‘Massive’ issues expected to test bushfire royal commission deadline
27 July 2020
Published by https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au
AUSTRALIA – The issues raised by the Black Summer fires require major reform and will be challenging to fit into the bushfire royal commission’s timeframe, experts warn, despite the two-month extension of its reporting deadline.
Ross Bradstock, director of Wollongong University’s Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, said any extra time was welcome but warned the commission’s report shouldn’t be expected to detail all the necessary reforms given its time constraints.
“The extension couldn’t be a bad thing but the terms of reference are very broad, the issues are massive and with all of it in the timeframe [it] is a big challenge. However, we expect they would highlight many key issues and solutions,” Professor Bradstock said.
“We’ve seen a summer which is off the scale in terms of the magnitude of the fires and impacts to human and environmental values.”
The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements was announced in February after 10 million hectares was torched across four states. Its original reporting deadline of August 31 was last week extended to October 28.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the August deadline was set so “practical action” could be taken ahead of the next fire season. In contrast, the royal commission into the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria ran for 18 months and cost $40 million.
Emergency Management Minister David Littleproud said commission chairman Air Chief Marshall Mark Binskin requested the extension due to the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, with some state agencies struggling to devote attention to their contributions to the inquiry.
Professor Bradstock said fire seasons such as Black Summer were going to become more common “and we may have to retreat from fire landscapes and that is a massive thing”. “We can tweak firefighting arrangements and resources but budgets are finite so we may have to really rethink where we live,” he said.
The Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires is studying the causes of the Black Summer fires. Professor Bradstock said its preliminary findings revealed the limitations of risk mitigation and showed high fuel levels through lack of prescribed burnings were not, as some had argued, a primary cause.
“There was nothing exceptional in fuel conditions, in fact they may have been lower taken as a state average than some previous seasons. That tells us it was the exceptional dryness and the unrelenting nature of the fire weather we saw last summer,” he said.
Associate professor Trent Penman, from the University of Melbourne bushfire behaviour and management group, said he was optimistic the extension would help the commission “make good headway”.
But while smaller changes could come “quite quickly”, Professor Penman said, a “paradigm shift” was required in the way Australia prepared for and fought fires. It remained to be seen what advice the commission provided and whether governments acted on it, he said.
“The cynical view might be it’s just a lot of noise and no action. But an optimist would think there’s a lot of potential for real action here.”
The royal commission has heard the fire season in parts of eastern Australia has extended by almost four months since the 1950s, with climate change a prominent driver. Climate experts have warned weather systems that fuel catastrophic bushfires across south-eastern Australia will be up to four times more likely to occur under forecast levels of global warming.
“Many people in the scientific community who work on fire are still grappling with the likelihood of an even bigger season,” Professor Bradstock said.
