Australia's Efforts To Boost Prescribed Burns Collide With An Ever-Shortening Season To Do So
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Climate change has made Australia’s major fires fiercer and more frequent, scientists say. While the conservative government this week bowed to pressure and agreed to go carbon-neutral by 2050, experts warn catastrophes like the Black Summer fires two years ago that killed 34 people and destroyed nearly 2,500 homes could become regular occurrences. Hazard reduction is one of the few tools firefighters have to respond. Yet, climate change is altering that, too, as expanding fire seasons narrow the window for controlled burns.
“Those opportunities are few and far between,” said Ben Shepherd from the New South Wales Rural Fire Service (RFS), one of the agencies conducting the prescribed burn in Sydney’s north earlier this month. “The question now with climate change is how long the fire season will last.” As another season looms, some former chiefs fear climate change is making hazard reduction burns obsolete. “We now have bush fires that are like lava flows,” said Neil Bibby, the former head of Victoria’s Country Fire Authority. “There is going to be a lot of pain, and that pain includes not being able to do what you used to do back in the 1990s. Try doing it in the 2020s or 2030s and you’ve got no hope.”
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The RFS and other Australian firefighting agencies now say climate change is increasing the frequency and ferocity of bush fires. But it has mostly fallen to retired fire chiefs to sound the alarm. In 2019, months before the Black Summer fires, Bibby and two dozen other former chiefs wrote to the prime minister twice to ask for a meeting only to be rebuffed. By December, when Morrison’s office reached out, there were major fires in almost every state. “I don’t think you can deny it in Australia,” said Greg Mullins, the former chief of Fire and Rescue NSW. “The fires are different now. Extreme weather is in people’s faces.”
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Hazard reduction burns are still essential, he said, but are becoming “less and less effective.” Bibby goes further, arguing climate change has turned controlled burns into mere training exercises — something Shepherd from the RFS strenuously denied. But the former chiefs agree that if the world doesn’t act to limit warming, Australia’s fires may soon be unstoppable. "I can see medium-sized towns being obliterated,” Bibby said. “It’s already happening.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/27/australia-climate-change-fires/