Unprecedented Black Summer showed us what needs to change to keep Australians safe

Following a three-year drought and during the hottest and driest year in Australia on record, a flume of scorching air seared the continent and set it aflame. Amplified by climate change, the Black Summer fires of 2019-20 were unprecedented. 

Over more than six months, they burned more than 24 million hectares of Australia’s southern and eastern forests — one of the largest areas burnt anywhere on Earth in a single event. As the fires were dying out, COVID-19 began battering Australia. Several years on, we are slowly recovering from this global catastrophe and its traumas. 

One nightmare enveloped and overwhelmed the other. The tragedies of the Black Summer were repressed — except in those communities where its direct impacts were now compounded by the pandemic’s additional cost in lost jobs and lost income. 

It is hard to keep the dark days of the Black Summer in focus due to the pandemic, successive years of storms and record floods, and global and domestic economic and political turbulence. Yet how we remember, represent, and understand the fires frames our anticipation of future similar events and our actions in response.

There is a consensus among climate scientists, fire ecologists and policy researchers that climate change has increased the severity of recent bushfires and their future risk, including by making more dangerous weather conditions conducive to fire occurrence. 

Significant evidence points to an increase in fire danger in the future, with a greater increase with each degree of climate warming we will experience. Specifically, southern and eastern Australia are projected to experience a warmer and drier climate with more events of hot and dry conditions preconditioning the landscape for fire, and with more dangerous days of “very high” or “severe” fire weather conditions.

Scientific developments suggest that we are now entering a cycle with wilder swings: continued warming produces more severe heat days and major fires, followed by prolonged La Nina events with weather conducive to major flooding and vegetation growth, returning to El Nino and fiercer hot weather and, again, increasingly severe fires. 

The fires indicated that commonly used prescribed burning, hazard reduction and fire suppression techniques might not be uniformly effective in reducing the severity of megafires but can be useful against lesser threats. 

This has implications for how landscapes should be managed for fire risk, how fires might be fought, the firefighting technologies required, and the new challenges associated with allocating, sharing, and coordinating firefighting resources across state and territory borders. 

The fires also revealed the consequences of hidden but persistent political and policy neglect. The Morrison government — ideologically blinded to the threats posed by climate change — was unresponsive to expert warnings in the run-up to the Black Summer, failing to undertake actions that might have ameliorated that disaster. 

Given these concerns, how then are we preparing for future fire seasons? The public inquiries that examined the events of the Black Summer recommended many practical changes. Some 80 recommendations arose from the Commonwealth’s bushfires royal commission.

Overall, the recommendations can be grouped under three key headings, namely: preparation (pre-emptive biodiversity protection, landscape management and fire risk reduction, and community education and adaptation); emergency response (strategic action and practical coordination; firefighter capacity, training and equipment; information and warning systems, and emergency services and ADF involvement in evacuation planning and response); and remediation (disaster relief and recovery funding, and insurance assistance).

Second, the fires laid bare the inadequacy of our biodiversity information and management approaches, especially for native animal and plant populations that require protection from major wildfires.

To ensure that action is effective requires close monitoring of the condition of vulnerable species and the identification and “improvement” of existing critical habitat and potential refugia. Fully understanding the dimensions of ecological impacts depends on a multi-layered narrative extended over time. 

To form an accurate picture and story requires ongoing monitoring and reporting to pick up both longer-term recovery and the permanent changes the fires produced, to better target programs for restoration and protection. Such programs also have to be well funded and enduring and also need to mesh with attempts to overcome the devastating larger and deeper impacts of European colonisation on Australia’s flora and fauna.

Efforts must be accompanied by carefully tailored programs for prescribed (pre-emptive) burning to reduce fire risk, supporting and extending the use of Indigenous cultural burning practices where possible. 

Actions need to be mandated in management plans that are supported by monitoring and recurrent audits which identify and prioritise action to reduce projected vulnerabilities, especially in the case of increasing habitat resilience for biodiversity conservation — the actions themselves take some time to come into effect and have their uncertainties regarding success. Such a program is not a once-off action. It requires enduring commitment through budgets and legislation, the employment of dedicated personnel, and community education.

Last, the costs of disaster relief and remediation are mounting. The bushfires royal commission reported on the many and sometimes overlapping measures that were used during the fires to deliver relief and recovery assistance to individuals, households and communities.

The 2023-24 federal budget recognised the need to confront more frequent and intense natural disasters by committing $200 million to the Disaster Ready Fund “to support projects across Australia, including levee and drainage system upgrades, building seawalls, bushfire risk reduction projects and more”.

The Commonwealth has also provided $1.5 billion to individuals since July 2022 through the Disaster Recovery Allowance, and the Australian Government Disaster Recovery Payment committed more than $1.4 billion for its share of targeted assistance via joint Commonwealth-State Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements. The Commonwealth government expects to reimburse the states and territories $8.4 billion over the period from 2022-23 to 2026-27 for costs incurred in relation to past disasters. State and territory budgets have also allocated funds to such measures.

However, many of these funding initiatives are temporary and insufficient relative to need. Resilience building and disaster assistance measures need to be regularised and expanded. While disaster-related insurance claims have soared over the past decade, not everyone has access to such resources.

Non-insurance and underinsurance usually mirror socioeconomic status, with poorer households and communities — already overrepresented in disaster-prone regions — being the most prone. The problem of underinsurance and non-insurance in disaster-prone areas has been exacerbated in recent times by the combined impacts of inflation and rising premiums.

The outdated “Holocene mindset” that sees climate-related natural catastrophes as rare rather than as increasingly “normal” encourages households, communities and the state to focus on remedial repair rather than risk-averse adaptation. 

If we are to reduce the risks posed to our human and ecological security by these future fires, if we are to improve our responses during such events and to diminish their impacts, we have to change our mindset and our behaviour. 

Social change is usually slow and imperfect. Capacity building and workforce training also require regular renewal. Adaptation in fire and flood disaster-prone areas requires material and other forms of assistance to increase community resilience and self-reliance. Home buyback schemes and other measures to reduce vulnerability are costly to implement.

Of course, the most important overarching action that Australia can take to reduce the impacts of global warming is to end domestic emissions of greenhouse gases and to cease our much greater contribution to climate change by ending exports of coal and gas.

To build resilience we must recognise that effective action takes time — and for this reason, beginning now is a matter of urgency. It has to be substantial, coherent and pre-emptive rather than incremental, ad hoc and provided predominantly after disaster has befallen us. 

The protection of threatened and fire-susceptible native plants and animals depends on the resilience of their ecological communities. Enhancing resilience takes nature’s own time. It involves reducing existing pressures from pest species, logging and land-clearing while identifying new potential habitat and refugia.

The shifting impacts of climate change will also necessitate new forms of integrated, whole-of-landscape ecological management in which the limiting boundaries of public and private property ownership are functionally set aside to enable the priorities of biodiversity preservation to be met.

As part of these changes, new patterns of fire management must emerge across Australia’s varied ecological landscapes. Changing the frequency, timing, and intensity of fuel reduction activities, to ensure the best possible protection for ecosystems and species as well as human life and property, requires careful observation, and this too will take time to develop. 

The list of things to be done is long. Some of these actions are challenging, difficult and expensive. But above all, these matters are urgent. They must be addressed now — in advance — if we are to deal better with the fires next time.

This is an edited extract from The Fires Next Time, edited by Peter Christoff, published November 28, 2023 (MUP).