Bushfire management has been on the agenda to think about this week.
We are told that with climate change we can expect South East Queensland to be hotter and drier as the years go by. That would make our forests locally more susceptible to bushfire.
At the same time our Brisbane City Council continues on with its policy of planting more and more indigenous trees locally in our streets our parks and along our creek lines. A big proportion of these are highly flammable. Think gum trees and paperbarks. In the US where they introduced gum trees they are now doing what they can to eradicate them because of the fire hazard they cause.
How as a community do we think through fire risk? Most of us are not in any position to make an informed judgement about it. We’re not trained in fire control. Unless we’ve had a run-in with a serious fire event we are unlikely to be paying it much attention.
This week we were called on to respond with input to a draft community fire management plan. It was a difficult task. At least one shareholder has little concept of what bushfire in Australia can do coming recently as she does from Ireland. Protecting the environment for koalas and wallabies has deep appeal to a majority of shareholders. They weren’t around after the last bushfire to see that no birds or animals survived at all from its devastation. It is only now after ten years that they have returned in numbers but the fuel load on the forest floor is now dangerously high and could wipe them all out again. With no regard to the Victorian bushfire deaths people want to plant groves of trees around their homes for privacy. None of which makes for any hope of a really sound fire management plan.
This story mimics our whole community approach to fire. We focus on biodiversity conservation and rail against the controlled burning regimes that were the result of careful experimentation in the middle of last century to determine what worked to stop runaway wildfires. Our Rural Fire Brigade can do controlled burns on a regular cycle to reduce the fuel load so that if a fire does break out it doesn’t have a very heavy fuel load to increase its damaging ferocity but there is a lot of pressure against controlled burning regimes. Few of us are in a position to get out and rake and clear forest areas. Eventually as oil becomes scarcer and scarcer we may even see a position developing where equipment like slashers and tractors become harder to get fuel to reduce fire hazards.
Property developers push deeper and deeper up into our forested areas to create new housing estates close to forests. Our local hilly suburbs all have good examples of this. Population growth is always a driver behind the pressure to build in risky localities.
There is a big question is how we manage disaster risk whether we respond when there is a disaster or prepare in advance to mitigate against predictable known risks.
You could say that mitigation against predictable future risks is what the Transition Towns movement is all about.
Developing a real and deep understanding of what the predictable future risks are and developing plans as a community for how to mitigate against them
We see complacency as a dead end solution. Like wildfires in the bush there are some huge potential risks facing the world Australians and us here in the upper Kedron Brook valley. Now is the time to be focusing on how to survive them.