International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Socio-economic and environmental impacts of veld fires are acknowledged, documented and widely discussed at different forums. However, what is largely missing are solutions to reduce occurrence of veld fires mostly in rural areas. Literature also suggests that veld fires are to increase (more intense and long burning) with warming (hot and dry conditions – climate change). This is likely to affect rural poor households who largely depend on land-based natural resources (field crops, forests harvest, grazing land); with limited access to fire brigades, that mainly serves urban cities. With warming (drier and hotter conditions), rural areas who share boundaries with mountains, rangelands, forests and wetlands are predicted to face greater threats from veld fires because of the dry flammable biomass in these areas. Against these drawbacks and leveraging high mobile phones ownership and network coverage in rural areas, we present an integrated mobile application for veld fire detection and notification prototype rural households can use to identify high fire danger areas and burning fires in near real time close to their location.

Index Terms—Mobile phones, rural communities, veld fires.

A. Taruvinga is with the University of Fort Hare Private Bag X1314 Alice South Africa (e-mail: ataruvinga@ufh.ac.za).
E. Chikohora is with the Namibia University of Science and Technology Private 13388, Windhoek, Namibia (e-mail: echikohora@nust.na).
N. R. Jere is with the Walter Sisulu University P.O Box 1421, East London, 5200, South Africa (e-mail: njere@wsu.ac.za).
R. van den Dool is with CSIR, PO Box 395; Pretoria 0001, South Africa (e-mail: rvddool@csir.co.za).

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Cite: Taruvinga Amon, Chikohora Edmore, Jere Nobert, and Dool Riaan, "Integrated Mobile Veld Fire Detection and Notification System for Rural Communities: A Case of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 94-98, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).