In this new normal for bushfires, business as usual will no longer cut it

The toll as our nation burns is simply incomprehensible: change must happen.

In the context of the catastrophic fires that have now been raging for months across our country, it is true that historically Australia burns and that fires have long been part of Australia’s ecology.

In fact, southeastern Australia, California and the Mediterranean are the three most fireprone region­s on the planet.

Our country burns because our dominant weather patterns are primarily dry and hot.

It hasn’t always been this way: as of 50,000 years ago, Australia was a much wetter place, dominated by a massive freshwater inland sea.

But 50,000 years ago the great drying began. That led to the end of the megafauna, the drying of the inland lakes, the retreat of our tall forests to the coastal fringes and our more ancient rainforest types to the wet gullies and peaks of our high-rainfall mountain ranges.

So fire has been a reality for Australia for a very long time.

But these fires are different because­ the country is becoming drier, quickly.

That climate change is a major factor is not under contest, with even the head of the Australian Forest Products Association, Ross Hampton, agreeing this is the case in a piece in The Australian this week and that the drying out of the forests is making hazard reduction burns harder.

With significant sections of the country still burning, it is too early to conclusively predict the extent of these fires gripping southeastern and southwestern Australia, but the most conserv­ative estimates suggest that at least 6.5 million hectares have been burnt.

When combined with the major fires in Queensland early last year and the Tasmanian fires of 2016 and 2018, that figure is likely to top 10 million hectares.

This will make these fires the largest since colonisation, far eclipsing the previous record of five million hectares that were estimate­d burnt in the colony of Victoria in 1851 and five times larger than the infamous Black Friday fires of 1939.

The loss of life and the destruction of townships and homes are the physical human toll of these fires. The mental scars are not so obvious but will be deep and long-lasting, both for those who found themselves directly in the face of the fires, whether locals, firefighters or tourists, or those who suffered­ through the choking air of our major cities.

And the toll on nature is incomprehensible. The sheer magnitude of these fires and the loss of literally millions of hectares of invaluable habitat along the wildlife-rich coastal lowlands and wet forests of the Great Dividing Range will require a complete rethink of policy, funding, and action on the ground.

We will never know how much wildlife perished in these fires, includin­g threatened and endangered species. And the loss of so much habitat is likely to spell the death knell for countless others that no longer will have suitable habitat and which will starve.

The toll on iconic landscapes has also been severe. At least 20 per cent of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, home to the ancient Wollemi pine, has been burnt. The World Heritage-listed Gondwana Rainforest Reserves, a network of 50 separate reserves across northern NSW and southeast Queensland, have been severely­ damaged.

Never before in the past 200 years has so much of the forest estate­ burnt at once across the entire southeast of the continent. So this is new, and business as usual simply won’t cut it.

The economic impacts of these fires will be far-reaching. The forestry industry will not be the same as massive areas of production forests have been burnt, both native forests and plantations.

The fires have made the ­primary commonwealth and state approach to managing the production and conservation values of the forests, the Regional Forest Agreements, meaningless.

The RFAs were created following a major national inquiry into the forestry sector by the now ­defunct Resource Assessment Commission, the findings of which were turned into the National Forest­ Policy Statement in 1992. The subsequent RFAs attempted to manage the objectives of protecti­ng the conservation values of the forests while supporting nativ­e forest logging.

Most of the RFAs have now been in place for more than 20 years and many have been recent­ly extended. Now, post the fires, neither the wood production nor the conservation assumptions that underpin the RFAs make any sense, as the timber is simply gone while the forests have been critic­ally damaged and forest-depend­ent wildlife is now on extended life support.

Likewise, our already weak national­ environment laws will need to be overhauled and given some real teeth in response to an environmental crisis that is likely to pan out for many years.

It has been suggested the fires are created by poorly manage­d national parks but this does not stand up to scrutiny, as the majority of forests that have burnt have been production forests. In last year’s central Queensland fires, only 170,000 hectares of national park areas burnt out of a total of 1.4 million hectares, while in NSW this fire season, initial estimate­s indicate that less than half of the fires were in the national parks.

The simple reality is that the whole of the forested landscape has burnt — the fires have not observe­d arbitrary lines on maps.

So change is inevitable and must happen. It is important that the mooted royal commission being considered by Scott Morrison does take place. The inquiry must be comprehensive and involve­ all three levels of government.

It is clear the Federation has failed us this fire season. The buck-passing has been unseemly and the Council of Australian Governments has not ­discussed fire management or preparation for many years, despite the growing­ recognition of the drying of the forests during the drought and major fire events in Tasmania and Queensland in the past three years.

This is a far cry from the leadership provided by COAG following the fires of 2002 and 2003, when it commissioned a major report into bushfire mitigation and management and implemented those findings to improve the safety and fire-readiness of bushfire-prone communities.

It is also clear that we need, and should expect, leadership from the Australian government. For 20 years, the federal government has retreated from playing a strategic leadership role in environmental and natural resource management issues, even abolishing the COAG standing committee on the environment and water in 2013.

This needs to change, as only the federal government has the scope of perspective across the entire country and the resources to implement the changes required­. Each level of government needs to agree on a plan together and identify roles, responsibilities and accountabilities.

And governments will need to find the money. Governments of all persuasions have underfunded environment and natural resource management, particularly in our protected areas and state forests. The true costs of this under-investment are now becoming clear.

As a nation, we will need to ­assess and analyse the impacts of these fires. We’ll need to fund the science to understand the impacts upon wildlife and the actions needed to bring species back from the brink.

We need to review our laws and policies, and ensure all levels of government are working hand-in-glove. We will need to assess the learnings from traditional fire management practised by Aboriginal Australia for millennia.

We need to assess and understand the impacts on forest-­dependent industries and support displaced workers and communities in both forestry and tourism.

We will need the best science and a renewed national effort to understand what happened and what we need to do to avoid a repeat,­ while beginning the long pathway to recovery.

Lyndon Schneiders is a long-term environmentalist and former national director of the Wilderness Society