Scorched earth

By John Deex. This article first appeared in Insurance News, October/November 2018. Reproduced with permission. 

2018 has already been a year to forget for bushfires. Wildfires – as they are commonly called across the rest of the world – wreaked havoc through the northern hemisphere summer.

California has seen its second consecutive horror season. Even the frigid forests within the Arctic Circle didn’t escape the summer wildfires. At least 11 fires raged in the region, with Sweden hardest hit. In Greece more than 90 people died as fire swept through the country, and even British residents were evacuated as crews struggled to contain a blaze on Saddleworth Moor, near Manchester.

Australia, in the midst of winter, didn’t escape the impact of warmer and drier conditions. Fire crews in New South Wales and Queensland battled a concerning number of winter bushfires.

Some areas experienced the earliest total fire ban in a decade, and with the last major bushfires in April authorities had just three months between seasons.

In September the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre released a worrying outlook for southern Australia, saying most of Australia’s east coast is set for an above-normal fire risk this summer as vast areas of the country continue to suffer severe drought.

The centre’s Chief Executive, Richard Thornton, says Australia is looking at “a long and busy” fire season.

“It has been unusually dry and warm over the last few months,” he told Insurance News. “When preceding conditions have been like this, and the bush and grass is so dry, it doesn’t take much for a fire to get going once the wind is up, regardless of the season.”

Taking recent events into account, many suggest that climate change may have altered our relationship with fire for good. As global temperatures heat up, longer and more severe fire seasons are expected.

Dr Thornton says heat, drought, flood and fire “are not new phenomena” for Australia, but he accepts climate change is playing its part.

“What is different now is that there is an underlying one-degree increase in average temperatures, which means that the variability of ‘normal’ events sits on top of that

“We are seeing weather records routinely being broken, and all indications are that we are on a trajectory that will see temperatures continue to increase.

“What this means for extreme hazards, we cannot be sure.”

University of Melbourne Associate Professor Alan March leads a Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre project on emergency management, mitigation and planning.

He told Insurance News there was a similar period of dryness prior to the devastating 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria.

“It is certainly a bad year, and these conditions are no longer unprecedented,” he says. “I am always reluctant to talk about climate change, but we are under threat for much longer periods. That is not conjecture, that is fact.

“It really does seem that we have to accept a new normal of very long fire seasons.”

Understanding the growing extent of bushfire hazards and ways to counter and even co-exist with them leads Dr Thornton to agree there is a “critical need” for further research into weather prediction, land planning, infrastructure development, population trends and community awareness.

He says demographic changes are just as important as rising temperatures and deserve equal attention.

“Research has identified significant trends regarding a growing and ageing population shifts into traditionally hazard-prone areas.”

He believes the extension of the fire season, across Australia and the globe, will force a fresh look at how resources are allocated.

“With fire seasons lengthening and overlapping across the globe, we need to change and think of new ways of dealing with bushfires, floods, cyclones and heatwaves.

“The old ways of sharing resources around Australia and with the northern hemisphere may not always be possible, so we need to discover better ways to manage all our resources. Firefighting is still very much done by people, despite advances in technology, and a great many of these people are volunteers from the community.

“Our evidence shows that those human resources are now being stretched with the bushfire seasons getting longer, while our emergency services still regularly deal with floods, cyclones and severe storms, plus other demands such as motor vehicle accidents, and search and rescue.”

So what should we be doing to counter the increased risk? Should there be tougher rules on where homes can be built, and what materials are used to build them?

“Building in some areas is clearly unwise,” Dr Thornton says. “It may be best not to build houses, roads, bridges or other infrastructure in some areas because the risk is unacceptably high.

“For bushfire, this means that some locations may be too dangerous, such as on the tops of ridges, surrounded by bush, or with only one road out.

“Not coincidentally, these are also the areas we often choose to build because we value the location – surrounded by the bush.

“Our research shows that many Australians struggle to understand that we live in a country where natural perils exist and that the actions required to increase our safety are sometimes inconvenient and threaten the very things we value.

“Fire, flood, storm and earthquakes have always shaped our world, and they remain an inevitable part of living in Australia.

“Natural disasters, however, are mostly human-caused because of where we choose to live and work.”

Professor March believes current building standards give good results in the majority of cases, but says there are certain highly exposed communities that need extra attention, such as those on slopes or in particularly remote locations.

These areas require a “whole of government and whole of community” approach, he says.

He also believes residents need to take a greater share of responsibility with ongoing property maintenance, and suggests the possibility of a “point-of-sale assessment”, much as there is with vehicles.

“[People buying a property] are alerted to being in a bushfire-prone area, but there is a huge variability in how seriously they take that,” he says.

“It is difficult for local governments and fire brigades to enforce actions.”

Dr Thornton says the challenge is complex, but doing nothing is not an option.

“Much can be done to reduce the impacts of natural hazards if we put the effort into working out how to do things differently.

“Even if natural hazards are increasing, better mitigation by governments, emergency services and the community will ensure better protection.”

While the Insurance Council says it has yet to record any trend of increasing bushfire claims, Professor March believes it is “highly likely” that the future will bring more frequent and extreme events.

“There is still a tendency for communities to see bushfires as random acts of god or nature, but we should have a different mindset to acknowledge that in fire-prone areas there will be a fire – we just don’t know which year it will happen.

“With the ongoing push for tree-change, population growth, as well as the changing climate, this risk is not going away.”

Is climate change causing severe bushfires?

It’s a question that makes conservative politicians bristle and ordinary Australians worry. But leading scientists say the answer is that it is the wrong question.

“Climate scientists cannot say that extreme events are due to global warming, because that is a poorly posed question,” explains Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research.

“However, we can say it is highly likely that [extreme events] would not have had such extreme impacts without global warming.

“Indeed, all weather events are affected by climate change, because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”

The direct cause, or source of ignition of bushfires can usually be traced back to “human carelessness,” he says, including dropped cigarette butts and unattended campfires. Natural sources such as “dry lightning” can also start fires.

But, he says, global warming raises the risk and increases the impact.

Atmospheric scientist at Pennsylvania State University Michael Mann agrees.

“We’re not saying climate change is literally causing the events to occur,” he says. “What we can conclude with a great deal of confidence now is that climate change is making these events more extreme.

“It’s not rocket science. You warm the planet, you’re going to get more frequent and intense heatwaves.

“You warm the soils, you dry them out, you get worse drought. You bring all that together, and those are all the ingredients for unprecedented wildfires.”

If some think talk of a “new normal” in our environment is an exaggeration, Dr Mann sees such a way of thinking as an understatement.

“It’s actually worse than that,” he says. “A new normal makes is sound like we have arrived in a new position, and that’s where we’re going to be.

“But if we continue to burn fossil fuels and put carbon pollution into the atmosphere, we are going to continue to warm the surface of the Earth.

“We’re going to get worse and worse droughts and heatwaves and super storms and floods and wildfires.”