‘Next fire season is already upon us’: NSW to adopt all recommendations of bushfire inquiry report
The Guardian by Lisa Cox 25 August 2020
Report finds climate change ‘clearly played a role’ in conditions that led up to Australia’s 2019-2020 fires, which were so extreme, traditional firefighting methods often failed.
Last summer’s bushfire disaster was so unusual that traditional firefighting methods, such as hazard reduction burning, failed in some instances, an inquiry into the crisis heard.
The final report of the New South Wales bushfire inquiry, said the 2019-20 bushfire season brought fires in forested regions on a scale not seen in recorded history in Australia.
“The season showed us what damage megafires can do, and how dangerous they can be for our communities and firefighters,” the inquiry chairs, former NSW police deputy commissioner Dave Owens and former NSW chief scientist Mary O’Kane, said in their opening summary.’ “And it is clear that we should expect fire seasons like 2019-20 or potentially worse to happen again.”
The NSW government said on Tuesday it would be adopting all of the report’s 76 recommendations, which include the establishment of a major new centre for bushfire research and technology, new training to increase the capacity of fire authorities to deal with disasters of the scale seen in 2019-20, and examination of existing preparedness strategies to determine the best approach to increasingly frequent, extreme fire seasons.
The inquiry found climate change and rising greenhouse gas emissions “clearly played a role in the conditions that led up to the fires and in the unrelenting conditions that supported the fires to spread” but climate change alone “does not explain everything that happened”. Click here to read the full article
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