Firing Debate - Research Tuesdays March 2020

[Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] good evening everyone I'm working on welcome to tonight's research Tuesday at the University of Adelaide the event is firing debate my name's associate professor Patrick O'Connor I'm from the center for global global food and resources at the University of Adelaide I'd like to start by acknowledging that we that these this land that we meet on which in this place was once red gum Woodlands and blue gum gray box Woodlands is the traditional lands of the garner people and we acknowledge their continuing association with the land and their leaders past and present tonight we turn our attention to what is probably for many people one of the major events of the past few three or four months that we've been through where the bush fires impacted us directly or through our our connection to the media people that we know and the aftermath so that the bush fires have been a very big event in South Australia but also across much of Southeast Australia and in fact beyond into Queensland starting even earlier than that I want to start by acknowledging that there's a lot of trauma about for Australians about those push fires particularly indigenous people but also for other people who are associated with the livelihoods and and lives on those landscapes the loss of human life the devastating effect on environments and wildlife the impact on businesses and just people going about their their lives and probably not made easier by the follow up of a coronavirus and concerns about where that takes us next but to note what we're going to focus on is a is a journey through some ideas about what's going on with those bush fires where do they come from what's happening with them how do we feel about them how do we think about them and so we're going to a bit about bushfire history understanding of bushfire risks and how to manage these risks in the future we've got four experienced passionate researchers tonight who lead the discussions they come from very different disciplines so they're going to bring a perspective from a range of research backgrounds and collectively represent a very large amount of research experience of concentrated interest in what the world knows about these things and in their own research and adding to that and the way that we will do that is that we will have the four speakers speak to us in series and then we'll have a series of questions have been formulated from those that many people who registered provided to us and if we have time we'll go to the audience for a few extra questions so I'm going to introduce the speakers first and then they can come to the stage one after each other our first speaker will be the professor Bob Hill who's the director of the University of Adelaide's environment Institute and as a former winner of the Clark & Burbage medals respectively from the Royal Society of New South Wales and the Australian systemic body botany Society he's authored over 200 referees papers and 35 book chapters and has a wealth of knowledge in the paleo botany and Australian flora after that we'll have a session professor Douglas Bardsley Doug's acting head of the Department of Job of the environment and population his research focuses on climate change impacts on socio ecosystems both in Australia internationally including fire risk management Douglas will be followed by Professor Hagemeyer who's an environmental engineer in the university of adelaide school of civil environmental and mining in engineering also a research leader in the area of decision support and natural hazard risk reduction within the national bushfire and natural hazards Cooperative Research Centre and the final speaker will be associate professor Melissa nocebo Bray whose interim head of the University of Adelaide's school of Social Sciences malicious research focuses on how to engage communities in environmental decision-making particularly in the context of climate change and biodiversity protection each guest will give us their short presentation followed by the panel discussion and any other questions I'd now like to invite professor Bob Hill to the stage thanks Patrick okay I hope you can hear me all right so I'm a botanist by training I didn't choose to be a zoologist because I couldn't cut up animals there's a huge human tragedy that's just taken place across Australia as a result of these fires and I'm going to talk about the vegetation but it is worth also pointing out the loss of animal life as a result of this fire and I just put that first three words up there not counting invertebrates the best guess is that a billion animals have been lost during the course of the fires over summer in Australia and in social media that's quickly moved from being a billion animals to a billion souls the important point is each one of those animals would have suffered enormous Lee during that the tragedy here is far beyond the human and it's important that we don't forget that so fire has often been called a global herbivore and there's evidence that we've had fire in the ecosystem in on earth for as long as we've had plants on land that could burn so once plants came out of water where they first evolved moved on to the land fire became an important part of what they their whole ecosystem that carried on until we reached the point where flowering plants evolved and flowering plants dominate the landscape today so they're the things we're most familiar with and it's clear now that fire played a critical role in the early evolution of flowering plants and that's important in understanding what's going on today so in order for fire to be in the environment in an important way you need three things you need an ignition source for the fire you need significant amounts of fuel and you need fuel that's dry enough to burn the thing that's important here is how dry is dry enough to burn and I've put up a diagram here that might give you some idea of what can change through very deep time so in this graph there we go the atmospheric oxygen level today is the green line that runs through there and this graph runs back to four hundred million years ago you can see the the black line shows you the past oxygen levels with fairly large error bars around them it's quite a difficult thing to do to predict past oxygen but the different colored bands are really important if you look down at the purple band I mean the blue one is fire absent if you have an atmospheric oxygen level around 13 to 15% it's very hard to sustain a fire if you have it between 15 and about 24 percent you have something very close to current conditions where if the fuel is dry a fire will burn that if the fuels wet then it usually won't happen once you get above about 25 percent and up to 30 percent you move into a very strange world which we wouldn't recognize where any fuel will burn there's enough oxygen that wet fuel burns so fires are really common in the landscape as long as there's an ignition source and we know that it's never gone above 30 percent oxygen because if it did you effectively get spontaneous combustion and you have no terrestrial vegetation and we do so that hasn't happened but for a lot of the past you can see there we were in the yellow zone a very different situation to where we are today and it's only in about the last 50 million years that we've dropped down here to something like current levels but now things are changing and they're not changing because the oxygen levels going up they're changing because temperatures are increasing and rainfall is decreasing it's getting drier and so I put that red arrow on the end suggesting that our fire regimes are moving back up into those days territories not because of oxygen but because of a change in the climate so if you have a look at the Australian vegetation over the last 50 million years or so it's evolved to a really quite stringent fire regime Australia has dried out through that time and the vegetation has evolved strategies to survive through fire and if you lump them together you can turn those into three basic strategies there's a large group of species that are fire intolerant and we heard a bit about that over summer when the Gondwana rainforests in New South Wales and Queensland burnt a lot of concern about that because those have no capacity to come back after fire there's a huge number of fire resistant species and I'll show you some of them they have many strategies to try and return after fire without too much difficulty and then at their really interesting end there's fire promoting species mostly eucalyptus species and those are species that get a selective advantage from fire and so it's in their best interest to make the fires spread further and burn more ferociously those those are the really dangerous species when we get into hot fire conditions I'll just quickly show you some examples this is the mountains in Tasmania that's a conifer subalpine forest you can see the forest guy really clearly there you can still step over it effectively and that burned more than 20 years before that fire that photo was taken so that's a vegetation that has absolutely no capacity to return after fire and it's fire intolerant there's another example there's a lot of talk this summer that the Gondwana rainforests were burning for the first time not at all they've been burning for a long time in Tasmania and at some cost so the aerial photograph on the left was taken in 1982 the green bit at the top is good Tasmania and rainforest the brown bits around the edges where it's burnt in that particular fire and the yellowy colour bits at the bottom be a quartzite that once used to be rainforest but been burnt out over many thousands of years that also is fire intolerant vegetation and if you look at the tree on the right that's one of the dominant species in Tasmanian rainforests that was growing in peat you can see the Peters actually burned away from the base of the tree you can see little fragments of the peat that's where it used to be it's all bad away it's broken the connection between the roots and the main part of the tree and that's a dead tree standing there's nothing you can do about that one then fire resistant vegetation Xan 300 yeah Curzon Kangaroo