Indigenous burning practices once reduced the shrub cover that now fuels megafires in Australia, say researchers

Blue Mountains bushfire [credit: Meganesia @ Wikipedia]

” data-image-caption=”" data-medium-file=”https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/mountain_fire.jpg?w=300″ data-large-file=”https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/mountain_fire.jpg?w=614″ src=”https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/mountain_fire.jpg?w=614″ alt=”Australian bushfire” width=”614″ height=”410″ class=”aligncenter size-large wp-image-70221″ />
In this case the supposed human causation problem is not the one alarmists like to put forward. Since colonisation ‘shrub cover has surged to an unprecedented 35%’. Many generations of indigenous experience in managing known wildfire risks by targeted precautionary burning were ignored by settlers, even up to the present day, sometimes with disastrous results – which are now used to promote claims of human-caused climate change.
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Indigenous burning practices in Australia once halved shrub cover, reducing available fuels and limiting wildfire intensity for thousands of years, but the removal of these practices following European colonization has led to an increase in the tinder that has fueled today’s catastrophic megafires, researchers report.

The findings suggest that reintroducing cultural burning practices could provide a strategy to curb future fires, says the AAAS (via EurekAlert).

“Through detailed histories of Indigenous burning regimes across the world and Indigenous-led collaborations in contemporary wildfire management projects, we can inform sustainable and healthy solutions that ‘tame the flames’ threatening global socioenvironmental systems,” write the authors.

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires in many regions, particularly the forests of western North America and southeastern Australia.

In addition to anthropogenic climate change [Talkshop comment – the usual assertion], human forest management and fire suppression have led to a build-up of shrubby vegetation that fuels more intense fires. This dense shrub layer allows ground fires to spread to the forest canopy above, resulting in destructive and difficult-to-control crown fires.

For millennia, humans have used fire as a tool, with Indigenous groups worldwide practicing ‘cultural burning’ to promote biodiversity, improve hunting, and reduce fuel loads through frequent, low-intensity burns. This approach creates spatial diversity in vegetation and helps to prevent severe wildfires.

In fire-prone regions like southeastern Australia, colonial suppression of Indigenous burning practices has caused fuel loads to increase, resulting in more frequent high-intensity fires.
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Mariani et al. found that Indigenous population expansion and cultural burning practices during the mid-late Holocene (6,000 to 1,000 years ago) coincided with a roughly 50% reduction in shrub cover (from ~30% from the early to mid-Holocene to 15% during the late to mid-Holocene).

However, since British colonization in the 18th century, shrub cover has surged to an unprecedented 35% – surpassing levels seen even before human presence on the continent – contributing to modern megafires.

Full article here.
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Image: Blue Mountains bushfire [credit: Meganesia @ Wikipedia]