Tasmanian Fires Devastate as Climate Change Worsens

Currently, the Tasmanian fires have devastated more than 72,000 hectares of the rich western World Heritage Area forest after a cluster of bushfires, ignited by an unusual amount of dry lightning that crossed the island on January 13th. However, with the on-going rise of climate change driven by human activity, a CSIRO study shows this kind of storm activity and resulting ecosystem destruction is the new normal in the ancient Tasmanian region that has rarely ever experienced fires such as this prior to the last decade.

The current fight is also not over—dozens of fires still burning could do so for up to 10 or 20 more days as they are potentially made worse by the dry and warm conditions that are forecasted as a high-pressure system moves through Tasmania. The fires are one of more than seventy that started across the state over three weeks ago and many of the blazes were and still are burning in remote, difficult to access areas, including sections of protected old-growth forest.

Who is to blame? Certainly the dry lightning, but the drastic changes in weather systems are occurring around the globe because of climate change that is driven by fossil fuel burning and emissions from animal agriculture, causing Earth’s atmosphere to heat up. The result? An insidious threat against the survival of one of the last cool temperate wilderness regions in the Southern Hemisphere.

A National Enquiry into the Tasmanian Fires

Conservationists and academics are appealing for a national enquiry into the fires that are devastating the unique wilderness that has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage List since the 1980s.

The 1.6 million hectares is one of the largest conservation reserves in Australia, is one of the three largest temperate wilderness areas remaining in the entire Southern Hemisphere, it’s also home to the second tallest tree in the world—the 101m giant swamp gum named Centurion—and contains hundreds of archaeological sites, including the remains found in limestone caves which attest to the human occupation of the area for more than 20,000 years. To top it off, the world’s oldest continuously living tree organism of 10,500 years lives here—the Huon Pine.

Pencil pine devastation.

The geographic scale of the 2016 Tasmanian fires is only describable with the help of photography, but even then the damage and the on-going enormous challenge to the fire service is at crisis point given the absence of soaking rains in the foreseeable future. With so many fires, the Tasmanian Fire Service has had to implement a triage process with focus on threats to life and property—farmland, major hydro-electric transmission lines, and core areas with extraordinary biodiversity values.

With little immediate prospect of a speedy resolution to this fire crisis, specialists from New Zealand have flown in to help exhausted fire crews, who are supported by water bombing. A national enquiry will ask whether Parks and Wildlife have adequate resources to implement fighting fires in remote areas.

David Bowman from the University of Tasmania has said that an enquiry is absolutely needed. Bowman said it was important that it not seek to lay blame on anyone because the current situation was “unprecedented” and could not have been predicted. However, Michael Grose from the CSIRO conducted a major study into the future climate of Tasmania. The study indicates that the Tasmanian temperature is projected to rise by about 2.9C under the high emissions scenario and this will lead to increases in evaporation, decreased average cloud cover, increases in relative humidity, and increased winds in spring.

In short, Tasmania will get dryer and hotter and fires, due to dry lightning strikes, are also expected to be more common as a result of climate change. Some people may assume that with lightning comes rain and it can’t be all bad, however a dry lightning thunderstorm has most, if not all of its precipitation evaporated away before reaching the ground. This creates a truly dangerous set of conditions when combined in an old-growth forest area that’s incredibly flammable because it has never really experienced regular bushfires or controlled back burning.

Climate Change Will Destroy Ecosystems

Change is an unavoidable feature of the 21st century global climate, and increased temperatures are just one aspect of climate change.

Global warming describes the accelerated warming of Earth due to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and it causes changes to rainfall, wind, evaporation, cloudiness, and other climate variables. These changes will not only become apparent in changes to average climate conditions but also in the frequency and intensity of extreme events such as heatwaves, flooding rains, or severe frosts. While climate change is a global phenomenon, its specific impacts at any location will be felt as a change to local weather conditions.

Destructive fires in the alpine zone are known to have occurred in western Tasmania in the past 10,000 years, but very infrequently until European colonisation. It’s been recklessness by developers, animal agriculture, recreationalists, and arsonists that have caused much damage in the past and thankfully, this has been carefully regulated since. Unfortunately, over the last decade there have been an increasing number of lightning storms that have ignited fires, such as the 2013 Giblin River fire that burned more than 45,000 ha—one of the largest fires in Tasmania in living memory.

These areas, with highly varied flora ranging from open and closed forests through to buttongrass moorland and alpine communities, that are burnt by fires are unlikely to ever fully recover given the slow growth of these species. As climate change causes Tasmania to dry and warm with record-breaking dry springs and the largely rain-free and consistently warm summers, it has has left fuels and peat soils bone dry. With thousands of years of flammable accumulating vegetation and peat soils, the Tasmanian wilderness is now entering a new era where it is very vulnerable to destruction as the risk of more fires from lightning strikes increase.

The impacts of human driven climate change is becoming more prevalent as the years go on. The burning of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions generated from animal agriculture are threatening biodiversity and destroying ecosystems. How much destruction has to occur before industry stops putting money ahead of everything else? What level of chaos must present before Government leaders will look past their seated term and to the future? How much loss of biodiversity and habitat has to occur before individuals confront the fact that meat-centric diets are worse for the environment and drive climate change forward?

How much do we have to lose before we realise?

Sources: TheConversation, ABC, TheGuardian, DiscoverTasmania, Department of the Environment, Climate Futures for Tasmania study.
Leading Image: Flickr.