ISO/TS 19677:2019

Guidelines for assessing the adverse impact of wildland fires on the environment and to people through environmental exposure

This document addresses the impact of wildland fires and firefighting activities on the environment (air, water, soil, wildlife and vegetation). It further addresses the impact of wildland fire effluents on exposed human population, including firefighters, as well as food production, land, sea and air traffic, and the built environment. It also describes the environmental impacts of firefighting activities.

This document also provides requirements and recommendations to quantify such impacts of wildland fires and to establish post-fire mitigation measures.

The wildland fires covered include both natural wildland fires and man-initiated fires, including prescribed burning and agricultural fires, but not peat fires nor coal seam fires.

This document is intended to serve as a tool for the development of standard protocols for:

— the assessment of local and remote adverse environmental impacts of wildland fires;

— the assessment of the effects of smoke and gas exposure on firefighters and exposed human populations.

It provides guidance for incident commanders and other responsible or affected parties when decisions regarding firefighting strategies, tactics, and restoration are made. It is intended principally for use by firefighters and investigators, insurance providers, environmental regulatory authorities, civil defence organisations, public health authorities and land owners.

This document does not include specific instruction on compiling and reporting the information needed to assess environmental damage caused by a fire incident, nor does it include specific sampling methodologies and analysis requirements. These topics are the focus of documents in the ISO 26367 series. This document does not address either fire damage to the built environment, direct acute toxicity issues, which are covered by other ISO standards, nor does it address economic impact, although the impact of climate change is discussed in Annex D.

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