Written by Chloe Lucas, Christine Eriksen and David Bowman. Australia is in the midst of a bushfire crisis that will affect local communities for years, if not permanently, due to a national crisis of underinsurance. Already more than 1,500 homes have been destroyed – with months still to go in the bushfire season. Compare this to […]
Read More
Our current policy, operational, knowledge-gathering and research capacity is inadequate to deal with such a new, fiery world The fire situation in eastern Australia continues to rapidly escalate. At this stage we cannot predict when this will come to an end, but with losses of lives and property mounting on the south coast of NSW, […]
Read More The blame game over who is responsible for the fires raging around the country is escalating. Nationals MPs have renewed their attacks on the Greens, suggesting opposition to hazard reduction burns had heightened the fire threat. Fire Science Professor David Bowman discusses hazard reduction methods used in Australia and whether they are enough to prevent […]
Read More DAVID BOWMAN: More funds are needed, for example to pay for a smartphone warning app A CRITICAL warning was buried in a report on last summer’s Tasmanian bushfires. The report released this month focused on the 2019 fires that burnt nearly 3 per cent of the state’s land area, concentrated in the Tasmanian Wilderness World […]
Read More
Fire Centre Director Prof. David Bowman and Dr. Cathelijne Stoof from Wageningen University in the Nederlands have written a communication for the prestigious journal Nature discussing the importance of diversity, both in terms of background and in terms of perspective, in the wildland fire sector. One of the core goals of the Fire Centre is to promote the […]
Read More
At the Fire Centre, we strive to empower local communities to develop solutions and to understand the cultural context of these solutions. In the USA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and local tribes are leading the way in this regard. The BIA has been the only federal agency in the USA to substantially increase […]
Read More
By Dr. Michael Shawn Fletcher Senior Lecturer School of Geography University of Melbourne The hype over the fire crisis and the role that climate change has played masks an awkward truth: the myth of wilderness is as much a threat as climate change when it comes to large and uncontrollable wildfires. Like the Kakadu National […]
Read More
A gathering of women fire researchers during the Tasmanian bushfire crisis has underlined the growth of research and engagement in fire science at the University of Tasmania. It has also highlighted the importance and positivity that a diversity of voices brings to understanding and managing bushfires. The lunch gathering was organised by the University’s Fire […]
Read More
For the first time, researchers at the University of Tasmania have modelled how effective certain types of prescribed burning scenarios are in reducing wildfire risk at a regional scale. In the largest simulation study of its kind, the effectiveness of a range of hypothetical prescribed burning treatments was evaluated across Tasmania over a five-year period. […]
Read More
University of Tasmania Professor of Environmental Change Biology David Bowman led an international collaboration – including researchers from the University of Idaho and South Dakota State University – to compile a global satellite database of the intensity of 23 million landscape fires used to identify 478 of the most extreme wildfire events. “Extreme fire events […]
Read More