Bushfire Mitigation Research Articles

Designing a conceptual framework for strategic selection of Bushfire mitigation approaches

Fires are an important aspect of environmental ecology; however, they are also one of the most widespread destructive forces impacting natural ecosystems as well as property, human health, water and other resources. Urban sprawl is driving the construction of new homes and facilities into fire-vulnerable areas. This growth, combined with a warmer climate, is likely to make the consequences of wildfires more severe. To reduce wildfires and associated risks, a variety of hazard reduction practices are implemented, such as prescribed burning (PB) and mechanical fuel load reduction (MFLR). PB can reduce forest fuel load; however, it has adverse effects on air quality and human health, and should not be applied close to residential areas due to risks of fire escape. On the other hand, MFLR releases less greenhouse gasses and does not impose risks to residential areas. However, it is more expensive to implement. We suggest that environmental, economic and social costs of various mitigation tools should be taken into account when choosing the most appropriate fire mitigation approach and propose a conceptual framework, which can do it. We show that applying GIS methods and life cycle assessment we can produce a more reasonable comparison that can, for example, include the benefits that can be generated by using collected biomass for bioenergy or in timber industries. This framework can assist decision makers to find the optimal combinations of hazard reduction practices for various specific conditions and locations.

Fuel weight and understorey hazard dynamics in mature karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor) forests in southwest Western Australia

ABSTRACT Fuel properties influence the behaviour of forest fires, so understanding how these change with time since fire is important for appraising the bushfire threat and planning and implementing bushfire mitigation operations. A space-for-time study in mature karri forests with fuel ages ranging from 1 to 92 years demonstrated that total fine-fuel weight (TFFW) increased with time since fire for about 30 years then plateaued at a mean value of about 50 t ha−1. For fuels older than four years, on average, 74% of TFFW was in the surface fuel layer (the litterbed) and 17% was in the near-surface layer (up to 1 m above the surface layer). Live understorey vegetation contributed only about 6% to TFFW. Predicting TFFW from time since fire was improved by including karri tree basal area. Mean understorey height (Uht) increased with time since fire, peaking at 6 m after about 30 years, then declining to about 4 m after 92 years. Mean understorey hazard (Uhaz), derived from Uht plus the proportion (%) of dead fuel in each fuel layer, followed a similar trend, peaking at 20–30 years post-fire, then declining. Although Uhaz had declined by 36% from the maximum value by 60+ years post-fire, it was 27% higher than the Uhaz value for young fuels (1−<5 years old). For a mean prescribed-burn interval of eight years, 50% of the forest fuel will be ≤four years old and so will be carrying about ≤19 t ha−1 of fine fuel (≤38% of the maximum value), with a Uhaz value of about <3.56 (<50% of the maximum value). Fuel weight and Uhaz directly influence fire intensity, flame size, spotting potential and rate of spread. Therefore, prescribed burning, done strategically and at the appropriate temporal and spatial scales, will make bushfires less damaging and easier and safer to suppress.

Indigenous Knowledge, Aspiration, and Potential Application in Contemporary Fire Mitigation in Southwest Australia

Protection of biodiversity, human assets, and cultural heritage pose significant challenges to contemporary planning of bushfire mitigation activities. Current mitigation approaches are not always appropriate, and mismanagement is a source of distress for Indigenous peoples. Increased understanding of Indigenous fire knowledge and increased Indigenous participation may provide insight into more appropriate and inclusive land management for fire mitigation. We analysed contemporary Noongar and Western fire practitioner approaches within an Indigenous fire knowledge (IFK) framework to explore knowledge and aspirations for small reserves in the Southwest Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR) global biodiversity hotspot. We recorded an extensive knowledge base, characterised by a highly nuanced approach to burning, held by the Noongar coauthors. We explore potential approaches to applying this knowledge to build collaborative fire mitigation strategies with mutually beneficial outcomes for biodiversity, cultural heritage, and human assets.

