After a Black Summer, a call for drastic action

GREG MULLINS AO, AFSM

Greg Mullins is an internationally recognised expert in responding to major bushfires and natural disasters and developed a keen interest in the linkages between climate change and extreme weather events after observing escalating frequency and impacts over nearly five decades. He coordinated responses to many major natural disasters over more than 2 decades and retired as Commissioner of Fire & Rescue NSW in January 2017.

He worked with bushfire fighting authorities in the USA, Canada, France and Spain during a Churchill Fellowship in 1995, and represented Australian emergency services at many international forums. Upon retirement he rejoined the volunteer bushfire brigade where he had started in 1972, and fought fires through NSW during Black Summer.

The 2019/2020 bushfire season in Australia demonstrated what scientists have been trying to warn about for decades – that a warming climate will lead to increased risks from bushfires and other natural disasters. From early 2019 former fire and emergency services chiefs representing every Australian fire service tried to warn the Federal Government that climate change has pushed Australia into a new, dangerous era of bushfire and natural disaster risk, and that a horror bushfire season was unfolding.

The warnings of scientists and experts were dismissed and even ridiculed by the Federal Government, such as when the Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, referred to the linkage between bushfires and climate change as ‘the ravings of some pure, enlightened, and woke inner-city greenies’. He also dismissed the former fire and emergency chiefs as ‘time wasters’. (1)

A recap of the 2019/2020 bushfire season:

• 34 people killed by fires

• At least 417 people killed by smoke

• Up to 3 billion native animals killed and habitats destroyed

• About 3,100 homes destroyed nationally

• In NSW alone: 2,448 homes destroyed – 11 times greater than the previous worst fire season when 225 homes were destroyed (2013). 268 “facilities” destroyed (schools, shops, halls etc), and 5,499 other buildings

• Hundreds of homes and businesses seriously damaged

• Many people left homeless and destitute.

The year 2019 was the hottest, driest ever recorded in Australia. Current fire chiefs from across Australia warned repeatedly that the weather conditions driving the fires were unprecedented. The fires resulted in the largest bushfire property losses ever suffered in Queensland and NSW, and the destruction of hundreds of homes in Victoria and South Australia. More than 12 million hectares of land were scorched; about 21% of eastern broadleaf forest, against an average annual toll of around 2-3%.

Places that had never burned before because they had been too damp, burned fiercely. Ancient Gondwana rainforest burned in places like the Hyland Nature Reserve near Dorrigo, NSW, and sub-tropical rainforest burned in Queensland. Rainforest fires also occurred in 2018, when vast tracts of ancient World Heritage forest burned in Tasmania. These fires followed a bout of intense fires in 2016 in other areas that had also never before experienced them. Nobody knows if these previously virtually fire-free landscapes will ever recover, because they are not adapted to intense fire.

The fires and weather conditions were unprecedented, but certainly not unexpected. The warnings had been loud, clear, and detailed, but unfortunately not listened to by many people in positions of political power who had the ability to make changes. Former fire chiefs wrote to the Government and warned that there were insufficient large firefighting aircraft, that processes to engage the Defence Force to assist emergency services were convoluted and ad hoc, and that medium- to long-term measures such as more stringent building standards, revisited town planning standards, and better resourcing for emergency services were urgently needed. The Prime Minister dismissed the requests, refused to meet and initially publicly ridiculed suggestions of any link between climate change and bushfires.

With the climate continually warming, natural disaster risks are escalating because of the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. The warming atmosphere and oceans have resulted in a sustained reduction in East Coast rainfall, an average temperature increase of 1.4 degrees since the early 1900s and changes in patterns of fire risk. The Bureau of Meteorology has found that the annual accumulated fire danger index has increased in nearly all locations across eastern Australia, in some cases very significantly; that fire seasons now start much earlier and last longer; and that the previously rare category of Catastrophic fire danger, introduced after the 2009 Black Saturday fire storm, is becoming more common. It has also found that while the risk of tropical cyclones is likely to reduce overall, when they occur, they are more likely to be at the top end of the scale in terms of intensity and damage potential.

Some of the resulting natural disasters include the 2001/02 NSW fires, 2003 Canberra fire disaster, 2002/2003 alpine fires, 2009 Black Saturday disaster, 2011 Queensland floods and cyclone, 2013 NSW and Tasmanian fires, 2015 Pinery fire in South Australia, 2016 Tasmanian fires, 2018 Tasmanian, NSW and Queensland fires, and then our worst bushfire disaster in 2019/2020.

