Digital fire technologies and community networks: Cultivating just sociotechnical practices for living with planetary change

Fires are expanding in frequency and intensity worldwide due to climate change and land‐use transformations. At the same time, fire often plays a regenerative role in ecosystems. Traditional and cultural practices incorporate fire use for landscape management and landscape renewal. In this complex matrix of fire ecologies, digital technologies have emerged to monitor and manage fires, as well as support fire prevention and recovery efforts. However, ‘FireTech’ devices and data can be distant from the communities responding to changing environments and that could benefit from expanded fire knowledge and more appropriate fire management practices.

This article draws on interviews, fieldwork and field schools with stakeholders and communities in the temperate rainforest region of La Araucanía, Chile, to examine how fires, environments and technology intersect in an area where fire has been used for land management. We ask how digital technologies are influencing approaches to fire prevention, response and recovery; and whether and how communities contribute to or benefit from these digital practices.

Through our analysis, we demonstrate how community networks are often at the forefront of developing and maintaining fire networks and practices, which generate distinct understandings of changing environments. Nevertheless, we further show how digital technologies can be detached from community knowledge and initiatives, exacerbating expert, industry and community divides. Such disjunctures could impede the development of community‐oriented fire technologies and limit the ability to respond to and restore changing environments.

Based on these findings, we propose measures to navigate potential rifts and enhance connections across community fire networks and emerging digital technologies, ensuring more just sociotechnical practices and ways of living with planetary change. Such measures could further enhance fire management strategies to encompass prevention, response and recovery, treating landscape diversification and community engagement as critical practices within more comprehensive fire ecologies.