I note the reference to eucalyptus trees in the report. The oil from these, contained in glands in the leaves, is a factor in bushfire spread as it acts as an accelerant.  I also note the reference to ignition prevention. Both in the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires and in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires possible ignition due to electricity power lines featured in the investigation. Power lines appropriately feature in the report from the angle of their protection during a bushfire so that interruption of electricity supply is prevented,  and placing them underground is recommended. 

Possible redevelopment of a fire thought to have been extinguished is mentioned in section 8.20 of the report and ‘spot fires’ feature. A similar phenomenon is the ejection of a hot particle from a burning bed of forest litter and its entry into previously unaffected forest litter causing it to ignite. I was particularly interested to read in section 12.50 of the effects of radiant heat. This became a matter for debate in the scientific literature when bushfires in New South Wales in circa 2003 were being investigated.

The several references in the report to ambient temperatures are helpful. That high ambient temperatures will exacerbate hazards is common sense. The surrounding temperature will influence whether, once a bed of forest material has ignited, propagation will be by smouldering or by much more vigorous flaming. The latter is, of course, more difficult to bring under control.  

The Royal Commission into Australia's 2019/20 Black Summer has concluded with 80 recommendations across 70,000 pages, 14 for federal and 41 shared across states, relating to national emergency response, warning apps and communications, the use of the Australian defence forces and aerial firefighting, a more nuanced approach to wildlife and land management (thankfully), plus disaster recovery and funding, especially for the growing issue of mental health championed by the Fundraising Institute of Australia and others.  Building codes and insurance was also covered, although usually these costs hit communities already devastated by the fires themselves. The Red Cross points out that local communities, industries and governments all have shared but not equal responsibilities for national disasters. Note also that the Commission moves away from the term 'natural disaster', as if it's an unavoidable 'act of God' towards the more sensible term 'national disaster', leaving it open for arguments around culpability.  This might feed into the Australia Institute's call for the coal industry to pay a 'disaster levy', for example.

All this goes far beyond the original letters patent in February 2020, when the Governor-General called the Royal Commission to focus on establishing federal powers to declare a national emergency - this was eminently sensible as we've been asking all levels of government, and even agencies within state government, to share data and resources since Black Saturday, 2009.  If whole countries can do it for bushfires in Europe, then why can't we do it between our own fire-fighting agencies, police and health departments?  Until now only Western Australia, and some agencies in Gippsland, are doing a good job of this. One of the major recommendations of the Royal Commission is to establish national information centres and emergency powers alongside a resilience and recovery agency - fantastic!  We've been asking ministers to support this in preparation for megafires for 10 years.  

Black Summer began as early as August 2019; Queensland was hit by a series of local arson attacks but the subsequent fires stretching the length of the east coast created its own weather, pyrocumulus clouds that seeded more fires through dry lightning.  Both arson and land management issues were touted as the causal agents of these fires when in fact arson would have required an impossible 60-fold increase in active fire-lighting.  My own comments on earlier cases of arson in Queensland were taken out of context by right-wing commentators, 'fake news' bots and even the Trump administration to suggest climate change was not responsible. This started with an editorial by Alan Jones and others who claimed the fires were not unprecedented - they were, both in terms of volumetric (if not area) size and seasonality.    

Later, what really worried me in the original letter to establish the Royal Commission was the use of one term relating to climate change, 'adaptation', and not another of equal importance, 'mitigation'.  The letter focused on 'adaptation' to climate change, which is where we rebuild our societies and economies to adapt to an inevitably hotter planet, but never once did it include the word 'mitigation', where we actively seek to reduce the causes of climate change, such as emissions from dirty fuels, coal and gas, dirty transport, unhealthy food production systems, and growing socioeconomic inequalities that also fuel inefficient consumption, production, imports and exports.  This was to be expected, perhaps, from a federal government that has actively resisted recognition that Australia's economy is built on old and unsustainable technologies, energies and resources.  A few things have restored my faith in the system, however.  Closing counsel Dominique Hogan-Doran accepts that "further warming is inevitable" and argues for 'mitigation' as well as 'adaptation'.  

