National News - December 2006
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27/12/06 Trees don't start fires - More management of forests does not necessarily make them less fireprone. Gavan McFadzean. The Age Opinion
18/12/06 Locking up precious forest areas is playing with fire, Catherine Murphy, CEO NAFI; SMH
Climate National 14/12/06 PM's southerly change: expect extreme weather, Andrew Darby in St Helens, Tasmania; Fairfax Digital
13/12/06 Parks must be firefighter friendly: PM; By Robyn Grace, Charisse Ede and Jane Bunce; AAP
December 28, 2006 , The Age Letters
MY FORESTER daughter was fortunate to spend Christmas Day with us after two weeks in the mountains near Matlock fighting the bushfires. With others, she was planning and setting out control lines that were then constructed by a team of bulldozer operators. Their collective skills in dangerous bush operations held those fires until the rain came. They stopped the Mount Terrible fire from burning through Melbourne's catchments.
Guess where these saviours of the forests came from? Not from the Wilderness Society, but primarily from the timber industry. They mainly used access constructed for previous logging. So Melbourne's catchments are saved for another blow-up day when, after another lightning strike, they will need saving again.
Unfortunately, most foresters in Victoria are public servants and so constrained from responding to the mangled forest science that passes for "the forestry debate". They deserve better thanks for this most recent effort than pre-emptive and opportunist distortions.
Gavan McFadzean of the Wilderness Society sure knows how to defend a weak position ("Trees don't start fires", Opinion, 27/12) — imagine and exaggerate any potential opposing argument and then mount a scattergun attack on things never claimed! We do agree on one thing, though, within the stream of inaccuracies: the logging and regeneration of forests probably has little net influence on the frequency of bushfires.
What McFadzean conveniently omits to mention, though, is that the timber industry undoubtedly does make a huge contribution to controlling the inevitable and potentially more frequent bushfires.
Peter Sheehan, Camberwell
More management of forests does not necessarily make them less fireprone.
Gavan McFadzean. The Age Opinion
December 27, 2006
DON'T be taken in when the anti-national parks lobby feigns concern about bushfire risk. Their latest contributions to the debate have been unscientific, insensitive and opportunistic.
Insensitive and opportunistic because while exhausted fire crews fight blazes across three states and people's lives and property are at serious risk, the logging industry launches another round in its attack against national parks to get greater access to forests for logging.
Unscientific because the more "managed" a forest is for logging, roading and four-wheel-drive access, the more fireprone it becomes.
The anti-national park lobby argues for greater access to our forests — not for logging, of course, but to prevent bushfires. Unmanaged forests, they say, are a firebomb waiting to explode; they need to be logged and burnt regularly to make them less fireprone. But letting loggers into our old-growth and native forests is like giving Dracula a key to the blood bank.
More management of forests does not necessarily make them less fireprone, and national parks less fireprone than areas managed for logging.
Parks are not "locked up" — they are managed as part of fire protection plans. Management burns are routinely made in most parks, and firebreaks are found in most of them or along their boundaries.
Contrary to popular opinion, most fires start outside parks and burn in. Of the most recent blazes this summer, 70 per cent started in state forests. This is consistent with the average, where about 70 per cent of fires start in state forests and burn into national parks.
The fires of Black Friday, 1939, burnt 10 times the area of the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, yet there were few national parks back then. We can, and should, take sensible measures to reduce the risk and severity of bushfires, but it's a case of horses for courses. Controlled burning can reduce fire hazard around towns and urban centres, but may also create a fire timebomb in the bush.
Forests are ecosystems; they respond to whatever you do to them. Their response to regular hazard-reduction burns is for fire-tolerant plants to take over from fire-resistant plants, because they thrive in a regular fire environment. As a result, so-called hazard-reduction burns may, in fact, create a more fireprone landscape.
Advocates of more fuel-reduction burning talk as if it is risk-free. Remember Wilsons Promontory last year, where a fuel-reduction burn got out of control, burnt vast areas of the park and threatened campers? Controlled burning has many risks.
In the past few years, numerous controlled burns have escaped in Victoria, NSW and Tasmania. Premier Steve Bracks is right to say drought conditions can make controlled burns in the lead-up to summer too dangerous, and impossible to control. This is not to say we should never have hazard-reduction burns, but you have to pick the right environment and day.
