Failings in bushfire data highlight need for national body

nature article calls for new bushfire body to get a grip on shoddy data

The area burnt during Australia‘s 2020 bushfire season was 24 per cent less than was claimed by government, according to satellite checking by scientists at University of Tasmania.

In an article on Wednesday in Nature journal, the researchers said the results showed the need for a new nat­ional agency to better monitor bushfires and investigate their causes.

The research found that while eucalyptus forests along the east coast had suffered a more than seven-fold increase in bushfires over the most recent summer, bushfire activity in other land areas was average.

The Nature comment article does not downplay the serious impact of the 2020 fires or the role of climate change. It said for eucalyptus forests, it was possibly the worst bushfire year since 1851.

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

The article said without good data, it was not possible to know the damage caused to forests or wildlife.

The authors called for the establishment of a national fire monitoring agency to keep better records and to look at the role of arson among other things.

Lead author David Bowman, director of the fire centre research hub at University of Tasmania, said “it is difficult to differentiate important causes of the fire crisis from firmly held opinions with limited data to support them”.

Government estimates put the area burnt in the 2019-20 fires at 39.8 million hectares compared with satellite estimates of 30.30 million hectares.

“Good data is essential for evidence-based bushfire policy (but) the ad hoc data means there is needless confusion”, Professor Bowman said. “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.”

He said a national facility could fill a critical gap by providing reliable and consistent data on bushfire causes, extent and environmental, social and economic impact.

Researchers used a 19-year timeline of satellite data to estimate that the extent of fire across the continent for the 2019-20 season was 24 per cent smaller than that estimated from a compilation of government fire records.