PROTECT
Fire and Water BY GRAHAM QUINT, DIRECTOR, CONSERVATION
This article wasn’t written yesterday. It was written in November 2019. In that month, the New Zealand Parliament unanimously passed its Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Bill. Days later, fuelled by New South Wales’ longest drought on record, there were massive bushfires that tore through the state and burned through one million hectares of bush, homes and surrounding areas. The Hunter Region and Greater Sydney were under threat. For the first time ever, a ‘catastrophic’ fire warning applied to Sydney. A statewide emergency was declared. From its earliest days in the 1940s, the National Trust in New South Wales has acted to recognise and conserve Australian native bushland for its ecological, scenic, cultural and fauna habitat values. We need to protect our natural heritage now more than ever. The National Trust (NSW) has always been committed to protecting our natural environment – our bushland regeneration techniques have advanced and evolved over 40 years to become one of the most innovative and successful native vegetation conservation initiatives. Our newly adopted Koala Conservation Policy is the most recent in a range of actions aimed at better recognising and protecting New South Wales’ unique native vegetation and biota. I was visiting Forster on the mid north coast when the November bushfires started. It gave me firsthand experience of how extended drought, climate change and historic lows in rainfall are having an impact that is testing the capacity of our most skilled and experienced firefighters.
eastern Queensland. The 1930s Binna Burra was a much-loved feature of the World Heritage listed Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves of Australia. World on Fire In 2019, over 600 wildfires consumed more than 2.4 million acres of forest across Alaska and northern Canada. The University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Center found that: ‘recent fires are too frequent, intense and severe. They are reducing older-growth forest in favour of young vegetation, and pouring more carbon into the atmosphere at a time when carbon dioxide concentrations are setting new records’. Former NSW Fire & Rescue Commissioner, Greg Mullins, was in northern California in early November 2019 to assess the damage caused by the Kincade Fire, which had swept through the state’s famed wine country north of San Francisco. Mullins said that in this area 18,000 structures were destroyed in 2018, 9,000 in 2017 and 3,000 in previous years. Mullins states that: “as in Australia, California’s fire season is getting longer, stretching resources with fire speed, size and intensity increasing”. He warned that our fire services would not have access to use the aircraft needed – as has been historically possible – because of the overlap in seasons. Mullins and 22 other expert firefighters had written to the Prime Minister of Australia to express their grave concerns with predictions of what was coming in November. Koalas Lost In late October 2019, major fires near Port Macquarie swept through prime Koala habitat and as many as 350 were, as was described in the news, ‘incinerated’. The total estimated population of Koala in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory is 16,130.
“ I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” Greta Thunberg, World Economic Forum 2019.
World Heritage Lost Only eight days into spring in 2019, the Binna Burra Lodge was totally destroyed by the bushfire that swept through south 6
National Trust (NSW)
