The Global Fire Monitoring Center (GFMC), a Subdivision of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, is an Associated Institute of UNU and a formal partner of the UNU Institute for Environment and Human Security (EHS) since October 2005.

Established in 1998 as a contribution of Germany to the UN International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) the GFMC is serving since 2001 as coordinator and facilitator of the UNISDR Wildland Fire Advisory Group and the UNISDR Global Wildland Fire Network (GWFN), a global voluntary network that is providing policy advice, and science and technology transfer to enable nations:

• to reduce the negative impacts of vegetation fires (“wildland fires”) on the environment and humanity; and
• to advance the knowledge and application of the ecologically and environmentally benign role of natural fire in fire-dependent ecosystems, and sustainable application of fire in land-use systems.

Under the UNISDR Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction the GWFN is serving as a “Thematic Platform”. The GFMC provides a global portal for wildland fire documentation, information and monitoring and is publicly accessible through the Internet. The regularly updated national to global wildland fire products of the GFMC are generated by a worldwide network of cooperating institutions. Working at the interface between the science community and the user community the research and development work of the GFMC is targeted at providing capacity building and delivering problem-oriented products and solutions. The contribution of the GFMC to the UNU mandate includes applied research for the development of concepts for capacity building in advanced wildland fire management. GFMC is collaborating with UNU-IAS in addressing the role and use of traditional knowledge of rural communities in fire management.

GFMC Website:

http://www.fire.uni-freiburg.de

GFMC and Community-based Fire Management:

http://www.fire.uni-freiburg.de/Manag/CBFiM.htm