A group of bushfire scientists have used an article in one of the world’s leading scientific journals to call for Australia to establish a national agency to monitor the scale, severity and impacts of fires. The eight scientists from Australia and Spain say inconsistencies in how the scale and severity of bushfires are measured across the states had led to confusion over how much of the country actually burned.
Analysis of satellite data for the article, published in Nature, shows 18% or 7.5m hectares of the country’s eucalyptus forests burned – a figure 7.5 times higher than the average over the past 18 years of the satellite record, but about 600,000 hectares smaller than government data. The scientists from the University of Tasmania, the University of Wollongong, the Australian National University and the University of Alcalá in Spain, said the ongoing royal commission into the bushfires should recommend a national fire monitoring agency be established.
Such an agency, the group writes, could agree a consistent approach to measuring the frequency, size and severity of fires, as well as investigating their causes, the greenhouse gas emissions they generate and the public health and economic issues they raised. The lead author of the article, Prof David Bowman of the University of Tasmania, told Guardian Australia the purpose of the satellite analysis was to illustrate how the different approaches could deliver inconsistent results. “In the eucalyptus forests, there’s no question these fires were unprecedented in the satellite record,” he said.
Source: Guardian
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