Published works

Planned burning is one of the most utilised fuel management activities, but the safe and effective application of this method is likely to be hindered by climate change (e.g. shrinking and shifting windows of opportunity) and potential adverse societal outcomes (e.g. smoke impact, risk of fire escape). For this reason, fire managers need access to detailed information to help them make informed decisions and select a fuel management strategy that is compatible with a range of factors.

This project explored the use of experts’ knowledge and the UNHaRMED Decision Support System (DSS) framework (an integrated spatio-temporal model for analysing natural hazard risk within urban and rural environments) to assess the opportunities and risks associated with different approaches to reducing bushfire risk via fuel management.

This project identified:

• Areas of emerging risk in end-user defined regions of Western Australia resulting from the combination of climate change and urban sprawl.
• An increase in asset damages due to the combined effect of climate change and urban sprawl. The results indicate that losses increased dramatically more in urban residential areas compared to rural residential with increasing severity in climate change (about ten times higher).
• The relative suitability (i.e. where fuel management can technically be applied) and potential (i.e. where it is socially acceptable and economically feasible to reduce fuel loads) to apply different fuel management activities (e.g. planned burning, mechanical fuel load reduction, grazing) in achieving these outcomes. This work combined local knowledge and experience obtained through surveys and literature review with maps of current or future local conditions (e.g. land use, assets location).
• The extent to which fuel management can reduce bushfire risks. Fuel reduction led to a decrease in bushfire risk compared to a no-mitigation scenario. However, the results suggest that in cases where fuel management does significantly reduce the risk of impacts posed by bushfires, this reduction was much less than in increase in risk from climate change.

This report presents the major findings from the Fuel Load Reduction Utilisation Project and proposes future research directions identified by end-users, building on this project’s results. The proposed projects could help develop policies and strategies for reducing risk in emerging bushfire risk areas at the State and national scale by offering a range of fuel management activities adapted to specific regional conditions, which could change over time.