Island one of the most amazing plants we have in terms of fire resistance when they don't burn they develop a dead thatch around oh sorry a dead thatch around the base here when they do catch fire that's full of volatile oils that just explodes and creates enormous heat the apex of these which is buried right up in the top here is quite well-protected by all the leaf bases and it survives the fire quite well it's insulated from the heat and so as you can see on the right they recover vegetatively really well they also have a flowering response on the left here you can see these enormous flowering spikes they get that happens after fire those spikes contain thousands of flowers and the seed drops onto a nutrient-rich substrate there's a lot of ash there and there's plenty of light because the plants have been burnt out and they go away very nicely following fire so they've got two strategies they can germinate the seed after a flowering response and they survive vegetatively compare that to something like banks here banks here produces woody fruits on the left here and in many of the species they don't open every year they just stay closed up so the seed is retained in the cone then if the plants burnt the parent plant dies the desiccation that follows forces the cones to open up you can see that here and release the seed onto the ash bed that's a fire resistant strategy and in this case you can see some of the seeds still inside the kind so they're about to be released most of them are gone that was taken at vivonne bay just a couple of weeks ago on Kangaroo Island this is a great strategy for recovering from fire but you lose the parent plant so you have about a 15-year gap while this said generation of clients grow up and flower themselves another fire during that time is devastating for that species and it can be lost from the site now fire resistant vegetation acacia is another good example they store their seed in the soil when a fire goes through it cracks the seed coat and you see hundreds or thousands of acacia seedlings come up and then a bit later a few of them make it through to dominance and sometimes acacia seed comes up on sites that no longer have out altercations the seed can last in the soil potentially up to a century then there's a fire promoting vegetation eucalyptus or just that it's very quickly the u-clips have lots of strategies one of them is epicormic shoots dormant buds that sit under the bark on the eucalyptus and if the you clipped is damaged by fire or drought or insect have every these shoots are released from dormancy and you get this really characteristic clothing of shoots on the trunk over a period of time just a few of those will assume dominance and create new branch systems and eventually that tree looks just like a normal tree and you can see a lot of that at the moment you clips also produce lots of seed you can see on the left there very tall eucalyptus that's been burnt and very healthy seedling regeneration underneath it from the hard woody fruits that retain the seeds so what happens when fires becomes so intense that the seed store is destroyed and the existing plants are incinerated by the fire this is the concern we have after this Summers fires the fire intolerant species stay fire intolerant the fire resistant species have the capacity to become fire intolerant if the seed bank is destroyed by the fire then we can lose those species from that side that's a real concern the fire promoting species by and large are better adapted and it's going to take a little bit more effort to get rid of them from the sites but you can see signs that it's possible and we could also lose them so where's the evidence this is vivonne bay just down or just to the east of Flinders Ranges Park this fire wasn't anywhere near as bad as Flinders chase rather here's the fire site here are the South Korea's coming back you might be able to see the U clips have coppicing shoots all up the trunks so they're live plants that's where the banks here was and in this site it's releasing seeds so we know the seed bank at least four banks here has survived on that site and there is some ash on the ground and here are the remains of one of the billion souls that was lost and there were animal skeletons everywhere had vivonne bay probably about one for every five or six square meters it was quite confronting Flinders chase is another proposition altogether it's quite shocking to see what's happened there it's got a very spooky quality the reason it's so pale is that it's all on sand so that's the bare sand there's no ash there's no leaf litter there's no animal remains I suspect the animals have been totally incinerated there which suggests extraordinarily high temperatures in the fires and the fires are absolutely extensive so the whole of Flinders really does chase has effectively burned about half of it was burnt in 2007 and yet it's all burnt again so having different ages since fire is a good strategy for fire up to a point but it failed here despite this devastation the eucalypts are coming back from shoots at the base none of the above-ground parts are alive with the Eclipse but they've got an underground woody structure or lignin uber and this there are sprouting from there so there is sign at least that the fire promoting species are coming back but I can't see that there's any evidence of a seed store there and I can't see how there can be so the next few months will be an anxious wait to see if anything returns from seed and there's no nearby vegetation to seed into it the only seedlings that I could see in quite a long time looking was a small patch just by remarkable rocks you can see on the left there and I suspect those are weeds that have just somehow managed to survive the process and that's it there's been some good rainfall there's been some reasonable temperatures nothing else yet and now we just get to wait and see but there is a real chance here that we've seen a change in the fire regime especially in extreme conditions and if so we've got some serious concerns on our hands thank you [Applause] thanks Bob we've heard very much about the ecological impact of fire I want to talk about the social implications of fire and particularly how our conceptions of risk are changing in relation to bushfire and I'm going to start with some social theory and I don't often present social theory in talks like this but this is one of my favorite social theorists I've been following for some time and his work really argues that we are moving into a time which is going to be increasingly defined by risk he argued that we've had a first modernity an era which was relatively easy where we exploited technology's natural resources and labor but in that process we developed new risks and now we're heading into a second modernity that is being increasingly defined by risk so I want to go through some examples and I'll use that framework as I do to think about how risky is this society that we're generating already we've talked a lot about climate change and bushfire and the Mount Lofty ranges and there's been a lot of press this summer about the implications of that for some time now we have been looking at this question and looking how our systems here in the Mount Lofty ranges and elsewhere in southern Australia are going to be increasingly exposed to a change in climate and also we are highly sensitive to those changing climate but I don't want to focus on climate change I want to focus on another issue but importantly that climate change issue is driven by human modernity it's the very success of our modern systems that have generated the greenhouse gases that are driving that change so it fits it fits his thesis I want to focus more at the local or regional scale though so I'm going to focus on planning in relations in relation to bushfire and if you look back historically at the development of the city of Adelaide when it was established there's strong evidence to suggest that the city was surrounded by quite open park lands in agricultural areas now we know it's a lovely place to live in and around the forest but the city has moved out to the forest and arguably many of those suburbs and our forests the very success of our modern Agricola the most livable cities on earth is generating significant risk we know now that we need to think differently to respond to those risks there are real gaps in planning and from some work we did with guy Robinson I think he's also in this lecture room Deline Webber from the University of South Australia and others we looked at where how we can plan for risk already we know this little requirement for our planning system to account for bushfire risk in relation to how we organize our suburbs not at the building scale at the building scale we do quite well but where we place our entire suburbs or urban developments or we organize our transport links really don't take into account the potential for bushfire risk there's no requirement in South Australia to inform new residents of the bushfire risk in an area where they're planning to levy either that might seem like an obscure requirement but if you're not from South Australia or if you're not from Australia at all the knowledge of bushfire risk may be such a bad thing for you that you won't incorporate it into your planning there's no requirement for conservation staff to be consulted even on new housing development so what we've seen is a series of housing developments on the border between the city and our conservation estate in the mountain off-key ranges which run right up and against those conservation areas so suddenly we have to change the way we manage the forest immediately adjacent to those then in these same landscapes we wind slow moving Goods trains through the landscape which often caused traffic delays so there's some big changes we could make in relation to to those questions we undertook a large survey of South Australians about a thousand respondents from southern Eyre Peninsula and the Adelaide Mount Lofty ranges and we asked them how prepared they are for bushfire clearly there are some people who are very very prepared and some that are quite prepared but then there are all within a group both in the Lower Peninsula and in the amount of D Rangers there's