Australian Rural & Regional News has asked Cam a couple of further questions, set out below the article.

Cam Walker, Friends of the Earth Australia

Climate change is already changing our national parks

After World War Two, a growing appreciation of the Australian landscape and an emerging conservation movement led millions of people to become involved in campaigns to protect our wild and special places. From the Little Desert campaign in Victoria in the late 1960s, the Franklin campaign in the ‘80s, to the efforts to protect the rainforests of the Wet Tropics and the wonderful landscapes of K’gari/ Fraser Island, millions of hectares have been granted conservation status and protected for generations to come.

Once a campaign was won, we often thought that the battle was over. There was an assumption that the relevant parks service would have enough funds to manage these new conservation reserves, however sadly that was far from the reality. But the direct threat – mining, logging, cattle grazing or other activities – was removed by the granting of protection status as a national park or World Heritage Area.

Several decades ago I was a volunteer with an environment group that campaigned to gain protection of wild ecosystems. In those days I supported a ‘let burn’ policy when it comes to managing fire in wild landscapes. Leaving aside the dilemma of the concept of wilderness (where First Nations people are liquid papered out of history and the land is declared to be ‘pristine’) we argued that the Australian environment was adapted to fire, and that wild fire in large reserves would simply burn itself out as it hit natural buffers like old growth forest. The argument went that we needed less human intervention in managing wild ecosystems, and that if humans withdrew from active management, the land would eventually pass back into equilibrium as it recovered from impacts like logging and mining.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and we find ourselves in a very different world. Climate change is coming for the places we love and which we worked so hard to protect. I find it perplexing that there is not a mainstream outrage at this threat to the places we love.

The impacts of climate change are everywhere and easy to locate and include drought, flood, storm events, heat waves, rising sea levels and so on. But I will just look at one: fire.

Fire and the conservation estate

In a warmer world, fire seasons are already getting longer and more intense. Higher temperatures and extreme drought conditions driven by climate change increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires. Yes, fuel management is a significant part of the problem of intense fire, but climate change is turbo charging existing fire seasons. For many millions of years, Australia has been a fire adapted continent and ‘good’ fire belongs in many of our ecosystems (although not all. As noted by cultural burning advocate Victor Steffensen in his book Fire Country, Aboriginal people recognise that some vegetation communities do not need fire to be healthy. Understanding the needs of ‘No-fire country’ is as important as understanding the needs of vegetation communities that do require fire).

Early European occupation of the land was based on the widespread use of fire to clear land. This broad acre approach to burning was at odds with First Nations careful, localised use of fire. As noted by Philip Zylstra (then at the Centre for Sustainable Ecosystem Solutions, University of Wollongong) ‘British graziers … cleared country using fire. And because Australian vegetation naturally cycles from post fire colonisation through different vegetation stages, often the older forms of vegetation are less flammable. Phil argues that “self-thinning forest understoreys reduce wildfire risk, even in a warming climate” which means that fuel reduction treatments need to be done in a careful fashion so as to not make ecosystems more flammable.

As is made clear in many forums, including the Bushfires and Logging Debate page on ARR.News, the role of fuel reduction is one of the most fraught and contested land management issues in the country. While it often slips into ‘Culture War’ frames which naturally thrive on division, there are many useful conversations happening between ecologists, fire experts and First Nation cultural fire experts. That is a conversation beyond the scope of this essay.

However,  we know that the window to carry out hazard reduction has already been restricted due to climate change. And research is showing that climate change is reducing the effectiveness of fuel reduction burning, for instance the 2019–2020 Black Summer fires “raised questions about the effectiveness of prescribed burning in mitigating risk under unprecedented fire conditions”. So, regardless of our position on whether we should do more or less fuel reduction burning, we still need to deal with the elephant in the room: climate change.

Alpine Ash Forest and burnt Alpine Ash Forest, NE Victoria.
Photos: Cam Walker

Climate change is coming for the places we love

As fire seasons also get longer in the northern hemisphere, this impacts on our ability to fight fire here. During the 2019/20 Black Summer, around 1,000 personnel came from North America to assist us in our firefighting efforts, and we lease most of our large firefighting aircraft from the USA.

This is impacting on how we fight fires in our wild and protected places. A stronger emphasis on aggressive ‘first strike’ tactics which aim to contain small fires before they become blazes is helping reduce the number of fires. Many states are spending more to employ additional firefighters. Large scale interventions, like the ‘strategic firebreak’ program in Victoria, aim to slow the spread of fire in forested landscapes.

It is also impacting on how land managers look after forests and other ecosystems during and after fires. After large fires in the high country of Victoria in 2013, the Victorian government established an aerial seeding program to try and ensure that Alpine Ash, which are often killed by wildfire and then require around 20 years between fires to be able to produce seed, did not collapse. This is a great program, however, the scale of the 2019/20 fires showed how hard it will be to keep up with the need to reseed areas that are facing the prospect of ecological collapse. It is estimated that at least 44,000 ha of immature Alpine Ash forests in eastern Victoria are at risk of collapse (that is, conversion to non native forest cover) because of the 2019/20 fires.

In Australia, the threats posed to special ecosystems – like the ancient vegetation in lutruwita/ Tasmania that emerged when Australia was part of the Gondwana super continent – is leading to even greater intervention on the ground. For instance during the 2020 fires, firefighters were deployed on the ground to defend the only known natural grove of the world-famous Wollemi pines, in a remote part of the Blue Mountains. Fire crews were dropped into the area to operate an irrigation system that was set up to protect the trees, with helicopters also called in to drop water on the fire edge to reduce any impact on the pines.

