BY NICK SOUDAKOFF
Only a year after the worst bushfires in Australia's written history, another round of horrific bushfires is sweeping through south-eastern Australia. In Canberra, four people were killed, hundreds injured and more than 530 houses were destroyed by a fire storm which swept through the federal capital's western suburbs on January 18.
This catastrophic wave of bushfires is occurring in the context of the worst drought in Australia since reliable records began in 1910. The drought has devastated rural communities and placed severe pressure on local ecosystems.
It's no surprise that droughts and wild bushfires go hand in hand. Dry grass, parched native shrubs and dead leaves and twigs are a bushfire's basic fuel. During droughts and in very hot, windy weather, even heavy fuels like large logs and the green leaves and smaller branches of large trees can become dry and flammable. The January 1994 Sydney fires occurred during severe drought, as did the February 1983 Ash Wednesday fires in Victoria and South Australia.
Are extreme droughts, and the wild firestorms that they foster, just a fact of life? Is this as bad as it's going to get or could the risk of drought and bushfires such as we saw in Canberra continue to grow?
The severe weather conditions that Australia is currently experiencing are a disaster. But it is not a natural disaster. A report, released on January 14, prepared by Professor David Karoly, Dr James Risbey and Anna Reynolds for the WorldWide Fund for Nature (WWF) Australia, found that the severity of the current drought is a result of human-induced global warming.
The report, Global Warming Contributes to Australia's Worst Drought, focused its research on the Murray-Darling River Basin, which produces 40% of Australia's agricultural output and covers southern Queensland, western NSW, north-western Victoria and eastern South Australia.
The report argues that the current drought is related to natural climate variations associated with El Nino, the irregular warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean that occurs every three to seven years.
The severity of its impact however, is magnified by two factors. Firstly, in 2002, Australia experienced the lowest average rainfall since 1910. Secondly, there has been an increase in both surface and average daytime temperatures in this country. The 2002 drought temperatures are "extraordinary" when compared to the five major droughts since 1950. This increase in temperatures is not attributable to the natural variations of Australian climate alone.
Australian average surface temperatures increased by more than 0.7oC between 1950 and 2001. Further, during the 2002 drought, the temperature across Australia was 1.6oC higher than the average and 0.8oC higher than the previous record. The report argues that "the actual trend in Australian temperatures is now matching climate models of how temperatures respond to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These greenhouse gas increases occurring today are due to human activity; burning fossil fuels for electricity and transport and land clearing."
While an increase in temperatures of 1oC may not seem like much, the higher temperatures mean an increase in water evaporation rates that speed up the loss of soil moisture and the drying of vegetation and watercourses. "Higher maximum temperatures and drier conditions have also created a greater bushfire danger than in previous droughts", the report states.
In its conclusion, the report argues that "we can expect that the impact of drought in Australia will get worse as global warming accelerates. The CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation] has projected increases in Australian temperature of between 1 and 6 degrees Celsius by 2070."
The WWF report won the independent endorsement of the CSIRO, which said it highlighted concerns about the sustainability of Australia's farming industry.
On January 20, Prime Minister John Howard was asked in an interview whether he was worried that Australia was getting hotter and drier and that this would lead to severe bushfires becoming more common in the future. He responded: "We tend to forget that the bushfire threat has been with us since the dawn of time and it's always going to be with us... It's not something you can abolish."
Other public figures have gone further. As was the case after the Sydney fires in January 1994, and the NSW Christmas bushfires in 2001, conservative politicians and the logging industry have attempted to blame both the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) for mismanaging National Parks and "greenies" for opposing burning off. Former forests minister, and now the territories minister, Wilson Tuckey and Liberal Party member Kate Carnell, who is the executive director of the National Association of Forest Industries (and former chief minister of the ACT) have both publicly attacked the NPWS.
Why the NPWS? Writing in the January 24 Australian, Alan Oxley, former Australian ambassador to and chairperson of GATT (the precursor to the World Trade Organisation), puts the pieces of the arguments together. He wrote: "There certainly are environmental lessons to draw from the bushfires and they are not that global warming causes them, but that bad environment policy on forests can foster them. In the US, wildfires are getting bigger than ever. Logging has been stopped in many forests and so has the ancillary benefit of managing the forest and undergrowth. Unmanaged forests in the US are becoming wildfire time bombs.
"A similar phenomenon seems to be occurring in Australia. The more forest we lock away when we cease not just logging but proper management, the bigger the tinderboxes we create."
Presumably, the way to completely eliminate bushfires in Australia is to eliminate the bush!
Mick Fendley, director of the Victorian National Parks Association, argued in a Wilderness Society media release on January 22, that "the fires of Black Friday 1939 burnt 10 times the area of the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, yet there were few national parks. Contrary to popular opinion, the majority of fires start outside parks and burn in. The Ash Wednesday and Black Friday fires were mostly in regrowth forests recovering from logging. The royal commission into Black Friday concluded that alteration to the environment from logging led to the severity and extent of the fire."
Fendley added: "South-eastern states of Australia are one of the three most fire-prone regions of the world, and the impacts of climate change only makes matters worse. This is our worst drought in 100 years, and with the impacts of climate change, we can expect more severe droughts more often, as well as more unpredictable weather conditions, including high temperatures and high winds such as those experienced in Canberra."
Any strategy for dealing with future threats of bushfire has to deal with climate change. What has the Coalition government done?
In 1997, after fighting to water down the Kyoto Protocol on controlling greenhouse gas emissions, the Howard government has decided not to ratify the protocol. Internationally, the collusion between the United States (the world's largest greenhouse polluter) and Australia (the world's largest greenhouse polluter on a per capita basis) to undermine the protocol has been a key factor in its slow adoption.
Furthermore, Australia is the fifth largest land clearer in the world and the largest in the developed world. The Queensland state government has revealed that more than one million hectares of bushland was destroyed in the state between 1999 and 2001 — an increase on the previous two-year period. As well as contributing to the greenhouse gas increases, land clearing also reduces rainfall and increases erosion, making both drought more likely and land more vulnerable to the effects of it.
If future horrific waves of bushfires are to be avoid, government policy will need to reflect the interests of the people (including a safe and sustainable environment), not the profits of the corporate polluters.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, January 29, 2003.
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