The Global Fire Monitoring Center brochure

The GFMC was established in 1998 at the Fire Ecology and Biomass Burning Research Group of the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry, Biogeochemistry Department, Germany. Since the 1990s the GFMC has been serving as facilitator and coordinator of a number of international cooperative arrangements, e.g., the Biomass Burning Experiment (BIBEX) of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC) Project, the Forest Fire Research Group of the International Union of Forestry Research Organizations (IUFRO) and the UN-ECE/FAO Team of Specialists on Forest Fire. Since the beginning the GMFC was sponsored by the German Foreign Office, Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance, as a German contribution to the UN International Decade of Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) in the 1990s and its successor arrangement, the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR).

The Global Fire Monitoring Center (GFMC) was designed as an information and monitoring facility, which national and international agencies involved in land-use planning, fire and other disaster management, scientists, and policy makers can utilise for planning and decision making.