a group that don't feel prepared at all I'll just quote this individual actions often do not translate into collective responses we've individualized our settlement patterns there is a modern structure people don't necessarily know their neighbours or they don't necessarily know other people within their landscapes they're working as individuals that might make people feel like they're prepared but collectively the community may not be we delve down more into though that particular data and asked how does this relate to climate change risk a people feeling like then being more exposed to bushfire risk because of the changing climate about two-thirds of the community said yes we do feel that a third said no we don't really feel like climate changes are altering our bushfire risk one half of those people who think climate changes increasing bushfire risk are responding the other half aren't so there's a sense there from within the community that risks are increasing but the capacity to respond to those risks isn't there and that's important that's a gap that we can start to feel by working with those groups to start targeting communication in different ways for different groups of people one of the responses that been talked about a lot this summer is greater use of indigenous burning of within the South Australian landscape we've been doing quite a bit of research in this space we recently published paper where he reviewed the knowledge that's available to us within science on indigenous burning within South Australia and we concluded the academic knowledge on regional indigenous burning practices in insufficiently developed to warrant any strong claims to inform possible improvements in hazard and natural resources management now that's a conclusion that does not say that it could that indigenous burning couldn't be useful or it might not be very important in the future but at the moment we've turned our back on that knowledge and that's been another modern action by turning away from traditional knowledge and prioritizing modern knowledge we basically have precluded ourselves for some very valuable sources of information that at the moment we don't have capacity to draw from we've been working in the APY lands up in the northwest of South Australia is where as well you can see in this map the very large bush fires that have passed over that region after the large strong rains in 2011 basically most of the APY lands burnt in that region to bush fires are predicted to become more severe partly it's because of climate change partly it's because they're getting increased fuel loads but also because there's less traditional burning but it is an area where the community still retains the capacity to implement to traditional burning at a landscape scale but there's a challenge now for South Australia and in fact for Australia because we're losing that knowledge this is one of my favourite quotes so I'm going to read it at length in the past old people walked around the country and you the science of changing weather patterns years ago we used to know everything because we would go out on country all the time and feel the changes now we're just stuck in our meter we used to look after country but now we just look after the store we need to understand people people need to learn about country only a few young people are still hunting and understanding we've been trying to work with communities there to integrate that knowledge into responses to changing climate and that's a process of social learning that's recognizing that our modern knowledge and how we apply it is vitally important but we need to integrate it with traditional forms of knowledge and wisdom that have come from a strong understanding of place and people within place built up over many centuries and we haven't done that much in Australia and that's another gap that we can start filling I'll finish with this quote because this speaks to the question perhaps of where we can go which is to invest into intact indigenous community actions in relation to natural resource management this country is us your country is what you eat from help us to out to leek live well to keep all the plants and animals alive we want support money to control oplock place we don't want to get rich thank you very much [Applause] thank you very much Duggan Bob so I'll talk to you a little bit about understanding future risk not just the risk we're experiencing at the moment but also more importantly what we can do to minimize that risk in the future and so trying to tie together some of the things Bob talked about about the changing hazard around fire and also Doug talked about you know people moving more into bushfire prone areas and also a lack of understanding how to deal with fires so when we're dealing with fires of managing bushfire risk it's been really shown that prevention is better than cure and Helen Clark put it this way she said it's better to park an ambulance at the top of a cliff then to sorry to build a fence at the top of the cliff than a park an ambulance at the bottom but when you look at the spending at the moment we're putting most their money into ambulances and very much very little money into building fences and the problem is because it you know it's very hard to know you know where to build a fence how high it should be and when to build it and so we need some sort of quantitative information that helps us to under to understand you know where we should build these fences and so on and so in order to do that we need some as I said some quantitative information and a good way to understand how that all fits together and some of the elements Bob and Doug talked about is the risk triangle and so it's pretty obvious that without a fire there wouldn't be a risk but even if the fire occurs there's no risk if nothing we care about is exposed to that and Doug talked about people moving into bushfire prone areas and also having animals and the the environment exposed to that that adds to the risk but even if something is exposed to the fire the impact or the damage is really a function of the attributes of what is exposed and Bob talked about the adaptation capacity of plants and if it plants that have all adapted then the risk is pretty low but if the plant is not adapted then the risk is high and the same applies for people you know Doug talked about our capacity to really manage risk and understand it and similarly for infrastructure how well does the infrastructure respond to fires what's the impact so we need to look at all these things together to really understand risk the problem is that in our society it's more like a risk iceberg than a risk triangle you know we we're very much focused on the hazard side and you can see the discourse that happened and after the fires this year it's all about we need to reduce the fires we need to more plan burning and that's that's all very important but the risk is a function of all of these factors and you know and and a lot of these risks down here to do with exposure and vulnerability they sort of happened by stealth you know as Doug mentioned we wish to get population growth people are start moving into nicer areas and I think that the thing is it's it's a lot of these things that driven by community values you know and as Doug said you know a lot of the planning regulations don't consider these things you know people are don't deliberately move into a bush because it's a high-risk area they move there because it's got high amenity value they want to live in a beautiful in a beautiful place and you can't blame them for that but we need to understand that by doing that we're building risk over time and we're not really aware of it and then when the ignition happens when we get the fire we all focus on the fire but we need to look at all of these things together when we're thinking about future risk it's a little bit scary because when you look at all of these different elements that contribute to the risk they're all getting worse or the risks increasing and Bob's already talked about and dark climate change is increasing the hazard side of things so we're getting more extreme temperatures we're getting higher winds we're getting lower relative humidity all of these physical factors contribute towards more fire and having more people and having slow-moving good strains for the hills are their ignition sources they they can spark the fire so having more people also increases the risk of fire and so that goes on the exposure there we've got population growth and economic development so we've got more people more assets it's not just people it's it's buildings it's also um you know they need to think about vegetation as well but but all of these things are pushing into these bushfire prone areas and if we have you know if we have more people and if that they need to need to live somewhere and in this particular point we also need to think of not just bushfire risk in isolation we need to think of other hazards as well because if you're thinking about where people are living and have to live somewhere they don't live in the they might live near the coast and get now get flooded for sea level rise so we need to really think of it think of these things holistically and finally we've got in terms of vulnerability we have furlough volunteer rights we've got aging population and probably a greater disconnection with country as I've talked about so all of these things are working together to increase our future risk when you're thinking about mitigation then how do we reduce that risk we also need to look at all of these aspects of risk not just a hazard or the fire part and so we can do all these things and don't mention some of these so we've got fuel load reduction is one way of reducing the hazard path this could be planned burns it could be indigenous practices it could be mechanical fuel load production there are lots of different things we can do to actually reduce the fuel load and the fire risk itself but there was a Productivity Commission into natural hazards and that reported in 2015 and their conclusion was the biggest single thing we can do to reduce risk is spatial planning so this is land-use planning and as Doug mentioned you know that that the fire component the fire