Climate Change and Forest Fire in Eastern Himalaya: A Case Study of Sikkim and Darjeeling Himalayas of West Bengal

The Eastern Himalaya is known for its unique biodiversity. In recent years, it has been reported that the incidence of forest fire in the region has been increasing, which poses an alarming threat to its rich biodiversity and also poses a challenge to the risk mitigation measures and initiatives under different organizations including government for the protection of forest. This study has made an attempt to examine first the climatic variabilities of the selected areas and to check whether the much-debated issues of global climate change have influenced or not, and second, to find the implication of climatic variabilities on the pattern and distribution of forest fire incidence in the selected areas. The study also identified various types of biodiversity that are more likely to be affected by recent forest fire with the help of DEM and Google Earth Imageries. Climatic data from three stations located at different altitudes—two stations from Sikkim (Gangtok located at 1650 m from MSL, as an Urban centre and Lachung at 3500 m from MSL, snow cover site where no direct anthropogenic influence) and Darjeeling (1350 m), West Bengal—had been analysed to study the nature and trend of climatic variabilities in the region. Forest fire incidences in each district of Sikkim and four subdivisions of Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts of West Bengal had been collected to study the spatio-temporal pattern of forest fire incidences as well as to establish how climatic behaviour induces forest fire incidences in the region. It is found that most of the forest fire incidences occur in the winter and pre-monsoon seasons, which are closely related to rain and temperature in the winter and pre-monsoon seasons. Each district in the region has different types of biodiversity loss due to forest fire but mainly vulnerable to tropical and sub-tropical forests. Anthropogenic factors are also found profound inducing factors in forest fire incidences directly or indirectly, as well as deliberately or incidentally.