This Monday (February 22 2021) the Fire Centre’s Prof David Bowman and Dr Penny Jones are launching a new unit, ‘Living with Fire’. This 12-week unit is part of the Certificate of Sustainable Living and is for anyone interested in the fascinating but complex challenges of how we live with wildfire in Australia today. The […]
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The Bushfire Mitigation Measures Bill 2020 – What does it mean for you? The State Government has released the Bushfire Mitigation Measures Bill 2020 for public consultation. The Bill has potentially wide-ranging implications on the use and management of both public and private land. The School of Law and the Fire Centre at the University […]
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This seminar was filmed in Sydney Opera House on Sunday 16th February 2020. Session 1 Relief & Response. Session 2 Future Thinking. Watch the broadcast of the seminar here (link to YouTube). From relief and recovery to long-term solutions It’s been a devastating summer, and none of us have been left unaffected. Homes, lives, livelihoods, wildlife […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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