This has implications for the costs of Black Summer, which lasted until a full 17 million hectares (including the Northern Territory fires) had burned across Australia - 33 dead, 429 smoke-related premature deaths, 3,230 hospital admissions for heart and breathing disorders, and 1,523 emergency department visits for asthma.  The size of the fires was at least 25 times Black Saturday which, when multipliers were counted, cost Australia about $7.6 billion in today's dollars.  There were far fewer deaths in Black Summer, suggesting better preparedness in Black Summer versus Black Saturday, and the other major cost was the 2009 bushfire commission itself. Subtract the costs apportioned to human lives and the cost of the Royal Commision itself and the multiple of 25 still puts the cost of Black Summer in the vicinity of $100 billion.  Even these costs ignore the loss of species and mental health impacts, which typically come about three years post-disaster in the form of suicide and domestic violence. 

So it seems the costs for Black Summer are being seriously underestimated at a time when the Australia Institute is calling for the coal industry to pay a disaster levy for contributing to these fires via climate change dynamics.  At the time of the fires, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that blame cannot be apportioned.  Yet the World Attribution Study shows that 30% of these fires were directly attributable to climate change.  So I think this area needs some scrutiny.  If it can be costed and apportioned, then some industries could be answerable and culpable with enough accuracy to impose a levy, or even a class action. We seriously needed this Royal Commission - a lot was achieved after Black Saturday and I think a lot more will come over the next 10 years as we strive to adapt to a very new ecological reality.

I think there is a sad irony in the recommendation (4.5) that 'Australian, state and territory governments should produce downscaled climate projections' when our track record as a nation of heeding such warnings, and addressing the root causes of climate change, has been so weak. For example, in 2008 the Garnaut Report forecast severe fire impacts in 2020, did we really take any notice?

Hopefully, in the future, we will take the science more seriously and commit to act to address the root causes of climate change, while also preparing for the more frequent natural disasters our past inaction is now visiting upon us. We have an overflowing bathtub of troubles where, sure, we can focus on monitoring the levels in the bath, mopping up when it spills over, but we could also look at turning off the taps! Given the catastrophic impact of last summers’ fires on our wildlife and their habitats, I am very disappointed there appears to be just one recommendation relating to the threats posed to our unique wildlife (Rec 16.1).

I would really liked to have seen some additional recommendations related to the recovery and protection of our wildlife, not just the documenting of its demise. I don’t think international observers would think this issue has been given the serious consideration it needs, given we are custodians of such extraordinary and unique plants and animals.

We need to prioritise preventing future fires by learning from Indigenous science and traditional knowledge. 

Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 65,000 years. There is no archaeological evidence of massive bushfires. This is because they managed their landscapes through regular, low-intensity burning that occurs in a mosaic pattern, like a chessboard. This gave even small animals a chance to move to safety.

We need to rethink our love of a green landscape. We need to embrace a landscape that is blackened by regular burning, for each of us to check when the landscapes around us were last burnt off.

The Royal Commission’s Recommendation 10.1 is that 'Disaster education for individuals and communities: State and territory governments should continue to deliver, evaluate and improve education and engagement programs aimed at promoting disaster resilience for individuals and communities'. This could be taken to mean ‘keep doing more of the same’. Starting with the Victorian 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, successive post-bushfire research studies have found that the benefits of community bushfire education programs have been, at best, modest. Traditionally, response agencies have taken the lead role in community bushfire safety and engagement programs. There have been reports that agencies spend rather small proportions of their budgets on community bushfire education programs. Perhaps it is time to consider moving this responsibility away from response agencies to local governments and boosting the resources of local governments accordingly.

Our national survey research showed that 37 per cent of participants (n=3,145) had a hazard response plan. The potential for a natural hazard emergency is often the trigger to start thinking about how a community member may be affected by bushfires or floods. In this time, the way we communicate risk and guide community response is critical.  

My team’s research has identified a set of words and phrases that signal threat or risk at low, moderate, and high levels, to support the development of warnings like emergency alerts for natural hazard emergencies. Risk communication researchers long advocate for the value of consistent but meaningful words that avoid an educative burden. In practice, we translate that to the actions that we want community members to take (e.g., prepare now, evacuate now).

This same survey found that the strongest motivator for evacuation was a desire to keep family members safe and the strongest barrier to evacuation were pets. The majority of participants (79 per cent) considered they were completely or primarily responsible for the safety of their household, with only 2.1 per cent perceiving that government was primarily or completely responsible for the safety of the household.