The 2003 bushfire inquiry noted that the "prescribed-burning debate has been at times ill-informed and peppered with gross exaggerations and the view by some that one size fits all". The inquiry noted that there are only about 10 days a year when conditions are right for prescribed burning.
The oversimplification of this issue by some sectors of the public is dangerous. Bushfires are a complex phenomenon, and no single land-management practice will reduce the extent and frequency of large, intense fires across the entire landscape.
The argument that we should engage in widespread and regular burning of the forest because that's what Aboriginal people did for years is, as the 2003 bushfire inquiry put it, "a highly attractive philosophy".
But the inquiry rightly concluded that unfortunately "we do not know enough about traditional burning in southern Australia to be able to re-create an Aboriginal burning regime".
Since European settlement, the landscape has changed dramatically. Trying to replicate Aboriginal fire practices in southern Australia would unfortunately now be a risky experiment. Instead, the goal must be to produce a fuel-reduction management plan that protects biodiversity and reduces the effects of wildfire for protection of people and assets.
As for the pro-logging interests, their hypocrisy is breathtaking. They say a logging industry is essential to help fight the fires, yet this is the same industry that has contributed to making the forests of south-eastern Australia so fireprone in the first place.
Logging destroys old-growth forests and rainforests, which are less fireprone, and replaces them with young, dense, fireprone regrowth over vast areas.
The Ash Wednesday and Black Friday fires were mostly in managed regrowth forests recovering from logging. The royal commission on the 1939 Black Friday fires concluded that logging had increased the severity and the extent of the fire.
The Canberra suburbs of Duffy and Curtin, which were razed in 2003, were surrounded by pine plantations and grasslands. Pine plantations are managed forests with plenty of roads and easy access, yet these forests created a firestorm.
Logging and regeneration burns create big gaps in the forest, which in turn create a drier, more fireprone environment. Huge amounts of debris are left on the forest floor after logging, adding to the fire hazard.
About 75 per cent of fires are started by humans, and logging roads provide greater public access to the forest.
If the logging industry really cared about reducing the bushfire hazard, it would be calling for an end to the logging of native forests.
In big bushfire seasons, national parks are demonised. We need to remember that these areas are huge carbon sinks that buffer us from the impacts of dangerous climate change. Our parks take the equivalent emissions of 250 million cars for a year out of the atmosphere.
Prime Minister John Howard's comments that the recent bushfires are unrelated to climate change are alarming. CSIRO has predicted global warming may double the very high and extreme fire danger days. South-eastern Australia is already one of the three most fireprone areas in the world.
Fire is a natural and vital part of Australian landscape; it has been a key process in shaping Australia's unique biodiversity.
With the onset of dangerous climate change, fire frequency and intensity is likely to increase unless we take a different approach to forest management.
Gavan McFadzean is the Victorian campaigns manager for The Wilderness Society.
Catherine Murphy, CEO NAFI ; SMH
December 18, 2006
THE past weeks have been a catastrophe for the environment. More than 700,000 hectares of forest in eastern Australia, particularly in national parks, have been devastated, with hundreds of thousands of birds and animals killed or injured amid enormous losses of vegetation.
At a time when the issue of climate change has never been more important, these recent fires have released millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.
Given the environmental catastrophe, it is incongruous that we have heard nothing from the environmental movement. Australian conservationists are the first to applaud the locking up of more forests into reserves, but refuse to acknowledge the often negative environmental consequences.
Tasmania's Wielangta Forest is an example. It has been the focus of a case by the Greens leader, Bob Brown, against sustainable forestry operations. He wants to see the area placed into a reserve, ending forest management practices which have been occurring over decades.
While the forest's future is being pursued through the courts, a moratorium on harvesting has been in place which effectively locked up the forest and resulted in reduced access during the current fires. The result of the non-management of the forest is that large areas have been destroyed.
Environmentalists continue to decry the need for active park management through controlled burning, yet are silent on the massive loss of biodiversity resulting from fires.
Once productive forests are locked up, the passive management approach adopted by national parks bodies becomes the norm. One of the major contributors to the destruction of forest areas by fire is the loss of access for fire crews. Previously developed roads in commercial forests are not maintained, with the result that they become overgrown and impassable. Some park managers have placed padlocked gates across roads, which again inhibits access.
Passive management of national parks is a recipe for environmental disaster. The destruction caused by the 2003 bushfires in NSW, Victoria and the ACT is still evident. More than 3 million hectares of forest were destroyed and the damage to biodiversity was enormous.
