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Environment Forest Ecosystems Forest Industries Forest Management Forest Products Greenhouse Gases NAFI Submissions Policy and Politics Renewable Energy Sustainability |
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Forest fire expert says fuel is the keyThere will be recriminations, blame and opportunism - but is the ongoing tragedy of this season’s fires avoidable?Given any set of weather conditions, the facts are relatively straightforward: Fire will not occur without fuel or ignition. Natural and criminal ignitions are inevitable in Australia. Increasing the amount of fuel in a given area will increase energy released during fire. The higher the release of energy the greater the potential for damage and spread. Increasing the continuity of fuel (especially fine fuel) will improve the ability of fire to spread. Under certain weather conditions it is practically impossible to slow, let alone stop, a fire’s spread when it is burning in high fuel load. With these facts in mind, the only way to retard or prevent the spread of fire in severe fire weather is to have an adequate break in fuel arranged before its arrival. Two politically motivated arguments fan the current debate over fire management. One states that no amount of fuel reduction would have averted the recent disastrous fires. The other retorts that more hazard-reduction burning on public land (and particularly national parks) would have prevented them. The first is as logically untenable as the second is simplistic. There can be no doubt that management of large areas of public land has recently shifted from a use focus (grazing and timber production) to an amenity focus (preservation of ecosystems in an attempt to minimise impacts on species and landscapes). With this shift has come a change in the quantity and quality of fuel loads. This is partly the result of park managers reacting to a history of frequent burning that they view as unnatural and damaging. However, the more important causes rest with park bureaucracies. They are currently stretched by rapidly expanding park estates, and mired in minutiae of government regulation relating to management of fuel on public land. In other words, governments appear incapable of financing and managing their new commitments to conservation. As a result, fuel management has all too often been management by default (ie, no management at all). But the broad-scale impacts of these changes are really a side issue in the current crisis. Yes, fuel accumulation and difficult access in the wilderness will probably lead to more severe and larger-scale fires in national parks. These fires will probably occur at intervals, intensities and geographic scales that will not replicate pre-European fire regimes (if only someone could tell us what those regimes were). They will also probably damage many of the very values that the parks were set aside to conserve. Changes to fire regimes in the wilderness, however, need not impinge on most people. Most national park area is little used. Also, contrary to the environmentally fashionable dogma of ecosystem fragility and the irreversibility of human impacts, many if not all of these values that national parks attempt to conserve will be recovered in time. There is extensive scientific evidence that demonstrates the resilience of native ecosystems. With only a few exceptions, what happens to fuel loads in the wilderness will be of little conservation significance. The interface between human settlement and nature is far more relevant to the current crises. Large areas of continuous fuel with poor access are not the direct cause of loss of human life and damage to property. Rather, there is an inability to recognise the need for an adequate break in fuels between the wilderness and the things people hold dear. The strategic management of fuels is simply a matter of controlling the build-up of fuel surrounding people and things to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire to an acceptable level. The loss of lives and property occurs when risks associated with a given fuel build-up are either miscalculated or simply ignored. I grew up in Canberra, our bush capital, playing in the native parkscape that was the urban planning utopia of the 1970s. I gained my love for forests walking in the native and plantation forests that have so recently been devastated. Later I received my forestry degree and theoretical fire-management training from the ANU. I know the urban-bush interface of Weston Creek intimately, as it was my home for over 15 years. On reflection, Weston Creek was a fire trap - a sinuous and diffuse boundary between bush reserve, grazing land and pine plantings on the one hand and suburbs on the other. The suburbs were systematically pierced with fingers of parkland planted with highly flammable native plants and often-desiccated grass. The native theme permeated most gardens. No thought was given to the flammability of buildings. Similar things could be said of many cities in Australia. Here lies the crux of the current problem. We can insulate people from the effects of wildfires like those that occurred in Canberra by eliminating available fuel. The problem is that many people want to live intimately with something that approximates nature. The result is an interface between settlement and bush that is so extended and diffuse that it is impossible to defend. There are those who argue against the practicality of eliminating available fuel. Any accurate measure of practicality would have to be weighed against the cost of doing nothing. The combined cost of fighting the current catastrophic fires and repairing their damage will be astronomical. Consider also that planning permission in my current home shire demands extensive fuel-free and fuel-reduced zones surrounding rural dwellings. It also requires each dwelling to have a dedicated water supply for firefighting purposes, minimum levels of firefighting equipment, including a petrol-driven firefighting pump and firefighting hoses, and high standards for all access tracks. In other words it is not impractical; some of us are already required to do much more. Catastrophic bushfires have been, and will continue to be, a feature of Australian life. Why is it that continuous fuel loads adjacent to our houses are systematically ignored? Is it that the discontinuity in fuel that would protect lives and property is too high a price to pay for safety? Or is it simply that these types of fires occur relatively infrequently in one place over anyone’s lifetime, making it easy to forget or ignore their disastrous consequences? Irrespective, if we insist on inviting the wilderness into our homes, we must accept the inevitable and sometimes brutal vagaries of nature to pay us a visit. Fuel management is about choices. This is one cake we cannot both have and eat. |
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