The Commission's report clearly reflects the scientific consensus that natural disasters are changing and will continue to change as our planet's climate warms. Such circumstances mean that more must be done urgently to manage the threat of natural disasters. The call for a whole-of-nation effort is critical, reflecting that every part of society has a role to play in reducing the threats posed by natural disasters. Without attention to the recommendations made by the Commission we risk significantly increasing the risk of future disasters, some of which may overwhelm Australia's capacity to deal with them. Further investment in disaster risk reduction and a nationwide approach are critical. We must be ambitious in our goals to have a safe and resilient Australia.

While it is always important to try and learn from major bushfire events, there is little in terms of new learning in the current recommendations of the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements. Many of the recommendations repeat what we already know from previous inquiries dating back many years: Australia is the most prone area in the world; there is a need for greater coordination between agencies during times of heightened bushfire threat; emergency management arrangements should be changed to allow for key decisions to be made as bushfire threat escalates; warning and information should be integrated and make use of best available technologies. The Black Summer Bushfires remind us to must remember that each bushfire is unique, and we run the risk of becoming complacent if we think public inquiries deliver us to a position of safety. The biggest lesson from looking at 76 years of learning is that the complexities that surround modern-day bushfires are often difficult to explain and so we need to reinterpret accountability and reflect on bushfire risk as everyone’s responsibility in our community.

The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements (RCNDA) report has missed a golden opportunity to insert Indigenous 'cultural burning' into the mix of approaches for mitigating against an ever-increasing risk of climate-driven catastrophic bushfire. In doing so, it has failed in its mission to pave a sustainable and effective way forward for landscape managers. Indigenous people presided over a healthy Australian landscape for millennia and the wave of catastrophic bushfires and species extinctions following the British Invasion is directly attributable to the removal of cultural burning and other Indigenous management practices. The soft language used in the 2 recommendations pertaining to Indigenous land management state that Australian, state, territory and local governments merely should “explore” and “engage” with Indigenous communities. These recommendations provide no clear directive and allows these agencies too much wiggle room to maintain the status quo, which locks Aboriginal people out of Country and continues to prioritise failed approaches based on the myth that we can “fight” and even “win” a battle against fire. It is beyond time for Australia to wake up and look to the knowledge of its First Peoples on how to live and operate appropriately in this country.

We have been asking South Australians about what they think about forests in relation to the bushfire risk. If people perceive that climate change is increasing bushfire risk, the pressure to the forest estate could increase, as it is in the USA. While some individuals are proactively managing bushfire risk, it is uncertain whether our communities are preparing adequately. There are important questions about whether we are planning our suburbs and transport systems so that they fully account for the risk. There are opportunities for new approaches and people are open to a more complex discussion about how we should respond, but it will require a broader conversation about how our society can engage with new climate change-driven risks and how we organise our settlements, insurance systems and response systems. It is hard to tell if these findings would support such a longer-term shift in Australia’s understanding and responses to environmental risk.

It’s been an interesting year here when it comes to emergency powers; gaining public attention across Australia during the 2019–20 bushfire season, when a 'State of Disaster' was declared in Victoria for the first time under the state's Emergency Management Acts. At that time, Prime Minister Scott Morrison also called for Commonwealth capacity to declare a generalised national State of Emergency.

The exercise of special powers under the states' Public Health Acts and the federal Biosecurity Act during COVID-19 has now further tested tensions that legal experts have long identified as inherent to emergency law, and its impacts on the distribution of power across the Australian federation. Once these special powers are triggered, the executive government is typically authorised to make regulations with respect to anything deemed necessary to respond to that emergency, often free from normal processes of parliamentary scrutiny.

These powers are provided for by emergency legislation, or clauses within legislation, that are activated by the declaration of a State of Emergency. We have certainly seen concerns regarding these powers - often confusing them with the actual public health restrictions we have been living under. These concerns are likely to grow if new national state of emergency powers are passed. They would, however, provide some much needed consistency across the country.

The newly released bushfire royal commission report highlights that Australia will continue to experience bushfires and other natural disasters. It is paramount that their impact on structures is adequately considered in both design and the selection of materials. One of the key research areas for the Fire Safety Engineering research group at The University of Queensland is the fire performance of wood products. We are collaborating with the National Centre for Timber Durability and Design Life on the assessment of treatment methods and the selection of wood species with heightened bushfire resilience, to illuminate the future for local timber resources in a changing world. We are also conducting multi-scale experiments to investigate the role of moisture content on the flammability of vegetation fuel, and wind tunnel research to better understand physical processes that drive the propagation of bushfires and to quantify bushfire intensities.