It is estimated that 130 million tonnes of carbon was emitted into the atmosphere in the few weeks that those fires blazed, equal to one quarter of Australia's annual greenhouse emissions.
The Kosciuszko, Alpine and Namadgi national parks were devastated in the 2003 fires. Thousands of hectares of pristine alpine ash forests were reduced to blackened remnants. There has been almost no regeneration in much of the area. Unlike commercial forestry operations, which must regenerate all species harvested, there has been no active program by national parks bodies to reseed the forests, and no management or environmental requirements for them to do so.
As we witness one of the worst periods of drought on record, of equal concern is the effect that the 2003 fires and the latest fires will have on water supply. As forests regenerate after fires, their need for water is enormous. CSIRO studies have shown that the Melbourne water catchment has only recently recovered from the effect of bushfires in 1939, almost 70 years ago.
The effect of the 2003 fires is likely to be of the same order, with studies predicting a reduction of up to a fifth in water flowing into the Murray-Darling Basin region as a result of the regeneration of forests. It has been estimated that the regrowth will absorb 430 billion litres of water a year for the next 50 years. This will have a significant impact on the availability of water for communities, irrigators and environmental flows.
State governments and environmentalists applaud themselves in continuing to convert sustainable and productive forests into national parks. However, limited resources are made available to ensure proper forest management, with the result that there are worse environmental outcomes. In NSW, there is one ranger for every 23,000 hectares of national park and the annual report of the NSW Parks and Wildlife Service shows that only 20 per cent of its staff are field officers.
We have many wonderful national parks of which we can be justifiably proud. However, proper forest management practices are essential. We need to question the locking up of well-managed forests into poorly managed national reserves, including national parks. Otherwise the environment will continue to be the major loser.
Catherine Murphy is the chief executive of the National Association of Forest Industries.
Asa Wahlquist
December 13, 2006
Athol Hodgson - chief fire officer with the Victorian Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands from 1984 to 1986 - warned that the state was at risk from feral fires due to flawed policies and blinkered politics.
Mr Hodgson said that in 1985 there were 111 lightning strikes in mountainous country that were "remarkably equivalent" to the current bushfire crisis. But in 1985 there was a different outcome.
"They flared into about 50,000ha in the alpine area and we stopped them at that acreage without the aid of rain," he said.
"We did it because at that time there was a very significant number of people who worked in the forests and parks earning their daily bread. The difference now is that when fires start, that workforce is not there."
Mr Hodgson said about 3000 people worked in the forests in the early 1980s, in forestry, the electricity commission and saw-milling. It was a condition of the saw-milling licences that if a fire broke out, the workers had an obligation to fight it.
"They stomped on fires very quickly and very, very effectively, and that has all changed."
Mr Hodgson said firefighters now had to be brought in from outside, causing a catastrophic delay. "Instead of having four or five fires running out of control, on this occasion they had about 50, and it became too big a job."
Rod Incoll, chief fire officer for the department responsible for Victorian forests and national parks from 1990 to 1996, says funds have been stripped from fire management, skilled foresters have virtually disappeared, and the culture that knew how to manage fire has totally changed.
Mr Incoll said the mountainous country, where many of the fires are now burning, "has become a wasteland. Nobody is managing it. No money is being spent on it, nothing is being done in it".
And he warned there would be worse to come.
"I think we're going to cop it in the first three months of next year," Mr Incoll said. "There's not much we can do about it."
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Andrew Darby in St Helens, Tasmania; Fairfax Digital
December 14, 2006
THE Prime Minister, John Howard, last night embraced a key climate change forecast, warning Australians to prepare for more extreme weather events such as the current bushfires.
Visiting north-east Tasmania, he repeatedly made the point that the region was not normally associated with bushfires, and neither were they usually so common early in the summer.
On his last stop in St Helens, Mr Howard was asked if he accepted the scientists' predictions of more extreme weather events.
"Let me put it this way," he said. "I think the country should prepare for a continuation of what we are now experiencing … I think the likelihood of this going on is very strong."
In recent years there has been an almost global increase in extreme maximum temperatures and extreme rain, according to the Australian Greenhouse Office. By 2030 most of the country is expected to have 10 to 50 per cent more days over 35 degrees, and many fewer frosts.
CSIRO models show that in many places global warming is likely to increase the frequency and duration of heavy rains, droughts and floods.
