Community Forest members patrolling their forest. © Pema Namgyel

The community Forestry program in Bhutan is quite new and it’s in the process of gaining momentum, with the decentralization process of the Government. People now seem to show interest in managing the forest near to their settlement and derive the forest and ecosystem benefit in which their lives had been attached for centuries living in harmony with nature. The community program has been moving forward since 1970s with the Royal command to observe the June 2nd as social Forestry day. Involving people in the management of forest has been identified as key to better management of the forest.

Today the number of community forest in the country has reached to 556 with total area of 62115.45 hectare managed by 23908 individual households. However it had not reached to its full potentials and is in the process of growing. With some of the Community Forest in the country as old as two decades its contribution towards forest and ecosystem management through control forest fire had not been studied except some studies on income and benefit of Community in livelihood. This had prompted me to carry out a study on the contribution of Community Forest towards forest fire reduction in Punakha District. Over the years in the Districts managing decentralized forestry like Community forest it had been observed that whenever there is forest fire it’s more in the state forest than in community owned forest and the extent of damage is also seemingly high in state forest which is a hypothesized. However, the cause of such difference has not been documented so far. Therefore, my study will document and examine this difference and put forth for policy recommendation to increase the people managed forest if it comes as hypothesized. The project aims to take in account the cause and extend of damage of forest fire in both forest managements. The Secondary data maintained in the Forest Department and District level will be used as baseline for the project to compare the difference of fire occasion and damage in both forest management regime. The project is targeted in the oldest community forest in the district to gather more reliable information and tentatively 12 community forest out of 37 had been selected in various location in the blocks base on the forest fire occasion and management experiences. The study will enable more future studies to be conducted since its first of its kind especially in community forest contribution in ecosystem management.