risk is a very small component of their planning if it's considered at all and so once you let people live in these bushfire prone areas it's very hard to reverse that you've got a lot of lot of social challenges you can't just tell people to leave and then finally in vulnerability you've got things like community education people being better prepared but also you can change building codes to make buildings more resilient to fires so again the point here is that it's a pretty complex space so you've got lots of things going on you've got three areas of risk you have future drivers of change for the climate population growth economic development all of them increasing risk you have a plethora of different options you can use to reduce risk and so it's very difficult to know what the best mix is of these different options the other thing that's complicated is that these vary spatially so what's best in one location is not necessarily the best in another location and other thing they they vary temporally and so some of these drivers of change occur different timescales but also the mitigation options if you reduce a fuel load the risk is reduced pretty much immediately if you change a building code that'll take 1020 thirty forty fifty years to take in to come please come into effect so it's a complex space so as in order to try and help I guess navigate governments through that space we've worked with over forty government agencies over the last six years to develop unharmed it's a unified natural hazard exploratory decision has a reduction explosion decision support system but basically the idea is really to help people explore all these different options and drivers to it understand risk but also to try and mitigate risk in the future and so the way it works is we look at all these three aspects of risk and so in terms of hazard you might look at the spatial distribution of the fire intensity this is for the greater Adelaide area you might then overlay that with land use and building stock information and so again that gives you the exposure you know if you've got the hazard over here and you've got the exposure and you could easily look at not just buildings here you can look at environmental assets you can look at social assets we've done some social vulnerability work as well and then in terms of vulnerability this is really so for example this is for different building types they have a bit different response or vulnerability to a hazard so just very briefly you know this on the x-axis we've got basically the the intensity of the fire and on the y-axis it's really the damage that caused us to that particular type of building so a zero is no damage and one is complete destruction and just for illustration so different buildings have different types of these curves and if you put all that together you can then get a spatial distribution of the risk in this case we've looked at the average annual loss of just direct losses okay so it just gives you an indication of how you can put all these things together to better understand risk but all these things are not just maps so we've developed models that helps us to explore some of these factors so each of these you can dial you can change at some climate change or at different population growth at different mitigation strategies to really understand how risk changes into the future and also how it is affected or mitigated by different by different combinations of strategies and so for example in terms of mitigation you can look at spatial planning impacts on the land allocation so if you put a different special I look at special planning map into our model you can then see for the same population growth people will be more likely to live in different areas and then you can see whether that's more or less risky so you can so test the effectiveness of spatial planning and also over what time frames that might take come into a fit in terms of building codes you can then basically that changes the vulnerability curve so you're changing the vulnerability curve of a building whether you do it by retrofitting or whether you actually have different requirements for new buildings that can change the overall risk in terms of fuel load reduction or whether it's planned burning or indigenous practices or whether it's mechanical fuel load reduction that changes basically your a lot of factors going to the bushfire risk model so where the vegetation is where the fuel is the time since last fire all these different things go into that model and then also you can look at community education which might also change your vulnerabilities and also might affect the ignition potential and so when you look at changes over time as I said they're all models we might look at the land use now and also the the building stock at the present but then if you run the model under a different scenario you might see look this is what the land use distribution might be in 2050 given a particular zoning regulation and particular population growth in terms of the land value that might change in response to that but also in terms of urban renewal and different building codes in terms of the bushfire risk of fire intensity this is what it might be at the moment but with climate change this might change into the future and you can see explore what these changes might be and then finally oh this is just a link from there's a link between where people live and the ignition potential so there is actually a dynamic link between population growth and and the fire risk and finally you've got the average annual loss now and then what it might be in the future the point here is that I guess we think of our decision support system like a policy wind tunnel so before you mass produce a car now you test it under a range of conditions that can might be exposed to a during his lifetime and so in the same way we can test our policies under a range of different futures so the policy is like the design of the car this might be the different combinations of risk mitigation strategies being a combination of plant burning and changing the building codes and and zoning and then the wind in the wind tunnel might be the different futures around climate change and population growth and different economic development scenarios so it's really saying will the will our strategies that we're putting into place now are they're likely to stand up in the future under all the conditions we're likely to be exposed to so just to take home messages I think you know the the immediate response is to think about the fire is the problem and it's certainly an issue we can look at in terms of mitigating but it's more risk is much more than fire and the biggest part of risk is really the exposure and the vulnerability and if you want to reduce future risk or understand risk we need to focus on those components as well we need to take a long-term view you know some of these options as I said like planning or building code changes take a long time to take into effect and the actual risk we're experiencing now is a lot of it as a function of decisions made by people in the past now if someone's allowed to let people live somewhere or the building codes all these things we have to deal with now and it's the same which we want you know the risk future generations will experience or a function of decisions we're going to make today and so we nearly need to think about those long-term things the other thing is that it's it's really difficult mitigations a hard sell you know you think about tell somebody I spent 10 million bucks and nothing's happened isn't it fantastic no it's it's it's not the same as the emotional response we experienced in response to that the fires we've had you know someone you can see the devastation you can see the loss of property the hardship people are very generous and they in which you speak which is fantastic but we also need to think about how can we put money into mitigation which is shown to be much more effective and so the tools like the one we've developed helps you make a business case to actually understand what the likely benefits and costs are of different strategies down into the future and that really leads into this we're very reactive at the moment you know something happens and we respond rather than being proactive and strategic in terms of planning the future and that's partly because we're dealing with three-year political cycles but really we need to think about the longer term and transcend that to really try and do what's best for our communities and finally we need to consider all the options you know that it's very natural for people to come up with you know our we should do more of this or more of that more plant burning or more indigenous practices or change the building codes they're all excellent suggestions and we need to consider all of these things but we need to put them all together and say look what's the best mix of these in a particular location given a particular future and also the best time to make these decisions are not in a crisis we need to plan when you know when we can be rational and calm about it but in general my experience is but whether its water or fires usually when the another initial I guess when everything dies down after the initial event then that comes off the off the radar and the political agenda and that's really the time when we need to plan rather than when we're just in an emotive state and responding to these things so thank you very much okay well thank you very much again and thank you to Bob and Doug and Holger for really sitting there the scene for my talk South Australia's are affected by climate risks and they hit at the very heart of their communities and these communities are being hit all across Australia since the start of the bushfire season in September an estimated 25 point five million acres of burned at least 27 people have perished and more than a billion animals are feared dead an estimated 2,000 homes have been destroyed with hundreds of thousands of people being evacuated so my burning question is how do communities adapt to this situation both now into the future and the other speakers have talked about risk were talked about mitigation knowledge and social learning and what I want to look at is