Myriad current causes, combined with warming climates and robust public and political debate, add both uncertainty and urgency
The management of future bushfires will become increasingly complex,
with trade-offs that demand astute recognition and knowledge of current
and future trends, as well as how these trends interact with each other
in a dynamic and intricate world. Deploying empirical data, embedding
experiential insights and involving stakeholder communities will also
play a key role in how bushfires can be managed effectively.
The upcoming special edition of Geographical Research, which
will be published online on 04 February 2014, attests to the above.
Bushfire, the issue’s guest editors Christine Eriksen and Lesley Head
recognize, is a constant and ongoing part of Australian history, ecology
and culture and it impacts either directly or indirectly on everyday
life. The impact of bushfires, the editors note, is exacerbated by
warming climates, changes in land use and population growth in
fire-prone landscapes, in particular, peri-urban[1] areas.
Longer fire seasons and an increase in extreme fire weather days with
climate change have added - and will continue to add - both uncertainty
and urgency to Australia’s ability to co-exist with fire in the future.
The range of topics covered in the edition is diverse and includes
insidious bushfire smoke, planning regulations as mitigation strategies
and gendered dimensions of bushfire resilience to the scale politics of
knowledge and the management of fire-prone vegetation. Articles in this
special issue include:
Different
Ways of Knowing How to Coexist with Fire
Geographers are well placed to make valuable contributions to how we
understand and live with fire. Knowledge production is upheld as
providing the answer to the riddle of our coexistence with such perils,
and yet it is marred by uncertainties, paradox and reversal. Such
matters are discussed here in relation to the different ways of knowing
and learning how we might coexist with fire.
Subdivision
Policy and Planning for Bushfire Defence: A Natural Hazard Mitigation
Strategy for Residential Peri-Urban Regions in Victoria, Australia
From time to time, catastrophic bushfires cause substantial losses of
life and property in southern Australia. Moreover, recent analyses of
longitudinal fire weather behaviour point to a steady increase in the
Forest Fire Danger Index. Although natural hazards such as bushfires can
rarely be prevented, effective hazard-mitigation strategies can manage
and lessen the impact on humans and the environment. This paper
investigates subdivision design as one such mitigation technique. Roads
and other forms of access are vital to successful bushfire response by
fire brigades. The research examines the effectiveness of current policy
to provide adequate access and suppression opportunities for
firefighters in peri-urban areas, with particular reference to Victoria.
Subdivision policies applicable to development in bushfire-prone areas
throughout Australia and the United States are assessed and compared.
Interviews with firefighters, planners, and researchers provided insight
into the key components of the road network which facilitate firefighter
access and identified major shortfalls of current policy and practice in
Victoria.
Coexisting
with Fire? A Commentary on the Scale Politics of Adaptation
Australia's experience of bushfire in changing environmental,
economic and social circumstances raises the need for learning to live
with fire risk more effectively. But just what might it mean to coexist
with fire? Rather than addressing the particular risk contexts created
on fire grounds during fire events, this brief commentary considers the
need to rescale questions of coexistence with fire and to reconsider
just what coexistence with and adaptations to fire risk in Australian
landscapes might mean.
Bushfire
Smoke: An Exemplar of Coupled Human and Natural Systems
Carbon-based microscopic particles have provided a crucial line of
evidence in understanding the coupling between humans and fires. Through
the sedimentary record, they have informed our understandings of the
patterns of climate and humans on fire activity through time. The extent
of contemporary atmospheric biomass burning emissions has become
apparent through satellite monitoring, motivated by concerns about the
effect on the climate system. Sophisticated monitoring techniques
designed to monitor industrial pollution have provided a data stream
useful to determine the impacts on human health of wildfire smoke: we
review this rapidly expanding field. The key findings are that biomass
smoke is quantitatively and qualitatively different from urban air
pollution and that there is no ‘safe’ level of biomass smoke exposure.
Managing fires and smoke impacts will become increasingly challenging as
the climate continues to warm and demands understanding the trade-off
between wildfire and planned burns. The health impacts from severe smoke
events are substantial when large populations are affected resulting in
measurable increases in illness, hospital admissions, and deaths. The
health impacts are not evenly distributed, and large segments of the
population fall into higher risk groups. People in these categories are
also likely to be adversely affected by the comparatively minor episodes
of pollution generated by smaller planned burns. Planned burns thus need
active programmes of public communication and air quality monitoring to
ensure that the overall public health benefits of the intervention can
be achieved with the minimum possible adverse impacts on higher risk
individuals.
Climate
Change and the Management of Fire-Prone Vegetation in Southwest and
Southeast Australia
Mediterranean regions worldwide, and southwest (SW) Australia in
particular, are characterised by their high plant biodiversity,
fire-prone vegetation, and substantial conservation challenges in
relation to human land use, expanding populations and changing climate.
Recent climate change is evident in SW Australia, with markedly
decreasing rainfall and increasing temperatures since the 1970s. Fire
management in SW Australia, historically focused in the southern
forests, but now also engaged with a rapidly expanding wildland-urban
interface, is faced with the formidable challenge of increased fire
likelihoods due to increased fire danger weather under a warming
climate, and more human-caused ignitions as population growth proceeds.
Here, we review key components of the fire–environment relationship, the
use of fuel reduction burning as a wildfire mitigation strategy, and the
potential impacts of changing climate on fire regimes and fire
management in the SW, including ecological impacts. We draw comparisons
between SW and southeastern (SE) Australia, contrasting the recent
history of fire in these two regions, how they differ, and how this
helps us to understand the circumstances under which planned fire may be
an effective approach to fire hazard mitigation in SW Australia.
Evidence suggests that fuel reduction burning in wildlands produces
little benefit for wildfire control. While wildfire sizes differ between
regions, a concentration of resources and fire management near human
infrastructure and not in wildlands seems warranted with increasing
emphasis on fire suppression and fuels management.
Geographical fire research to continue to inform
Said Christine Eriksen and Lesley Head, Australian Centre for Cultural
Environmental Research, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia: “The
cutting-edge research presented in this special issue and the lessons
learnt from a strong tradition of geographical research on bushfire
provide much food for thought in times of uncertainty and urgency. We
still have much to learn. Yet geographical fire research in Australia
has greatly informed the choices we face as individuals and as a nation
in terms of mitigating and adapting to a changing climate.”
[1] See http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-5871.12040/full for
an explanation of ‘peri urban’: “The localities predisposed to natural
hazards are often highly desirable places to live, characterised by
lower-density development and scenic landscapes (Alsnih & Stropher 2004;
Buxton et al., 2008).
There is no single, universally agreed-upon definition of ‘peri-urban’
(Allen, 2003).
However, there is a general consensus that regions immediately
surrounding cities are not entirely rural and have a unique and
distinctive character and function. Peri-urban land is ‘neither fully
urban nor completely rural’ (Buxton et al., 2008,
25) and is a unique zone containing a variety of both urban and rural
land uses (Allen, 2003).
Such regions are not only referred to as peri-urban but have also been
termed the ‘rural–urban fringe’, the ‘city's countryside’, the ‘urban
field’, and in the United States, the ‘wildland-urban interface’ (Ford, 1999)”
