kulik shared the Belarusian experience of fighting forest fires. In his words, the Belarusian system for detecting forest fires is based on ground-based and remote visual monitoring, remote video monitoring, aerial and space monitoring. The system allows detecting 78% of the fires as small as 0.1ha.

The effectiveness of the Belarusian forest fire prevention system has been proven by how little territory forest fires occupy per year. Two historic records were beaten in 2011 (115.6ha) and 2013 (50ha). This year Forestry Ministry specialists have been able to halve the number of fires from 270 to 121. Their territory has dropped from 213ha to 71ha.

The Forestry Ministry pays close attention to enhancing the physical infrastructure that forestry enterprises use. In 2016 a loan from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development helped buy eight fire engines and 31 off-road vehicles for the forest protection services. The Belarusian Defense Ministry also handed over 20 tracked vehicles for the sake of extinguishing fires in hard-to-reach and swampy places.

The international forum on preventing forest fires has been organized by the World Bank.