A GNA Feature by Nathaniel Sulemana
Tamale, Aug 31, GNA – Every summer now, television screens fill with the same devastating pictures: forests in Portugal, Greece, France and California turned to ash, towns evacuated overnight, and skies choked with smoke for weeks.
Fire scientists have a name for what is happening: the “suppression trap.” For decades, wealthy nations fought every fire as fast as possible. But putting out every small fire lets dead branches, dry grass and fallen leaves pile up year after year.
When a fire finally does break through the containment lines, usually on the hottest, driest, windiest day of the year, it has decades of fuel to burn, and it burns catastrophically.
Halfway across the world, in the Guinea savanna of Northern Ghana, farmers and herders have long practiced something that looks, at first glance, like the opposite of fire safety: they deliberately set fire to the bush.
But look closer, and the practice, known locally as “cool fire” or early burning, is anything but reckless. It may, in fact, be one of the most overlooked tools available for the very crisis now gripping Europe and North America.
A fire that protects rather than destroys
Early burning is timed carefully. Dagbamba (Dagomba) farmers set their fires at the very start of the dry season, while grass and brush still hold moisture from the rains. A fire lit this early, burns low and slow, clearing dry surface litter without scorching tree canopies, killing soil life, or threatening homes.
Research surveying farming households across six districts of Northern Ghana found that most families used fire this way at least once a year, for land preparation, pasture management, and firebreaks. Timing, not the decision to burn at all, was what farmers controlled most carefully.
This single, well-timed act of burning does three things at once.
Locking carbon into the soil
First, it locks carbon into the soil instead of releasing it into the air. Fire chemistry is sensitive to heat and moisture: a hot, dry wildfire burns biomass almost completely to ash and carbon dioxide, but a cooler, moisture-buffered fire behaves more like a slow industrial process called pyrolysis, leaving behind a stable, carbon-rich char known as biochar.
Scientists have confirmed that this kind of char resists decomposition for decades. That opens a door to something Northern Ghana has never had much access to. That is carbon finance.
Field data from a biochar training programme delivered this year by the Total Fund for Community Development (TOFCOD) and the META Foundation, working with Tree Aid Ghana, found that biochar produced through this kind of controlled low-temperature burning is roughly 75 percent solid carbon, enough, by international carbon-accounting standards, to generate close to 2.2 tonnes of carbon credit for every tonne returned to the soil.
Feeding livestock through the dry season
Second, it feeds livestock exactly when they need it most. The dry season is the hungriest time of year for cattle, sheep and goats, as standing grass cures, toughens, and loses its nutritional value.
Early burning clears that tired grass and triggers a rapid flush of tender new shoots, sometimes called the “green flush.” For pastoralist families, this is often the single biggest reason they burn at all.
The carbon and safety benefits are a bonus on top of a practice they were already doing to keep their animals fed.
Grazing as a living firebreak
Third, and perhaps most relevant to Europe’s crisis, the grazing that follows an early burn keeps the landscape in a permanent state of low fuel.
Cattle and goats browsing on the regrowth keep vegetation short for months, breaking up what would otherwise become a continuous carpet of dry fuel. It is, in effect, a living, self-renewing firebreak, repeated every year, across an entire landscape, at no cost beyond the labour communities already invest in their herds.
Not just theory
This is not an abstract idea. Between June and July this year, the TOFCOD–META Foundation partnership trained 140 lead farmers and four field staff across 21 communities in four Northern Region districts in safe, low-cost biochar production, and set up six paired demonstration plots to track results.
Every act of burning followed a strict safety protocol, including a cleared 10-metre firebreak, a worker stationed upwind, and a reserve of water on standby, with zero safety incidents across the entire programme.
It is proof that this can be done safely, and at a community scale, without expensive equipment.
Europe arriving at a similar conclusion
Europe, meanwhile, is arriving at a similar conclusion from a different direction.
Fire scientists writing after this year’s fire season have pointed to the disappearance of grazing livestock from the European countryside, as rural populations shrink and farming industrialises, as a direct contributor to the unmanaged fuel now driving bigger fires.
Separately, researchers studying Mediterranean fire policy have called on governments to stop pouring money into suppression alone and start investing in the kind of fuel and landscape management that prevents fires from becoming catastrophic in the first place.
Northern Ghana’s early-burning tradition is, in effect, a working example of exactly the kind of solution these scientists are now calling for.
Principle, not practice to transplant
None of this means simply transplanting a Ghanaian farming practice onto a French hillside or a Californian forest. Climates, land ownership rules, and fire governance are all different.
What can transfer is the underlying principle: fire, timed to the right moisture window and paired with grazing, can prevent the fuel build-up that turns a small fire into a catastrophe.
Evidence still needs to be built
What is missing is the hard evidence to prove it, measure it, and fund it properly: instrumented data on exactly how much carbon this practice locks away, how much forage it produces, and whether the model holds up outside West Africa.
That is the next phase of this work, and it deserves serious backing from research funders and government alike.
Northern Ghana did not invent climate-smart agriculture as a slogan. Farming communities here have been quietly practicing it for generations. It may be time the rest of the world to start paying attention.
Nathaniel Sulemana is an agribusiness and sustainable community development professional and biochar specialist, and Chief Executive Officer of the Total Fund for Community Development (TOFCOD).
GNA
Edited by Eric K Amoh/Benjamin Mensah
Writer’s Email: [email protected]