16/08/2020

(AU) National Fire Monitoring Agency Needed To Track Rising Threats: Paper

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

The lack of nationally consistent data on bushfires resulted in an overestimation of the extent of last season's bushfires by as much as a quarter, while also hindering longer-term preparations to cope with climate change, scientists say.

Researchers led by the University of Tasmania's David Bowman say Australia needs a national monitoring agency to track trends for everything from ignition sources – such as thunderstorms or arson – to the ecological impact of more extreme fires and the effectiveness of suppression efforts, such as prescribed burning.

The lack of a national database of bushfires and their impacts is making it harder to adapt to the changes brought by a warming, drying climate, researchers say. Credit: Nick Moir

"Precise real-time information about the area burnt and the intensity of the fires was not available when it was needed," the researchers wrote in an article published in Nature on Thursday. "In other words, we’re navigating uncharted territory without a compass."

Using satellite imagery, they found the area burnt since July 2019 was 30.38 million hectares compared with 39.8 million estimated by the National Indicative Aggregated Fire Extent Datasets assembled by the states.

While the satellite data also indicated the area of eucalyptus forest burnt was overestimated by about 19 per cent, the 5.67 million hectares charred was still likely to be the most on record. The tally amounted to about one-fifth of the forests and was 7.5 times the average burnt during the 2001-18 years, the researchers found. The official estimates count in patches that satellites indicate were not burnt.

"We need historical, solid data to contextualise the strange things we're observing in the bushfire space," Professor Bowman said. "Imagine if every state reported weather slightly differently."

The creation of a national monitoring agency would enable the public, researchers and the government to better understand the frequency, extent and severity of bushfires, including the impacts on biodiversity.

Social impacts from economic disruption, greenhouse gas emissions from the fires and also the health effects from bushfire smoke would also be better tracked with such a body, he said.

Understanding the impact of smoke from bushfires better would be one aim of a new national data service. Credit: Walter Peeters

Professor Bowman said he and other scientists had to come up with new datasets to prepare their submission to the NSW Bushfire Inquiry, with similar approaches needed for the latest royal commission into bushfires.

"Pretty everyone of these has to reinvent the discipline of pyrogeography, and assemble data," he said.

The national standards would also be able to monitor better the impact of so-called hazard-reduction burns on reducing bushfires in different vegetation types. That knowledge is likely to be increasingly necessary as southern Australia's warming and drying climate make big fire seasons more likely.

"It’s truly incredible what happened [last season], the scale and the shock of this huge event," Professor Bowman said. "We need to understand what’s going on with fire because fire is certainly changing."

Separately, a research paper also published in Nature on Thursday has found tropical soils are "highly sensitive" to temperature changes.

The study, by researchers including Patrick Meir from the Australian National University, found that warming soil on an island in Panama by just 4 degrees triggered a rise in carbon dioxide emissions by 55 per cent.

As the tropics contain about a third of the world's carbon stored in soil, "even a small increase in respiration from tropical soils could have a large effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, with consequences for global climate", the researchers said.

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