different concept which I work in quite a lot which is both adaptation and adaptive capacity and my argument is that whether it's adapting to climate change rural migration or indeed something like the coronavirus we need to build adaptive capacity so the first question around that is I guess what is adaptive capacity it goes beyond resilience which I thinks are very overused and misinterpreted term and it gives people a little bit more understanding of the nuts and bolts of what we need is collective societies and groups to work towards responding to these huge changes that we're facing officially a-w capacity it also has lots of definitions but this is the one that we work to it refers to the ability of a human and indeed non-human systems to adjust to climate change including climate variability and extremes to moderate potential damages and to take advantage of opportunities or cope with the consequences and to me I mean Doug's pick up a little bit on the idea of the learning capacity and we've looked at you know things like how do you resource it how do you get your fair governance and plan into those things I think one of the things I want to look at and I'm very concerned about is not only how do we build adaptive capacity but how do we do it in ways where we live with not against nature and I'm going to talk about a few of the more I think of the barriers to adaptive capacity and then I'm going to end with what I think is some of the enablers of adaptive capacity moving forward and one of the things I want to what I've noticed in my my research is that fear is a really big player people are scared and people and communities are scared and therefore they become angry and this fear leads to a sense of hopelessness which is compounded by the fact that climate change is seen by what Vanderpool caused a problem of many hands it has collective effects it has collective responsibility for the problem and it's solution is often widely and unevenly distributed and a lot of my work and Doug's worth work where you look at indigenous communities you find across the board the impacts of climate change are disproportionately unevenly felt and therefore the solutions need to be delineating different differentiator it the other thing I wanted to mention is that I really think a lot of the issues around building a deputy past is that we suffer collectively from a fear of nature which is often a fear unreasonably directed at nature as the culprit rather than also a victim of the problems and the emergencies I put this quote here from ethel turner who also wrote seven little australians there was no sound anywhere no twitter of wakening birds in the gum trees no bleep from the sandy paddocks no lo of far-off cattle silence the frightful silence of drought that has killed all life and our broods over the place aghast at her own handiwork I think this is the feeling a lot of people have out about the the fear of what happens in the Australian landscape and it doesn't help us understand it competing communications are also really problematic I speak to the casandra's of our day this is Cassandra on the Left she was a Trojan princess sister to the more famous Helen of Troy but she was doomed by Apollo to always speak the truth about the future but never to be believed and I think that climate scientists suffer and other casandra's of our age never being believed and communities have befuddled by who to believe what's real and what's not real we have skeptics and we have activists and the entire climate discourse is turned into an us-and-them and then we have the conflicting messages of our leaders this is Scott Morrison when he was treasurer in question time coming in with a piece of coal and he said soothingly this is coal don't be afraid don't be scared and in February of this year he actually left open the option of indemnifying a new coal plant and collinsville from future carbon risk this is confusing for communities compounded by 24-hour news cycle that continually regurgitates horrifying stories of grief and trauma in these communities which while they may be real don't lead us into a sense of action or empowerment and finally I think an issue here is the individualism and disconnection I've been reading a little bit about this idea called the attention economy the attention economy is a theory that basically says the something that is in short supply these days is our attention because it's so bombarded with everything else and leading to that is this idea of narcissism which again I heart back to ancient Greek mythology narcissus was an extremely scrummy yummy young man who unfortunately thought he was really good as well and he basically caught sight of himself in a pool and fell in love with himself and faded away and died now this is not very helpful this is the generation of the idea of narcissism and it is if you like the ultimate selfie but you can see there's been a lot of research done that shown that the individualism and disconnection created by the attention economy in fact is causing not just disconnection from self and communities it's causing disconnection from nature and Paul himself said one of the greatest causes of the ecological crisis is a state of personal alienation from nature in which many people live so what you might ask is what has that got to do with bushfires what has this got to do how communities can respond I think what it means is that we need to picking up on one of Doug's points about collective versus individual election is that we need collection action but we need a lot of socially pragmatic pathways social just pathways that are going to enjoin communities to work together we might have the technology we might have the money hopefully we have the insurance we can try and work towards mitigation but we're also facing situations where loss and damage exceed our capacity to move forward so building adaptive capacity to work towards new futures is really important and collective action is as down States instead of acting as an absence of clear solutions absolves us of responsibility for participating in collective action loosely structured groups might take their shared not knowing as a starting point for building their individual and collective problem-solving capacities together that's one movie towards thinking would be good way of addressing some of the issues on communities I'm going to put up a few ideas some promoting ones and some more thought-provoking ones one of the things I think about fear is that you creates conflict and then that creates disconnection and well we could look at productively harnessing conflict an energy to build governance and you know don't be frightened Dom it's got a lot of bad press but it can be seen as generating opportunity and growth in fact some studies show that eliminating conflict will also eliminate potential learning and innovation and therefore mitigating against fostering the kind of social learning that Doug was talking about a related advantage to confronting and using conflict head-on is that it usually has the effect of bringing people together and creating mini-publics who can create feasible feasible alternatives around controversial issues and in fact people exhibit a high degree of agency when faced with conflict and adaptively learn from each other about how to solve problems and I like this quote from laws who says the heat of conflict can contribute to the active engagement of stakeholders who are willing to challenge the habits of thought and action and whose emotion and commitment can inform and sustain a process of moral and practical learning but what does that practical learning look like picking up on some of the comments earlier I think building partnerships is really important and I agree with Doug and and in the literature some it's a very nuanced question about how we might engage traditional knowledge into current fire burning practices but that doesn't mean that we can't work across cultures in Australia currently there are over a thousand indigenous Rangers and 600 Ranger stations across Australia working on caring for their country and in New South Wales here there are 14 indigenous Rangers who were trained up by the New South Wales Rural Fire Service and our you know cohorts to go out and help build partnerships and help people fight these fires when they occur other people such as the National Farmers Federation have joined the Australian climate Roundtable and since these recent fires farmers for climate action have been established which are asking people from all across rural Australia to push for more action on the effects of the climate having on agriculture and the impacts that they're having such as fires so I think building partnerships is a tangible way forward and this promote from pragmatic collective action can also build adaptive capacity because action is key to addressing fear breaking it down into smaller steps nuggets you know as we say probably to our children chunk it chunk it into bits and you'll be able to get on top of things Holger talked about volunteering that's a big part of any community and it can build social learning and build community cohesiveness across generations the other thing that strikes me I did a lot of research about this prior to this talk is that there is a lot of information already out there for communities that can help them to proactively move into the future and build adaptive capacity the brain Australia for example has a green hub designed to build help for regional communities and has bushfire adaptation toolkits the Australian resistant resilience disaster handbook has a series of community recovery case studies the highlights highlights how rural communities after the black sent a knee up on the fires have actually successfully recovered and worked together to move forward there's a National Association of steel-framed housing which has created an entire guideline on how moving into the future you can build houses than a fire retardant and the national climate change adaptation risk research framework has built a bushfire synthesis summary there is ability for communities to come together around these guidelines to move forward another thing I think is very important is to communicate good news stories you know in the 