This is a global issue. California is arguably just ahead of us on the climate change/bushfire curve. In 2017, about 10,000 homes were destroyed by fires. In 2018, records were repeatedly broken for the largest fires in Californian history, then the city of Paradise was devoured by flames: 20,000 buildings destroyed and nearly 100 people killed. At the time of writing, California, as well as Oregon, Colorado, and Washington state, are burning again, with unprecedented high temperatures, unprecedented dry lightning storms sparking hundreds of fires, and unprecedented fire conditions including the first-ever fire-induced tornado warning. Although still early in the season, California surpassed, for the first time in recorded history, more than 1 million hectares burned by mid-September 2020. Expressing frustration with the US President’s climate denial, California Governor Gavin Newson stated that the fires obviously underline a ‘a damn climate emergency’.

Places that have never had a significant wildfire problem, like England, Greenland and Siberia, now regularly experience large fires. Countries with fire history, such as Portugal, France, Spain, Greece and Canada are suffering increasing losses.

In Australia, our fire seasons are now longer, with many more days of ‘Very High’ fire danger and above. Fire seasons now overlap between states and territories, restricting the ability to share firefighting resources. Our longer fire seasons now also overlap significantly with lengthening northern hemisphere fire seasons, limiting access to the large firefighting aircraft that we lease each year.

As we saw during our Black Summer, the formerly rare phenomenon of fire-induced lightning storms, usually without rain, is now commonplace because of increasing atmospheric instability, coupled with a 20-year drying trend that makes bushland fuels easier to ignite. This leads to more intense fires that feed off dry fuels, ever-increasing temperatures, low humidity and strong winds, making fire-generated storms almost commonplace.

Ignitions due to ‘dry’ lightning are also on the increase, particularly in Tasmania. The NSW Bushfire Inquiry found that most of the very large fires during Black Summer were caused by remote lightning strikes from storms that produced little or no rain.

Our efforts and capacity to combat such fires are paltry in comparison to the power of Mother Nature. Massive fires with perimeters of thousands of kilometres can only be controlled by rain, lots of it, so we were at the mercy of the elements until flooding rains arrived in February 2020. Our ability to conduct hazard reduction burns has been significantly reduced due to dangerous weather and shrinking windows of opportunity.

At the Australian Bushfire and Climate Summit in 2020, Cassandra Goldie, CEO of the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), said that natural disasters disproportionately impact those least able to absorb the blow, such as people living in poverty, Indigenous communities, older people, and single parents. They tend to be hit hardest and earliest, have the least capacity and knowledge of how to obtain help, and take longer to recover.

Governments, accustomed to relatively rare natural disasters that in the past have destroyed hundreds rather than thousands of homes, have only rudimentary structures in place to manage recovery following disasters. Arrangements are in most cases ad hoc, and put in place on the run, further delaying help from reaching those most in need. This has been recognised in preliminary findings of the Royal Commission into Natural Disaster Arrangements, which suggests that more permanent and comprehensive structures for disaster recovery are now needed.

Up until the mid-1990s, serious bushfire seasons that destroyed lives, livelihoods, homes and businesses had occurred around once a decade. Now, bad fire seasons are occurring about once every five or six years, and losses are escalating. Current structures in place for coordinating national response and recovery efforts are based on experience from a different era of lower risk and arguably are no longer fit for purpose.

Such problems are some of the increasingly serious and expensive consequences of out-of-control human-caused climate change. Our governments need to lead us out of COVID-19 with an economic pivot to renewables and low emission technologies, including new industries such as green hydrogen because we owe it to future generations to try to stabilise, then reduce global warming. The trajectory otherwise will be increasingly dire. The only way we can have any hope of managing climate risk is by starting to drive down emissions with a sense of national urgency, and to release the apparent stranglehold that the fossil fuel industry seems to exert on political decision making.

The impacts of climate change are now directly observable, and never more-so than during the Black Summer of 2019/2020. Who would ever have thought that Australia, a rich, well-resourced nation, would be trying to deal with the aftermath of a bushfire disaster leaving thousands homeless, dozens of families grieving the loss of loved ones, and tens of thousands of others dealing with physical and mental health issues caused by the relentless stress of living with fire risk and smoke?

We must learn from the COVID-19 response, listen to scientists and experts, and take bold, far-reaching decisions for the benefit of future generations. Unlike COVID-19, climate change is not a short- to medium-term problem. It is a rapidly worsening, relentless global disaster requiring drastic action right now.

1. ABC News, ‘Inner-city raving lunatics: Michael McCormark on the Greens and climate change’ (2019) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-11/ inner-city-raving-lunatics:-michael-mccormackon-greens/11694044?nw=0