Responsibility and Risk-Sharing in Climate Adaptation: a Case Study of Bushfire Risk in Australia

Abstract ‘Shared responsibility’ for managing risk is central to Australian adaptation and disaster-resilience policies, yet there is no consensus on what this term means or how it is discharged by various actors at each phase of the risk-management process. This has implications for both equity and effectiveness, because shared responsibility assumes that individuals have capacity and that the decisions they make will not conflict with other public values. This article explores how law assigns responsibility for climate adaptation by examining its approach to a specific climate impact in Australia: the increasing frequency and severity of bushfire. Australia faces heightened bushfire risk from the interplay of climate change effects and demographic shifts. While planning laws attempt to limit exposure of new communities to fire risks, adapting existing communities involves hazard mitigation across the landscape, through fuel reduction – accomplished by controlled burning or clearing of brush and timber – and the construction of fuel breaks. Most Australian jurisdictions impose some form of obligation on land managers or owners to mitigate fire risk. However, the effectiveness of shifting responsibility onto individual landholders, measured in terms of bushfire risk mitigation, is not established. The shifting of responsibility also has implications for equity because shared responsibility for fire management assumes that individuals know what must be done and have the capacity to do it themselves or pay others to. The law also privileges bushfire protection above other public values, including the protection of biodiversity and cultural values. To account for the complexity of adaptation decision-making, bushfire mitigation laws should avoid creating inequities and should include mechanisms for resolving trade-offs between competing values.

UAV Based Spatiotemporal Analysis of the 2019–2020 New South Wales Bushfires

Bushfires have been a key concern for countries such as Australia for a long time. These must be mitigated to eradicate the associated harmful effects on the climate and to have a sustainable and healthy environment for wildlife. The current study investigates the 2019–2020 bushfires in New South Wales (NSW) Australia. The bush fires are mapped using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing, the hotpots are monitored, and damage is assessed. Further, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)-based bushfire mitigation framework is presented where the bushfires can be mapped and monitored instantly using UAV swarms. For the GIS and remote sensing, datasets of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and VIIRS fire data products are used, whereas the paths of UAVs are optimized using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The mapping results of 2019–2020 NSW bushfires show that 50% of the national parks of NSW were impacted by the fires, resulting in damage to 2.5 million hectares of land. The fires are highly clustered towards the north and southeastern cities of NSW and its border region with Victoria. The hotspots are in the Deua, Kosciu Sako, Wollemi, and Yengo National Parks. The current study is the first step towards addressing a key issue of bushfire disasters, in the Australian context, that can be adopted by its Rural Fire Service (RFS), before the next fire season, to instantly map, assess, and subsequently mitigate the bushfire disasters. This will help move towards a smart and sustainable environment.

Strengthening sustainability initiatives: a case for repositioning Australian Indigenous communities as dominant stakeholders in managing bushfire risks

ABSTRACT This study examines the role of market orientation, privacy, and stakeholder theory in enhancing the effectiveness of current sustainability efforts for managing bushfire risks by proposing a novel conceptual framework entitled ‘Stakeholder Repositioning Strategy (SRS).’ Adopting a case study approach, we describe the SRS framework as a driving force behind shifting the Australian Indigenous community’s present position from a marginal (minimal effort) to a dominant position (key player) in bushfire mitigation. We build our framework based on the Johnson and Mendelow matrices and advocate for a sustainable solution utilizing Indigenous cultural burning practices to better manage bushfire crises, Australian ecology, communities, and the economy. The paper supports the need for Indigenous communities to proactively consult with government agencies to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into national bushfire management policies.

A Method for Calculating the Asymmetry in the Shunt Parameters of Power Lines in Compensated Distribution Networks

In compensated distributed networks (CDN), minimizing the asymmetry in the shunt parameters of the power lines is a key factor for avoiding excessive neutral voltages which is necessary not only for safety but also for improving the sensitivity of detecting ground faults, particularly when bush-fire mitigation is a major concern. This paper offers a comprehensive analysis and modeling of the asymmetry of the power lines in CDN. Unlike the existing analyses which assume the asymmetry can be lumped in one phase, the proposed analysis is based on more practical assumption by considering the asymmetry in all of the phases of the power lines. The proposed analysis is used to develop an equivalent circuit for asymmetrical CDN which then used to develop a new method for calculating the per-phase asymmetries in the shunt parameters. The proposed method has been validated based on simulations of real networks.