24-hour news cycle and with all the negativity that we can feel and the trauma that's being occurred remembering that there are good news stories is important this is just one I found from the GoFundMe in Kangoo on some of you will be familiar with it some of you will have contributed to it their aim was $15,000 they got over two and a half million and basically they've built communications that are productive moving forward they've built shelters they're releasing animals into the world I think a bit more of this sort of productive good news would help a lot so finally I just wanted to end by saying I think one of those really moving forward there are practical ways there are also wider ways societies can shift and move towards adaptive capacity and finally we could shift from having our attention bred from us to choosing to pay attention and reconnect both to people and to place and that therefore we can like construct the conditions that may make our attention our active activity rather than a passive one and ones that pay attention to the ways of knowing of indigenous peoples that respect and work with fear of nature so that we don't fear it but work with it and ones that get us to pay attention to each other so that we can build that social cohesiveness to work together so that when the next fire comes we are more climate ready we are more prepared and we know we're in it together thank you [Applause] okay Thank You Melissa and everybody else we're going to move to the chairs and have a bit of a discussion about some of the things that have come up there and some of the other issues that have come by extension from the questions that you've provided already and then we'll see if we have some times for some more questions do we have some microphones to share thank you um maybe yeah maybe holger if we start with you there's a there's a question in there about what's driving what's driving the changes that we saw the big bushfire events of this season and and there's a lot of talk about climate change as a driver but there are people who don't believe that climate change was the driver or don't believe in climate change at all and what do we know about climate change is a driver of the recent fires thanks Patrick yeah that's on look we can't definitively say that the fires were caused by climate change but what we do know is that you know if you look at the historical data and not just the projections but we know that the physics of fires you know the temperature's becoming more extreme winds are becoming stronger we've get more heat wave so the relative humidity is lower and the ground is drier so on balance you know we know that we're going to get more extreme fires over time that doesn't mean fires of this magnitude haven't occurred in the past we in Australia we have extremely variable climate and so it's really hard for us to pick up any trends because we wait long enough you're going to get really extreme fires but the frequency of more extreme fires is going to get greater and so I think on balance you can say look this that we're definitely as part of the this trend and on top of that obviously the impact will be greater if you've got more exposure and vulnerability as well okay thanks Melissa what do we say to people who when we are having these conversations that that's they say that I don't think climate change is real or driving this the changes that we're seeing in these big events I think I think that one of the things we need to say is to get people to focus in on what is the actual issue and so most climate sceptics will still agree that there's droughts that there's flood that there's fire and so trying to talk about the ways to move forward addressing their particular issues rather than dancing on the pin of whether or not it's existing as a climate change issue I think helps a lot thank you I could comment on that as well I don't think it's acceptable anymore to have someone say I don't believe in climate change and you can have someone say I don't want to believe in climate change but for someone to say I don't believe it it means they've read hundreds of thousands of pages have worked by thousands of experts and have had the mental capacity to say that that work is incorrect and it's no longer reasonable to you were to take that from anyone and especially people in power thanks Bob [Applause] one of the one of the things that came up there particularly in your talk Holger there was discussion about the the risk and exposure and vulnerability and one of and that we focus on the fire and so immediately and through the fire there was already talk about are we burning off enough and there's word different words used for that burning off prescribed burning planned burning and now the more common term is hazard reduction which is a little twist on if we burn more we're going to reduce hazard one of the questions I guess maybe if I start with you Bob one of the questions is if we start burning more or if we want to burn more because we think that will reduce fuel loads I mean should we what's going to happen if we try to take that approach well I mean I guess in the past the quite reasonable assumption was that if you had a mosaic landscape of different ages since fire you were reducing the risk of a large conflagration really taking over everything the concern now though is that at least in extremely is and I hope what we've experienced has been an extremely year not a new normal that doesn't work so at Flinders chase half Flinders taste burnt in 2007 and burnt very badly this year at all bent so you know only a few years later certainly within the range that most people would have thought that was safe the entire place was reduced to nothing so it's a strategy that in the extreme years appears no longer to work and and burning off or prescribed burning is a is a big impact on systems so what we know about ecological effects of adding burning to adding burning or changing fire regimes yeah so I think what we do know is that there's no simple answer to it it's different in every situation so in the worst case I know they did some work I think in New South Wales where they did a control burn through a u-clip forest that had quite deep and compacted leaf litter burnt it out about six months later most of the lead fell off the u-clips and produced the nice fluffy litter underneath that was far more likely to burn than what they had before so there was a case where control burning simply made the problem worse and that won't always be the case and there's no doubt a place for control burning but it's not a simple fix I certainly understand how someone who's experienced one of these fires the gut feeling is if only the fuel wasn't there we wouldn't have had the problem so it's a really natural reaction to have but it's it's not necessarily backed by the evidence yeah Doug you've done some work and you started to talk about some of your work on how communities feel about fire how do they feel about burning off for prescribed burning and increasing the amount of burn which changes the aesthetic changes the way that if we can even live in that landscape you know there are risks associated with burning off including smoke inhalation and other things and what do we know about what communities want in that from our respondents we found that most people have a very sophisticated understanding of prescribed burning it isn't simply get rid of everything or don't do it any at all people are tolerant of appropriate burning rate regimes and that came through very strongly and that's a very good story for the departments and the other agencies that are involved with those controlled burning where there's a particular risk is this idea that you've got to protect assets and that's where you're going in burning burning burning so regularly to try and reduce the fuel loads rather than ecological burns which are what a lot of the ecological systems are requiring to as a regular stimulus for the type of species recognizing those trade-offs in the planning we don't do that conversation it's that we're we're in our society we're happy to have discussions about economics and social issues but really about the complexity of ecological issues when actually people are open to that discussion that would be my uncle so we might not be going straight into revenge burning but but we are but there are look there are other options so we don't learning isn't the only option but we but we feel the fire and we feel like if a fire had been through before under some control it wouldn't be so bad now that it's uncontrolled in in in the summer rather than in the autumn hoga you started to touch there on some other options for fuel reduction or modifying how Farmar behave in the landscape at times of extreme flammability it's not just extreme and I think you know the fuel load reduction you know you probably might and work under these extreme conditions but you know if you get a less extreme fire that could otherwise cause a lot of damage it might be effective and so it's really you know to me it's horses for courses it's looking at all these suite of options but other alternatives include mechanical fuel load reduction and so I know in Melbourne for example they use that in areas where there's I guess residential development closeby where it's just too risky or to do the burning or even that the smoke inhalation that Bob mentioned and there are a lot of other there's lots of trade-offs I mean the smoke effects not just doesn't doesn't just have health impacts it affects the wine industry potentially in the bee industry so there are lots of trade-offs to consider and so there is no simple simple answer I mean as Bob said the the gut reaction might be yes we need to get rid of the fuel load but that only works under certain situations under extreme fires it might and work and a lot of houses get burned down from ember attacks so it's not the you know the fuel right next to your house it's the embers coming from you know few kilometers away and and also it's the the fire start inside the house so it's basically embers penetrating you your house through the window or something and then you get the fire inside the house so there's a combination of having more fire resilient buildings with potentially