Australia’s bushfire monitoring system is not fit for purpose, and we should build a national agency to strengthen our resilience and adaption to climate change, according to a team of leading fire researchers.

In a comment published in the journal Nature, the researchers argue that the magnitude of the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires – which destroyed more than 3,000 homes and razed 30 million hectares of vegetation – has highlighted the need for a coordinated national approach.

“Australia does not have a central system for gathering and storing essential information about bushfires,” University of Tasmania Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science David Bowman, said.

“State and territory governments, and even agencies within states, have different approaches. This worked fine when fires were smaller. But those in the 2019-20 season crossed multiple state borders.”

With each state and territory recording bushfires in a variety of ways, the lack of consistent data makes it difficult to measure scale and environmental impact accurately.

To determine whether the Black Summer bushfires were anomalous, the researchers used satellite data from the European Space Agency’s Fire CCI51 to analyse burnt areas from 2001-2020.

They also analysed the data and written records of all major fires in Australia from 1851 to gain a broader geographical and historical perspective.

The study found that the extraordinary scale and intensity of the Black Summer fires were driven by climate conditions not seen in a century, including three years of drought. Importantly, it also highlighted inconsistencies with the way government records are currently compiled using field observations.

Although the satellite data shows that the extent of the fires was 24 per cent smaller than estimated from government records, the results confirm that fires of that magnitude had not been seen since the mid-19th century.

Almost 20 per cent of Australia’s eucalyptus forest coverage burnt – more than 7.5 times higher than the annual average percentage burnt during the previous 18 years.

“The geographic scale, on the back of a series of massive bushfires that have burnt southern Australia and Tasmania since the beginning of this century, eclipsed the worst-case scenarios designed to prepare agencies and communities,” Professor Bowman said.

“In other words, we’re navigating uncharted territory without a compass. Effective adaptation to extreme events of this sort demands much more detailed description and analysis, and that requires accurate and timely data.”

Professor Bowman argued that good data is essential for evidence-based bushfire policy, which with the current ad hoc data means there is ‘needless confusion’.

“Knowing the extent of bushfire is a basic parameter yet there are widely varying numbers because of lack of agreement about mapping approaches to area burned and mapping of vegetation types,” he said.

“Currently, it is difficult to differentiate important causes of the fire crisis from firmly held opinions with limited data to support them.

A national facility could fill a critical gap by providing reliable and consistent data on bushfire causes, extent, and environmental, social and economic impacts, including the cost of bushfire fuel management and fire-fighting.”

Co-researcher Dr Grant Williamson, Senior Research Fellow at the School of Natural Sciences UTAS, made the point that it’s not that the official government records of fire are wrong or bad, but rather that this is a difficult measurement to make. “This has lead to different people, over the last few months, making a wide variety of claims about what actually burnt, and what the total area was.”

He said the difficulty of getting accurate maps of fire is not helped by having no unified approach to this in Australia.

“We’re calling for standardisation of methods and rapid data availability, that could be offered by some federal-level organisation, rather than the current situation where we’re relying on different state agencies, who are too busy worrying about actually fighting the fires.”

“No matter how you measure the area burnt, it is clear that the 2019/2020 fire season in south-eastern Australia was extraordinary, surpassing the largest previous fires known in recorded history in this biome,” Dr Williamson said.

The researchers have called on the Bushfire Royal Commission to recommend the establishment of a national fire monitoring agency to collect consistent information on:

  • Fire causes
  • Frequency, extent and severity
  • Biodiversity and vegetation coverage
  • Greenhouse gas emissions
  • Smoke and public health
  • Economic trade-offs

“The 2019-20 fires marked a historic crossroads. A national crisis of this magnitude, which will probably happen again, requires a national solution,” Professor Bowman concluded.

Adjunct Professor Jim McLennan, a Bushfire Safety Researcher at La Trobe University, considered that it would be difficult to advance a plausible argument against the proposal for a national database as proposed by the authors.

“Increases in hazard frequency and severity, driven by global warming, mean that weather-related hazards require a national response capability, and the basis for this must be an appropriate national database,” he said.

A nationally consistent approach to monitoring the extent and severity and impact of catastrophic bushfires is crucial for guiding efforts at mitigation and post-fire response, according to Associate Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher, a Biogeographer and the Assistant Dean (Indigenous) at The University of Melbourne

“While this goal is no doubt essential, the authors gloss over some of the real challenges that face such efforts,” he said. “Prime among them are the limitations of deriving consistent data on fire area and severity from satellite imagery across the complex array of vegetation types in Australia. Satellite imagery has been enormously effective in mapping fires in the tropical savanna biome of northern Australia, but these systems are very different to the temperate Eucalypt forests that, arguably, present the greatest risk for Australia’s firey future.”

He claimed that calibrating satellite data against actual fire data will require a concerted scientific effort if such a nationalised approach is to work.

“I also caution against defunding or moving away from independent assessments of fire area, severity and impacts in favour of a national approach,” Professor Fletcher warned.

“Such independent datasets provide a critical test of the accuracy and veracity of large nationally-managed monitoring systems.”

He also argued that the solution needs to reach beyond a simple national monitoring agency, to an “independent and nationally-coordinated agency aimed at informing government about prediction, mitigation and monitoring of fire in Australia.”

Wildfires: Australia needs a national monitoring agency was authored by a team of leading national and international fire researchers: David Bowman, Grant Williamson, Marta Yebra, Joshua Lizundia-Loiola, Maria Lucrecia Pettinari, Sami Shah, Ross Bradstock and Emilio Chuvieco.