Are we ready for bushfire? Perceptions of residents, landowners and fire authorities on Lower Eyre Peninsula, South Australia

Housing developments on the peri-urban fringe of Australian towns and cities create complexities for bushfire management due to the intermingling of natural, rural and urban spaces. To address the risk of bushfire, policies and practices have promoted and encouraged landowner responsibility for bushfire mitigation actions and behaviours. Using a postal survey, interviews and focus groups, we examine perceptions and actions regarding bushfire preparedness from the viewpoints of individual residents, landowners, and the local fire and environmental authorities on the Lower Eyre Peninsula of South Australia. Respondents living on larger sized allotments were more likely to perceive that their property was vulnerable to bushfire than those living on residential-sized allotments. Larger holdings tend to have more fire-susceptible vegetation than the smaller properties located in fringe suburbs, which seems to confer to those latter residents a sense of greater safety from bushfires. On the other hand, residents on larger blocks reported higher levels of bushfire management knowledge and expressed stronger connections to the place where they live, which influenced their willingness to work to mitigate bushfire risk. Importantly, there is a disconnection between such individual landholder preparedness for bushfire and that of the broader community. Individual actions often do not translate into collective responses, suggesting that a greater sense of shared responsibility will need to develop to enable effective mitigation of regional bushfire risk at a regional scale.

Mechanical fuel load reduction in Australia: a potential tool for bushfire mitigation

ABSTRACTAustralia is the most fire-prone of all continents, with large areas of the country affected by bushfires each year. Bushfires can have profound impacts on communities and on the environment. Traditionally, prescribed burns have been used as a fuel reduction treatment. However, the proportion of land that is subjected to prescribed burns in Australia has decreased since 1990. This is partly due to the increasingly smaller windows of opportunity available to conduct burns safely, concerns about operational costs, health impacts from smoke, and the social acceptability of prescribed burning. These issues suggest a need for considering alternative fuel reduction approaches in select urban and rural areas, such as the potential for mechanical fuel load reduction (MFLR) treatments. The aim of MFLR is to reduce size, likelihood and severity of bushfires. In this paper we outline key considerations associated with the implementation of MFLR trials in Australia. We discuss issues such as assessing the effectiveness of MFLR in reducing fire risk, biomass change, potential harvest systems, cost-benefit analysis, social considerations and potential impacts on biodiversity. We conclude the paper with some discussion on policy considerations around the MFLR trials.

Selective clearing of bush close to houses is the top bushfire mitigation strategy

ABSTRACTWhile the wild fire issue is certainly complex and may vary significantly across Australia, the clearing of the bush around houses is found to be the most effective measure. The proposed solution of community funded clearing and collection of the waste biomass with valorisation of this biomass appears to be the most promising measure to mitigate the effects of bushfires in the years to come.

Submission to The 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission

Summary The Institute of Foresters of Australia (IFA) is an independent, national body representing forest scientists, technicians and managers with professional and practical expertise. Bushfires are a day-to-day preoccupation of many of the Institute's members either through their practical work in the forest, or through involvement in research or the administration of forest management agencies or companies. Most foresters have had personal responsibility for bushfire mitigation and suppression at some stage during their career. The IFA regards the current bushfire situation in Victoria as deeply unsatisfactory and believe this is reflected by the damage, devastation and cost of forest fires since 2003. We have for some time felt that the situation would not improve until there was a major stock-take of the current approach which has become skewed firmly in favour of ‘emergency bushfire response’ at the expense of traditional fire prevention activities. We sincerely hope that this Royal Commission will be the vehicle for a sensible revision of this approach. The IFA has long advocated the need for a national policy on bushfire mitigation and suppression in order for Australia to more satisfactorily manage bushfire risk2. This would cover bushfire prevention and fire management which then flows on into state jurisdictions. This approach should be directed at minimising the cost of bushfires in terms of human life and valuable assets (including environmental assets), must be based on science, experience and facts, and should allow for cooperation and coordination across states and across land tenures. In our view a primary objective should be to place responsibility for bushfire management in the hands of land managers, both public and private, not emergency services. A critical ingredient which is lacking is political leadership. We have observed major changes in forest management policies across Australia in recent years, and this has been magnified in Victoria where for at least the past decade there has been a political focus on expanding national parks and conservation reserves. The fact that 52% of Victoria's public lands are now contained in these tenures has led to a profound change in management focus away from active treatment to meet more passive conservation aims. With respect to bushfire management, this has led to a loss of fire management expertise, greater restrictions to public access due to track closures and declining levels of maintenance, and a demonstrable reduction in the broadscale use of prescribed fire as a management tool to mitigate the impact of summer bushfires. This combination of factors has allowed forest fuels to accumulate to an extent that has raised the intensity of summer bushfires and increasingly forced a greater reliance on emergency fire-fighting. This has occurred at a time when there has been an increasing development of housing in bushfire-prone areas, both making the use of prescribed burning more difficult on adjacent public lands and further entrenching the need for emergency capability to preserve life and property at the public-private land interface when it is inevitably threatened by fire. The IFA sees a requirement to develop building codes for homes in fire-prone areas along with providing adequate separation between homes and bushland fuels (both public and private) and to maintain gardens and surrounds in a condition of low flammability. Properly prepared homeowners can do much to reduce bushfire damage and we believe they should be given legislated rights to do what is required to best protect their own property in the event of fire. This submission reviews the background to the bushfire situation in Victoria and responds to the Royal Commission's terms of reference. In total, we have made 44 recommendations in responding to the terms of reference (TOR). These are contained in sections which separately address each TOR. In addition we offer nine over-arching recommendations. This submission is accompanied by copies of the Institute of Foresters of Australia's national policies on bushfire management and the ecological role of fire in Australian forests and woodlands (Appendices 1 and 2).

