This presentation focuses on some legal aspects of forest fire management, namely international agreements and national legislation dealing with forest fires and is based on the updating work of Frédéric St-Martin, Legal Consultant; carried out in March 2004. The main objectives of the up-dating was to: (i) identify newly developed national and sub-national legislation on forest fire management; (ii) update the inventory of international agreements on forest fires maintained by FAO; and (iii) prepare a standard template for developing Global Agreements based on the Template agreed upon by the International Wildland Fire Summit in Sydney in October 2003.
Updating of national legislation dealing with forest fires was carried out through a systematic search in FAOLEX, the FAO legislative database.
The international agreements and the national legislation identified in this update, were clustered into two categories of forest fire legal documents: (i) international agreements, including emergency response agreements and other agreements; and (ii) national legislation consisting of texts which either deal specifically and more or less fully with forest fires, or partly deal with some aspects of forest fire management among other forestry aspects.
The legal documents on forest fires that were identified in the course of this work included: (i) 20 emergency response international agreements; (ii) 9 international agreements not dealing with emergency response but covering other aspects of co-operation on forest fires; and (iii) 204 documents on national legislation, of which 95 are specific to forest fires, and the others deal with forestry generally and cover forest fires to some extent.