We need a national rule to be implemented by all the states for issues such as 'Watch and Act' and for definitions of fire, cyclone and flood-prone land. Australia has over 40 definitions embedded in several laws of these key issues. States also need to standardise their training of emergency response personnel and their equipment, and use existing research from the Bushfire CRC to provide appropriate warnings.

The National Cabinet Approach is good but we must ensure we have accountability and adequate consultation. Engaging defence personnel in operations is vital.”

The Royal Commission calls for a prioritised national research agenda that targets critical gaps in our knowledge. 

In areas such as critical decision making, climate change impacts, extreme weather and fire prediction, shared responsibility, resource coordination, understanding risk, mitigation, and community warnings and education, we can now build on the findings and recommendations from the Royal Commission to help guide Australia’s future research direction. These insights will help Australia meet the challenges we are bound to continue to face in coming years. As the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC transitions to a new national research centre for natural hazards resilience and disaster risk reduction, the Royal Commission provides support for research that draws in the best science and the best practical knowledge from around the country.

This report shows that we have learnt much through science but there is still more to do. We must continue to ask the difficult questions and be prepared for complex answers. We must continue to identify what we do not know. That is the role of research.

Beyond Communication and Education: Preparing the community for disaster recovery action

The Royal Commission highlights Australian disaster preparedness is divided by an uncommon language – around warnings, around sheltering and instructions, there is a need for uniformity of message. The inquiry notes across a range of sections that challenges arise as terminology changes in the hundreds of meters across state and territory lines. Bringing a consistent message, tested for accuracy in recipients, will be key to disaster preparation for the foreseeable fire seasons. Critically, government agencies need to ask the people they’re targeting with information to explain it back - as marketers we know the difference between someone saying they understand, and then finding out ‘fire prepared” means a hose and pair of buckets.

Social marketing, the marketing of behavioural change, is needed in implementing the fire-readiness. Our community handles behaviour change – from drink driving reduction, to road safety, to sun awareness. For fire safety, we need to move behind the faith in an education leaflet and a poster, and into supporting changes in behaviour, including helping people self-assess their capacity to prepare, stay and defend, and evacuate in the times of crisis. The report presents a strong commitment to enabling the local knowledge of people on the ground, and it can go further with changing attitudes, behaviours as well as knowledge in readiness for the future disaster seasons.

The final report of the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements is a huge body of work reviewing our national approach to disasters, and it has recognised the enormous complexity of managing bushfire risk. Importantly, it acknowledged the role of climate change in natural disasters now and in the future. The 80 recommendations present a major challenge for all levels of government, industry and society as a whole. 

Many of the recommendations point to serious gaps in our understanding of bushfire occurrence, impact and the effectiveness of our responses to it. For example, the recommendations include improving national systems of gathering, storing and sharing of bushfire related information (including on climate change forecasting, fuels and impacts on life, property, air-quality and wildlife), and research and evaluation of aerial firefighting and prescribed burning. These matters require a concerted scientific effort and luckily, there is a great capacity for bushfire research in Australia.

The NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub (a collaboration between NSW Government and four universities) was established to conduct research on many of these issues with an express focus on how public land can be managed to reduce bushfire risk. For example, the Hub provided vital scientific analysis for the NSW Bushfire Inquiry to understand the impact and causes of the 2019/20 bushfires in that state.

It is good to see that the commission has acknowledged the significance of data, especially earth observation data, for the decision-making process to mitigate natural disasters. A huge amount of high-resolution spatial data exists that can estimate fuel distribution in the Australian ecosystem. Such information needs to be used at the start of fire season for relatively static factors, such as fuel distribution, and has to be updated at a shorter interval for dynamic variables, such as weather and soil/fuel moisture.

One such effort has been made by Geoscience Australia together with Australian National University to provide the Australian Flammability Monitoring System. This system provides flammability information for the whole of Australia at 4-day intervals. Such information is consistent at national scale but there will be limitations to managing fire disasters at a local scale, mainly because of coarser map-scale (500 metres resolution or roughly 1: 1 million map-scale).

There are earth observation data product providers capable of providing vital information at much finer resolution such as fuel distribution, fuel moisture content, and weather conditions that can be used for predicting flammability at finer resolution. Such products can significantly enhance decision-making processes at a local scale in case of extreme and catastrophic fire danger levels. While the commission highlights the importance of having nationally consistent data, it is also important to make use of whatever high-resolution data we have at local-scale for the decision-making process.