Many thousands of Australians spent years working to see wild and special places protected in national parks, World Heritage and other conservation reserves. From central Tasmania to the forests of south western WA, K’gari in Queensland to the Victorian high country, many special places are protected due to sustained community campaigns. But now, as fire increasingly threatens World Heritage Areas and high conservation landscapes across the country, these precious areas face an existential risk to their very survival.
While Australia as a landscape has adapted to the influence of fire, with many individual species even becoming fire dependent through long exposure to wild or human caused fires, there are significant areas that are fire sensitive, and which need fire excluded as they recover from previous fires. This includes vast areas of regrowth Alpine Ash forests (which generally need a gap of at least 17 years between fires if they are to regrow) and Snow Gum woodlands. It also includes the special remnants of Gondwanic vegetation that exist mostly across lutruwita/ Tasmania. As was reported in 2022 in The Conversation, there is an “observed drying trend across the state of Tasmania, which will worsen due to climate change. This is very bad news for the ancient wilderness in the state’s World Heritage Area, where the lineage of some tree species stretch back 150 million years to the supercontinent Gondwana’ (story here). These forests, which include trees such as the Pencil Pine, King Billy and Huon Pines exist in very limited areas and usually cannot survive fire.
IMAGE: ancient pencil pine frame Solomons Throne, Walls of Jerusalem national park, lutruwita/ Tasmania.
There are many things we need to do to reduce the threat to these forests, including:
- Rapidly decarbonising our economy, energy and farming systems to reduce Australia’s contribution to future warming impacts
- Ensuring that our land use practises protect fire sensitive vegetation communities. In Tasmania, we will need to change some aspects of how we manage the wild landscapes of the World Heritage areas, such as strategic use of fire to reduce the number of large bushfires while also applying fire to ecosystems and threatened species that require regular burning, and
- Increasing our ability to fight fires in these large reserves. This will include things like continued investment in early detection and rapid response to fire starting in remote areas due to lightning strikes.
IMAGE ABOVE: intact pencil pine forests in the Walls of Jerusalem national park.
A new firefighting team for wild places
Among a range of actions, it is time to establish a national remote area firefighting team, which would be tasked with supporting existing crews in the states and territories.
This was recommended by a Senate inquiry after the devastating fires in Tasmania of 2016.
Long fire seasons stretch local resources, and sometimes remote areas need to be abandoned in order to focus on defending human assets. For instance, this summer, fires on the West Coast of Tasmania burnt a combined area of more than 97,700 hectares. The Canning fire, burning in the Cradle Mountain Lakes St Clair national park, threatened sections of the famous Overland Track and a hut at Pine Forest Moor, owned by a guiding company, was burnt down. Crews focused on protecting these human assets. At the same time, Huon pine and myrtle beech in rainforests and pencil pine from sub-alpine woodland were at risk of burning.
As was reported on the ABC at the time, “the ancient and very slow-growing endemic pencil pine, Huon pine and other conifers were not as adaptable to fire.
In the case of the Huon pine stands, it could take several generations to restore their environments, with some trees estimated to be thousands of years old.”
While remote area crews and aircraft were able to protect ancient huon pines in the area, some sections of Pencil Pine were lost. A team of firefighters from New South Wales and the ACT arrived to assist with fire efforts, including 26 remote area specialists and six aircraft operators. Parks and Wildlife Service incident controller Nic Deka said there were 50 remote-team firefighters available.
Having an additional, mobile national team that could be deployed quickly to areas of greatest need would help us protect the wonderful legacy of national parks and World Heritage Areas that exist across the country while ensuring fire services are able to protect human assets.
We know that increasingly remote area crews are being used to protect fire sensitive vegetation (for instance the Wollemi Pines in the Blue Mountains or Gondwanic vegetation in lutruwita/ Tasmania). During the 2020 fires, firefighters were deployed on the ground to defend the only known natural grove of the world-famous Wollemi pines, in a remote part of the Blue Mountains. Fire crews were dropped into the area to operate an irrigation system that was set up to protect the trees. Recently prominent researchers in lutruwita/ Tasmania argued that as wildfires increase in severity and frequency as a result of climate change, that Australian authorities will need to adopt a landscape scale plan to protect old trees in the way that land managers are doing in the USA. They note that fires in 2003, 2010, 2012, 2016 and 2019, mostly ‘ignited by lightning storms under drought conditions, destroyed 17 of the world’s largest eucalypts. In these circumstances, individual stands of important trees can be protected provided suitably trained personnel are available’.
It is clear that we will need more specialist remote area crews who are able to carry out this sort of protection work as well as first strike response when lightning strikes cause fires across large areas of land. While the states and territories are responsible for funding local remote area teams and volunteer teams, there is a role for the federal government in establishing a national team.
Teams could be allocated to staging points in specific areas at high risk of fire and deployed alongside local strike teams and brigades, with a specific focus on protecting significant ecological assets.
IMAGE: Burnt pencil pine forests, Lake Adelaide area, TAS
Take action
It would be great if you could show your support for this idea by emailing the federal Minister for Emergency Management, Jenny McAllister, and urge her to act on the 2016 senate inquiry into fires in Tasmania which recommended that Australia establish a national remote area firefighting team.
Senator the Hon Jenny McAllister
Minister for Emergency Management
Parliament office (Canberra): (02) 6277 7290
IMAGE: What's at risk: ancient pencil pine, Dixons Kingdom, central Tasmania
Additional information
You can read our recent opinion piece about the need for a remote area firefighting team in the Tasmanian Times.
More dry lightning in Tasmania is sparking bushfires – challenging fire fighters and land managers. A story from researchers at the University of Tasmania is available here.
Other ideas on how to increase our ability to fights fires can be found here.
IMAGE: fire killed pencil pine, Lake Mackenzie area. These trees were burnt in 2016.