It is the same dilemma overseas. During recent fire seasons in North America, firefighters wrapped fire-resistant blankets around ancient trees, for instance as blazes raced through California’s world-famous Sequoia National Park. While sequoia trees are very fire-resistant and have evolved to survive flames – the same as most eucalypts – the scale and frequency of fires is threatening the ancient trees which only exist in localised areas. The US Forest Service also announced it is taking emergency action to save the sequoias, through labour intense efforts like removing smaller trees and vegetation around the large sequoias, and using prescribed fires – intentionally lit fires to burn away underbrush. This is intended to reduce the risks of high-severity wildfires.

Recently prominent researchers in lutruwita/ Tasmania argued that as wildfires increase in severity and frequency as a result of climate change, that Australian authorities will need to adopt a landscape scale plan to protect old trees in the way that land managers are doing in the USA. They note that fires in 2003, 2010, 2012, 2016 and 2019, mostly ignited by lightning storms under drought conditions, destroyed 17 of the world’s largest eucalypts.

Meanwhile, in the Alps, the situation for the Mountain Pygmy Possum is so dire because of reduced snow cover, bushfires and the reduction of a major food source – the Bogong Moth – that there are now attempts to start new colonies outside the mountains. With populations at great threat in the wild, a breeding program has been set up in Lithgow in order to try and ‘future-proof’ the species. When the captive bred possums have successfully adapted to the warmer temperatures in Lithgow, researchers will aim to create new wild populations of possums, outside of the threatened alpine environment.

In just a few decades, we have passed into a new era – the Pyrocene – where fire is a dominant force across most of the planet. This has been created through human induced climate change. It has profound implications for the wild places that have now been protected in conservation reserves. Unless we accept this, and shift significant resources to manage landscapes and limit the impact of fire, we risk losing the places we love.

How should we respond?

It is clear we need additional capacity to fight fires.

Some logical policy and funding interventions include:

1. State and territory governments need to continue to maintain and increase funding for career firefighters, including remote area firefighters.

2. The federal government should establish a national remote area firefighting force which can be deployed as needed across Tasmania and mainland states when World Heritage and National Parks are at risk. This was recommended by a Senate inquiry after the devastating fires in Tasmania of 2016.

3. The federal government should, as a matter of priority, act on the recommendation from the Bushfire Royal Commission report which proposes the creation of a national aerial firefighting fleet, which can then be allocated to the states “according to greatest national need”. As fire seasons get longer in both the northern and southern hemispheres, it is essential that we build a publicly owned air fleet of Large Air Tankers (LATs) and Type 1 helicopters. At present we only own one LAT, and have one other available year round – the remainder are leased internationally.

4. It is clear that many volunteer brigades are aging. The vast majority of Australians cannot sign on as a volunteer because they live too far from a fire station. We need a plan to create teams at the state level which are designed to attract younger urban based people who can be trained and then make themselves available during the fire season as part of strike teams. Creating new opportunities for urban people to join efforts on large ‘campaign’ fires could greatly add to volunteer capacity in bad fire seasons.

5. We need to prepare our emergency services – both career and volunteer – for the increasing demands of climate-driven disasters. As flooding, fires and heatwaves become more common it is clear that the load on existing volunteers will become unsustainable. During recent flooding across eastern Australia, volunteer firefighters have been heavily involved in relief efforts. This will reduce availability and capacity should major fires occur later this summer. We will need to transform how we respond to these disasters, with potential changes to resourcing for volunteers and their employers.

It is essential that there is a review of budgets for all first responder organisations to ensure they are sufficient to the reality of the climate driven disasters of the 21st century.

We should also investigate opportunities to provide financial support for volunteer firefighters who need to take extended periods of time off work in long fire seasons. The 2019/20 season showed the impacts of a long season on local brigades and individuals, who took long periods of time off work in order to fight fires.

The fire policy we developed during the Inspector-General for Emergency Management (IGEM) investigation into the 2019–20 fire season can be found here. Our thinking on fire fighting can be found here.

Cam Walker lives in Central Victoria and works with environmental group Friends of the Earth. He has a long interest in fire and ecology, is an active volunteer firefighter with the CFA, and recently received the National Emergency Medal for his contribution to firefighting efforts during the Black Summer of 2019/20.

Questions

Australian Rural & Regional News asked Cam a couple of questions to which he responded in part so far. Cam’s further response will be published here once received.

ARR.News: Would you agree that attributing natural disasters, such as fires and floods, solely or largely to climate change can tend to promote the view that those disasters are unavoidable, that there is nothing that can be done now to prevent them and so the focus stays on responding to them once they happen, rather than taking steps to minimise the risk that they will happen or reduce the impacts when they do (and the cynical may say there is a ready excuse when disaster does strike even if some actions may have reduced the impacts)?

Cam Walker: No, I think it’s just about facing the reality that we live in an era where human-induced climate change is impacting everything – our cities, our coastlines, our farming systems and our landscapes. Unless we confront that reality, we will never be able to find a way forward in terms of reducing risk through our land management.

We already have active land management across our conservation reserves and need to sustain that. In some vegetation communities that means doing fuel reduction burning and in others it means fire exclusion either because that community is fire sensitive (eg remnant Gonwandic vegetation) or is in recovery from repeat hot fire (eg much of the recovering alpine ash and snow gum country in the mountains of the south east).

ARR.News: You have acknowledged fuel reduction burning and the different views on this and focused on improved firefighting, which is generally responsive rather than preventative. You’ve also mentioned physically protecting some trees.

Would you say that there is more of an appetite now within conservation circles for other minimally invasive measures that might reduce the risk of fire in national parks?