some fuel load production but also ultimately the only way gonna stop the reduce the risk to zero is if nobody's there or nothing you care about is in the in harm's way and that's really the only way to reduce the risk to zero even if you do all these other things you know the risk is going to there's still a risk there and also we're moving into an environment where we don't understand the risks as well because of all these changes that we're experiencing Thanks the last 200 years of changes in our landscapes Bob maybe you can answer this but what about someone like kangaroo land so substantially the population their increased in the land was changed only really in the last 70 to 80 years for a lot of it were there when we was talking about past fire regimes what how might the last 200 years have changed what would have been previous fire regimes to now be changing the way fire behaves good question I I don't know that we really understand that so what we don't really understand about kangaroo island is what the past fire regimes were so there's the best way to do that is through coring sediments and you can reconstruct year by year what had happened in the past there's only one place that's been done on Kangaroo Island Lash Mars Lagoon and about 2700 years ago they had a massive fire on Kangaroo Island it's a really interesting question there were no Aborigines on Kangaroo Island when Europeans arrived it's still unclear when they left was it before that fire was it because of that fire there's a whole lot of questions we need to answer and one of the projects we're currently trying to put together is to find places where we can core longer cause get a longer fire history so that we do have some sense of it because Kangaroo Island is unique in Australia in being a large piece of land that wasn't inhabited when Europeans arrived and so it is quite a different environment and one that needs special attention so they're skirting around your question but I think the answer is we don't really know and that's right so no no aboriginal settlement at the time of european colonization on kangaroo island but what about in other parts of the country where we have had where we have now a really interest in cultural burning in resuming cultural burning and cultural practices for mosaic burning and management the landscape how confident are we that reintroducing those kinds of those kind of practices might help to manage fire regimes maybe Doug maybe Doug you can pick that up I think there's some parts of Australia where they've done a lot of work and they've really developed a really good knowledge based on what they understand of but modern burning practices in conjunction with traditional burning regimes and that's where there's a confidence to move forward and apply those burning regimes in a sophisticated way work we've done suggests that South Australia hasn't done that same type of work we really don't have at the basis of our decision-making about burning a strong integrated knowledge system that we can draw from that doesn't mean that traditional indigenous burning practices wouldn't be useful in particular places in particular contexts but the landscapes changed enormously we've carved it up with our settlement patterns our transport our other industrial activities we've concentrated conservation in certain parts of the landscape in other parts we don't have it at all so it would need to be an integration of that traditional burning practices within to within a landscape that has differed substantially from from that where those systems were applied unless we do when I add anything about cultural burning practice and its relevance in the future of how we manage these landscapes well I agree with Doug I think that the knowledge that he's available now is very differentiated and it's and it is patchy and that's partly as a result of you know clonal invasion and then the changes dispossession of Aboriginal people so that their knowledge has become fractured over the nation and I think then asking them to produce that knowledge into this situation is additionally complicated because of the new regimes and the new challenges that we face but as I said before I think there's as we've dug there's lots of places in Australia where that knowledge is extant its surviving and in northern Australia particularly there's a very strong fire burning and successful fire burning program that's contributing to the carbon sort of management of Australia with the indigenous Rangers there so I think there's opportunities but I think it's really important to not to me naive about them or to fall into romanticized versions of what what that all means that we work together equitably and fairly in part genuine partnership with indigenous peoples where where that can happen and and use that for the wider benefit thanks Holger you talked a bit about planting codes and building building planning and building codes can we can we build our way out of fire risk no I mean it's it's it's helped it's helpful you can reduce the risk you know that's the thing with all these natural events you can you know you can reduce the risk of zero I really and one of my pet haters people talking about fire proofing or flood proofing anything because it's now we're dealing with natural systems that are changing into the future and we're really moving into territory we have no experience with and as I said we've got a highly variable regime in Australia so if you wait long enough you're going to get more extreme events so I think it's got to be a combination of these things certainly as I said you can change two building codes and we increase the fire resilience off buildings to stop ember embers getting into your house for example you know there's there's building materials you can use there's lots of things you can use to protect your house but in those extreme events as absurd like with you know with them in the same way as with planned burning you know you really can't reduce it to zero so I think we need to look at the trade-offs it's all about trade offices but it's about risk and cost the more you reduce the risk the more it's going to cost how do you best target that spending you know where do you get the best bang bang for buck and what what are the things you care about is it you know purely assets is that people is it the environment you know all these things are on the table and we you know rather than just throwing solutions that you know and saying this is the best there is no silver bullet otherwise we would have done it by now it's it's a complex space it's getting increasingly complex and we really need to explore all the different options and look at the best mix in a different in a particular situation so we just have to be smarter more coordinated plan better yeah all those things and and the problem is our resources always we've got a lot of residual risk you know we've got we've made decisions in the past as I said that you know we we have to bear the risk and that that's the most difficult part you've got communities who are living in bushfire prone areas and they've been there for a long time you said you can't just tear the social fabric apart and tell people are sorry you know you or you can't also say you you you're on your own you have to bear the risk yourself it's you know and I guess insurance will have a big big say in that because they you know they're increasing premiums in California now they're just all of a sudden you get your annual notice and it says sorry we're not insuring you anymore so ultimately the the the government and we have to bear that risk for people because we've thankfully we're living living in a society where we we care about people and so we all have to collectively you know bear that risk and respond to it but it's a difficult conversation and to have but we need to have it because if we just keep sleepwalking into the future as we are now we're just going to be hit with more and more events like this and the impacts are going to get larger and larger and we just won't know what to do with it none of this mitigate none of this stuff is in any budget all these responses to fires it's just all coming on top of things and then you yeah Thank You Melissa there was a lot of trauma a lot of people personally affected and I'm sure there's a lot of young people looking at issues like the recent bush fires and connecting it up to drivers that will be will be important in their lifetimes how do we better prepare for the kinds of trauma that come out of these events I think that's another complicated question I think there's there's quite a lot of work done at the moment around you know helping people with immediate trauma so setting up counseling services and encouraging people to do all the kinds of things that you do when you are grief stricken which is you know be with family talk about it there have been suggestions of doing exercise and walking and all sorts of things that the kind of psychology of dealing with and grief and I think that's one thing to think about but the point that you pick up on which I he's a wider question is it's not just the people that have lost their houses are the people living in those communities that are experiencing forms of trauma or grief it's and it might be people in this room it's the people that have observed it that are reading the news the school kids are getting bombarded by this anxiety and I think it's a really evolving area on how you cope with that but again at the moment what seems to be is putting in for example educating people about what's actually happening rather than and helping people to differentiate between fake news and real news and the you know what what is the scale of problem and giving people bite-size sort of things that they can focus on because I mean I wouldn't want to be naive and say you know communities can just adapt it's like what you're saying hunger it's it's just not that easy anymore there's no win-win in going forward but there are winds that you can have in there are ways that we can address that trauma and I think good communications lessening the fear and putting in place the the kind of things that psychologists and doctors and counselors use those proper mental health services being funded