Global warming has started to produce more severe bushfires, and much of the east coast and southern states can expect more frequent and intense fires, according to the Government's Bushfire Research Centre.
Mr Howard said more emergency services infrastructure was one answer, but after touring Victoria he emphasised the need to "get the balance right" in national parks.
"I hear people say that they couldn't get access to some of the national park areas because some of the fire trails were blocked off."
He said it was possible to protect and preserve the values of the parks but still allow access.
Earlier, in the King Valley in Victoria, the Prime Minister told a group of fire fighter volunteers he was in awe of their efforts.
"I've come here today to do two things, firstly to say to all of the people whose livelihoods and properties and futures have been under threat and continue to be under threat, that the rest of the nation is feeling for you at this very difficult time. You're not alone. And also, to express my personal admiration to the men and women of the Country Fire Authority."
Mr Howard announced extra Federal Government disaster relief measures including grants to help communities recover from events like the bushfires.
Up to $10,000 would be paid to small businesses, farmers and community groups to help with recovery efforts.
In Tasmania, firefighters were bracing to deal with the major east coast bushfire, with hot weather and high winds forecast for today. A total fire ban is in place.
Firefighters were working to build firebreaks, but were preparing for the fire to run south through inaccessible forest country into the Douglas Apsley national park.
The NSW Rural Fire Service said a fire in the Bondo plantation, 30 kilometres north-east of Tumut, broke containment lines yesterday and could threaten properties in the Upper Goobragandra River Valley today.
with Ben Doherty
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By Robyn Grace, Charisse Ede and Jane Bunce; AAP
December 13, 2006 07:33pm
AUSTRALIA needs to "look again" at its national parks practices to ensure proper access during bushfires, Prime Minister John Howard says.
Speaking during a tour of fire-ravaged regions of Victoria and Tasmania today, Mr Howard said he had received reports of firefighters unable to access national parks in Victoria because fire trails were blocked off.
"I don't know all the details of that, but we have to surely have a situation where you can have national parks properly preserved and protected ... but by the same token if there is a fire you should be able to get into that national park very quickly," he said.
Tasmanian Senator Eric Abetz today blamed a build-up of fuel in wilderness areas for the severity of the fires on the state's east coast.
"I think there is always, when you have a bushfire event like this, I think there's always a case to see whether you've got the balance right," Mr Howard said.
"Everybody wants national parks, let me make that clear ... but I think you have to be very careful that you don't so close down national parks that you don't allow for ready access in the case of a bushfire."
The Prime Minister visited Whitfield and Wangaratta in Victoria, where residents have been facing the threat of bushfires for more than a week, and later flew into northeastern Tasmania.
He said his visit aimed to show firefighters and residents they had the support of the Government and all Australians.
"Going there today shows directly to the people that their fellow Australians are thinking of them, they feel for them, they worry that these fires are starting so early and in such a large number of areas," he said.
"It's going to be a long, hot summer, to use that old cliche. These fires have started very early."
Mr Howard's visit also included the small Tasmanian town of Scamander, where an extraordinary firestorm on Monday night gutted an estimated 14 homes, three businesses, 24 workshops and a wrecking yard.
The blaze in the region has devoured 12,000ha since Sunday.
When asked about his impressions, Mr Howard said: "What a beautiful peaceful spot that's been so badly scarred".
"The problem all over this country is that it's so dry with this drought.
"It really is quite an extraordinary experience to see what great work's done."
Mr Howard had earlier announced new arrangements for fire and disaster relief, which will make small businesses and primary producers eligible for grants of up to $10,000 to clean up and restore.
Disaster-affected voluntary non-profit bodies and the needy will also be eligible for small grants, while affected individuals will be able to access financial counselling.
Mr Howard said further funding would be provided through a community recovery fund for activities such as recovery services and the employment of a community development officer to support disaster-affected areas.
The fund would also cover commemorative events, advocacy and monitoring services, business advice and support, and economic and tourism development initiatives, he said.
Mr Howard said the special community recovery programs would be triggered by agreement between the Federal Government and the states and territories, and would be funded on a dollar for dollar cost-sharing basis.
"The Australian Government will give sympathetic consideration to any request from the premiers to invoke these enhanced assistance arrangements," he said.
Funding will also be made available to upgrade essential infrastructure to more resilient standards.
The enhanced arrangements were in addition to the federal government's Natural Disaster Relief Arrangements, Mr Howard said.
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