Frontier spaces of vulnerability: Regional change,urbanization, drought and fire hazard in Santarém,Pará, Brazil

Fire hazard is a mounting concern in tropical rainforests of the Brazilian Amazon and has raised awareness within the science community of the links between agricultural fire use, drought and accidental fire. As a result, fire is being addressed as a crisis event with mitigation focused on those who light fires, particularly smallholder agriculturalists. Little attention is paid to the historical and ongoing ways in which Amazon landscapes and peoples have been made more susceptible to fire. Frontier regions of the Brazilian Amazon serve a variety of functions within the larger Brazilian society, including as extractive reserves for economic development, as social safety valves to reduce population pressures, and as areas to support urban regional integration. Each of these functions has impacted frontier environments in ways that create more flammable landscapes and/or shape the vulnerability of people to fire hazard. This paper uses a case study inthe Brazilian Lower Amazon to understand how vulnerability to fire hazard develops. It argues that if fire mitigation remains centered on fire as a crisis event, an understanding of what constitutes frontier spaces of vulnerability, both in landscape and in populations, will be limited.