Measuring the distance of vegetation from powerlines using stereo vision

Electricity distribution companies in many countries are required to maintain a regulated clearance space around all powerlines for bushfire mitigation and safety purposes. Vegetation encroachment of high voltage electricity line clearance space is a major problem for electricity distribution utilities. If not properly controlled, vegetation encroachment can lead to bushfire and public safety risks as well as degrading electricity supply reliability. In this paper we describe a prototype airborne system for the automated measurement of the distance of vegetation from powerlines using stereo vision from a stream of stereo images. A fundamental problem with the images from the prototype system is that the powerlines are usually difficult to see, although the power poles are visible. The proposed strategy has been to recover the vegetation surface using stereo vision techniques, identify successive power poles, model the powerlines between successive poles as a catenary, and measure the distance between the vegetation surface and the modelled line. Some suggestions about how to improve the system are also made.

Inquiries following the 2002–2003 Australian bushfires: common themes and future directions for Australian bushfire mitigation and management

Summary Major bushfires in south-eastern Australia in the 2002–2003 bushfire season caused the loss of ten lives, substantial damage both to rural and urban property and to infrastructure and primary production systems, and had significant environmental impacts. The scale and impacts of the fires prompted the governments of the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria to establish inquiries into the bushfires in their jurisdictions, and the federal House of Representatives and Council of Australian Governments to establish inquiries with wider terms of reference. This paper reviews the outcomes of these inquiries in the context of the most wide-ranging, that of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), which the authors conducted. The inquiries which followed the 2002–2003 bushfire season explored many of the common themes which had emerged from the preceding 13 inquiries into significant bushfire events in Australia since 1939. These include the importance of risk reduction, particularly through fuel reduction; of community education; of the role of volunteer firefighters; of local knowledge and of access for firefighting; and of the adequacy of resources for bushfire mitigation and management. While emphases varied, there was broad agreement amongst the four 2002–2003 inquiry processes about key actions necessary to improve bushfire mitigation and management: more pervasive and effective community education; decision-making within a risk management framework; improving governance and coordination; and supporting and sustaining the role of volunteer firefighters. All inquiries focused, to varying degrees, on the limits of knowledge and information, and how that might be addressed; on the importance of improved development planning and building design; on the role of landscape-scale fuel reduction burning in reducing risk; and on improving bushfire response and recovery processes. The inquiries agreed there was both scope and need for more effective fuel reduction burning to protect natural as well as other assets. However, as the Victorian Inquiry noted, this is ‘not necessarily about burning substantially more land, but rather, burning smarter’. The COAG Inquiry developed an indicative set of national bushfire principles, which it suggested should form the basis for future Australian bushfire policy, and COAG has since undertaken to develop a final set of principles based on these.

Communities and bushfire hazard in Australia: More questions than answers

The issue of communities and their exposure to bushfire hazard is highly topical internationally. There is a perceived trend of greater exposure to bushfire risk which is exacerbated by increased levels of building in fire-prone areas or peri-urban regions. There is a need to clarify what we understand to be peri-urban regions, and how we conceptualise and describe the communities that reside in them, in order that efficient and effective services are provided. However, more questions arise for us. For example: Where are these communities located? What do we know about the people who live there? What are the implications for bushfire mitigation? Despite being problematic, locality remains important to the understanding of communities, bushfire hazard and delivery of services.