What does climate change have to do with bushfires?

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Abstract

A warming climate is increasing the duration of fire seasons and the risk of more extensive and intense bushfires. The Black Summer bushfires that occurred in Australia from September 2019 to early February 2020 were unprecedented in their scale and intensity. The fires led to loss of lives and homes, and widespread destruction of flora, fauna and ecosystems. Dense smoke from these catastrophic fires blanketed major cities and towns for weeks. A Commonwealth Royal Commission and two state inquiries provided recommendations for reducing the risk of future bushfires and for better disaster management processes to support the preparedness, relief, response and recovery to such megafires. While strategies to reduce the risk of bushfires and the damage to our biota and ecosystems are necessary and important, there is also an urgent need for mitigation strategies to reduce or prevent emission of greenhouse gases. If we are to minimise the planetary effects of a warming climate, we need to limit global warming to well below 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels and to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. This requires transformative thinking and action by our political leaders that builds on the Australian public and industry’s willingness to play their part.

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Most cited references 8

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The amount of carbon released from peat and forest fires in Indonesia during 1997.

Susan Page, Florian Siegert, John Rieley … (2002)

Tropical peatlands are one of the largest near-surface reserves of terrestrial organic carbon, and hence their stability has important implications for climate change. In their natural state, lowland tropical peatlands support a luxuriant growth of peat swamp forest overlying peat deposits up to 20 metres thick. Persistent environmental change-in particular, drainage and forest clearing-threatens their stability, and makes them susceptible to fire. This was demonstrated by the occurrence of widespread fires throughout the forested peatlands of Indonesia during the 1997 El Niño event. Here, using satellite images of a 2.5 million hectare study area in Central Kalimantan, Borneo, from before and after the 1997 fires, we calculate that 32% (0.79 Mha) of the area had burned, of which peatland accounted for 91.5% (0.73 Mha). Using ground measurements of the burn depth of peat, we estimate that 0.19-0.23 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon were released to the atmosphere through peat combustion, with a further 0.05 Gt released from burning of the overlying vegetation. Extrapolating these estimates to Indonesia as a whole, we estimate that between 0.81 and 2.57 Gt of carbon were released to the atmosphere in 1997 as a result of burning peat and vegetation in Indonesia. This is equivalent to 13-40% of the mean annual global carbon emissions from fossil fuels, and contributed greatly to the largest annual increase in atmospheric CO(2) concentration detected since records began in 1957 (ref. 1).