The Foco no Fogo 2024 project, carried out by the Government of Tocantins and coordinated by the Secretariat for the Environment and Water Resources (Semarh) with the participation of 32 partner institutions, within the scope of the Fire Committee – State Committee for Combating Forest Fires and Fire Control Fires in Tocantins began this week, the second phase of the prevention action plan, totaling almost 3 thousand people reached.
New registrations are processed all the time in the Foco no Fogo application which, this Thursday, the 9th, already adds up to a total of 2,818 people directly reached by the project, 1,707 of which during 16 actions carried out, such as lectures, courses, training, among others , during the first phase of awareness raising in schools; and another 1,111 during 242 visits to rural properties.
In total, 26 cities on the project’s agenda have already been visited, with among the eight most recent records of the application, the municipalities of Brejinho de Nazaré, Formoso do Araguaia, Lagoa da Confusao, Lagoa do Tocantins, Palmeiras do Tocantins, Paraíso do Tocantins , Ponte Alta do Bom Jesus and Ponte Alta do Tocantins.
The secretary of Semarh, Marcello Lelis, said that, “the anticipation of the preventive actions of the Foco no Fogo project was a wise decision. In the last few days we began to notice the approach of the dry season, but as planned, the action has already covered dozens of schools and this week we resumed visits to rural properties. Records show that the Foco no Fogo teams are advancing with the remarkable performance of the largest environmental education project in Tocantins. With this preventive awareness-raising work, our objective is to establish the population’s commitment to the guidelines on the use of fire, so that together, we can increasingly reduce the number of outbreaks in our State”, he pointed out.
The director of Environmental Education for Sustainability, Erliette Gadotti, reinforced that this year, “the Foco no Fogo project began with the motorcade and the educational blitz in Palmas, then we visited around 50 schools in the first phase and now we have resumed visits to rural properties . Every year Foco no Fogo has been growing and gaining strength with the population of the municipalities. Environmental education is a continuous work, which this year we innovated, incorporating into the project’s agenda, raising awareness among young people based on the students’ curriculum. Next week we will be at Agrotins, then we will have the official launch of Foco no Fogo and we will head to the southern region of the State”.
The Environmental Education manager, Thays Marinho, said that, “with the lectures, we had a great success, both in terms of the participation of institutions working towards this, and in the reception of schools and students. We believe that the project is really growing, reaching many more people. We resumed field visits, when we talked to rural landowners, but we will continue to hold lectures, but in a smaller quantity than we were attending during the first phase of the Foco no Fogo project”.
The forestry engineer, coordinator of the Environmental Monitoring and Fire Management Center at the Federal University of Tocantins (UFT) in Gurupi, Marcos Giongo, explained that “the consolidation of data in the Foco no Fogo application occurs as the platform receives the accumulated records that are sent by the device. Then the accounting process begins, so over the course of a day the results of each report may change until all entries are completed. This is an important survey that forms part of a historical series of the project’s performance.”
