Climate Change: Tassie Fires

ABC Catalyst - Mark Horstman

We like to think Tasmania is a refuge from climate change – a cool green island at the bottom of a warming world.
But this summer may have seen a tipping point.
The unprecedented number and size of fires ignited by dry lightning in Tasmania are no longer 'natural' events.
Conditions are so dry that the soil itself is burning.
Ecosystems normally too wet to burn are going up in smoke.
1000 year old World Heritage forests face irreversible loss.
Is this what climate change looks like?



Links

• Transcript
• Tas Parks & Wildlife Service – Fire Management in the Tasmanian World Heritage Area, Nov 2015 (pdf)
• Global Change Biology (2014): Effects of high-severity fire drove the population collapse of the subalpine Tasmanian endemic conifer Athrotaxis cupressoides
• Royal Society of Tasmania (2015): Less than 50 millimetres of rainfall in the previous month predicts fire in Tasmanian rainforest
• Journal of Biogeography (2013): The legacy of mid-Holocene fire on a Tasmanian montane landscape
• 1999 Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Management Plan
• 2015 review, Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Management Plan
• Photo essay (2016): Tarkine...After the Fire
• Catalyst (2014): Earth on Fire