is really really important particularly in rural communities where it might not just be far it might be drought and a whole lot of other issues that compound that mental health and depression yeah way out of my comfort zone but I've been to lots of conferences on this in the last few years and I think the big point here is that these impacts last for years you know it's it's you know there's this big push at the beginning to help people and even might be even weeks or months but these impacts are felt for years and so it's really you know we need to support communities for the long term and I think that's the thing where you know it tends to fade out of people's memories pretty quickly so I think that's that's a big cost that we need to think about and really keep supporting communities just wanted to add to that is that one of the things about it's like when I when someone at work or your friend or their relative dies and you're really immediately sympathetic then it moves on but they're still really miserable and upset and I think a lot of this stuff is like that it's like paying attention to beyond that period of time to how you build up wider systems that are going to help people when we're all going about our business as usual but they're still in pain and suffering and grieving for what they've lost so some of these things you know building codes and building and and how we how we deal with things individually they're very important we also have the ability to act in a in the face of changing risks now what kinds of things can we do as citizens to act in the in the face of these changing changing risks and you know especially when we stimulated by things like the recent fires I think we've got a question now and it comes back to the theory that I was presenting today about reconceptualizing risk within our society and starting to talk about it with people in a different way I think that's a that would be part of the healing process and also the preparatory process for young people we're heading into a world where the type of environmental drivers of risk are going to change we know that all of our evidence is suggesting that and so that's starting to have new conversations looking at our curriculum and our education systems and how we can develop those significantly I think more specifically this raises really interesting questions about how we organize our settlements it's not much we can do about the past but we can start thinking differently about things like our transport routes and how transport access we saw in this over the summer even though we had very substantial fires of light across large areas the actual fatalities was less than Ash Wednesday for example so even probably improved the way we communicate risk we've probably improved individual and collective responses but still people were stuck in transport situations which were horrendous and in some cases were very lucky in relation to those so transport is one area that I would want to see starts to take into account least fire risk in a much more fundamental way other places around the world that have significant hazard risks like avalanches or floods don't just design their roads hazard lis in relation to those risks they take them into account we have to take into account which try risk it to the same extent Thanks I might we might be able to ask a couple of questions do we have microphones to go around this one here and one back one back here so maybe start back there and then we'll come down the front back in 1983 the Ash Wednesday fire then that was there was a scary story I heard where they said that if the wind had changed the people in charge were going to try and stop the fire at Fullerton Road has anybody ever heard of is it an urban myth has anybody ever heard of that and maybe the second second question maybe you need a loiter for you to actually answered this one if I bought a house on the eastern side of Adelaide where would it be safe to to get it does anyone heard the myth I don't know that specific myth but I've had heard several presentations in the last few years by the Bureau of Meteorology about the potential for fire to go downhill in what in particular situations and so those eastern suburbs we always talk about fire rushing uphill and following the heat up etc but in the same way they're modeling and their experience is that fires can rush downhill in the same way so those first 'add eastern suburbs of Adelaide arguably could be vulnerable to that type of situation where to go in that situation I don't want a people oh how good do you have something to add fire modeling fire behavior is really complicated and when we look at floods it's it's reasonably straightforward if water flows downhill you know where it goes and you know which areas you're going to be flooded and you know if the flood gets worse you know which bits are in the inundated next fire you know obviously you need fuel but you know wherever there's fuel you don't really know where the fires going to go it's it's a complex interaction of different factors and so it's definitely conceivable you know that these areas are under threat and it's also if by the same token you can't really say where the safe line is because that that will definitely change in the future and it depends on an individual individual circumstances so it's it's a very fire is really complicated thanks Olga sure question for Bob when the fire actually can more or less sterilize the landscape this seed collecting become a lot more important now endemic species yes it does there's a there's quite a good seed bank of rare and endangered plant species in Australia the challenge that we have now is that those seed banks were never designed for really mass seeding so one of the plans that's at least in the embryonic stage is to turn some farmland over to effectively monocultures of individual species so that we can build up the seed bank and be able to put seed back into those environments the trouble is most of the species you're talking about will take at least 10 to 15 years to get to flowering so this is a long-term project and goes against most of what we've talked about here that you need to stay the distance to make that work but certainly the plan is there and people are thinking about it one more what place does traditional burning have a modern methods of predicting way you should burn and how much and for how long and should traditional burning have a more of a share of modern prediction methods but considering that they take in more data points but also taking in their traditional so this is about this is a question about what kind of evidence do we what kind of evidence we want to use to determine what the right fire regimes are and how to bring national knowledge so I know that their systems used to predict the model way or like five will burn and then you can counter burn to them and then how much weight should we put on traditional methods and should they have more weight than other modern methods of collecting data and utilizing it I'd be Bob and Melissa what it's worth you have to keep in mind that indigenous people didn't burn the landscape because they were trying to reduce the fire risk I mean they burned it for a particular purpose and they burnt it when it wasn't covered in farmland and being used for other purposes as well so we live in an entirely different world - what that was and it's not necessarily appropriate to bring in something which was designed for one purpose and presume that it's going to work beautifully to solve the problem that we have right now it doesn't mean that it wouldn't work but I it takes a lot of thinking through and on top of that at least in southern Australia we've mostly lost the knowledge anyway so you know I understand where the push is coming from and I have sympathy for it but it's a lot more complicated than it first sounds yeah I decide to add that the thing about traditional fire burning is that it's extremely place-based so it's not the kind of knowledge system where you'd say there are some broad principles here and you can transport those principles to any piece of land in Australia that knowledge is very much based in the indigenous country it's you know based on millennia of accumulated knowledge about that particular ecological region and how it operates over time and so fire burning knowledge is fantastic when it's in that country and it's still surviving and it's applied but you can't just uproot it and say ok I'm going to have a look at what it's going to be like in New South Wales now if it's from the territory so I think that's one dimension there the other dimension which I think we've all picked up on is that we have new challenges now in the environment which have affected how and different land management techniques to what indigenous peoples used and so that is compounded and created a situation which is beyond traditional knowledge because it's you know new knowledge new a new situation and then I actually think it's important to say that we're entering a new situation again where all of us are confounded by what's happening in the landscape and I think you know it's really good to think about what Doug was suggesting is that partnerships you know with indigenous peoples and place-based partnerships on their country could be really useful but that we all together work out what the hell we're going to do in terms of future and that might include fire burning but it might has to be a composite of the different knowledge is not not just hope that one or the other is going to work out I think thanks Melissa I'd like to thank our panel now for the a very well rounded conversation thank you to Professor Hagemeyer associate professor Melissa merci Bray professor Bobby Hill and an associate professor Doug Bosley thank you all also for coming and sharing insights through the website before you came so that we could construct a conversation and for the and for the questions that came late there as well the research Tuesday's continues and the websites available for you to look at what's coming up and booking if you're interested in that and share with others I hope that it's been useful tonight and thanks very much for coming 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