Environment
Facing the flames of complacency
A ‘do nothing’ approach won’t help Australia deal with bushfires as the climate gets hotter
With extreme fire seasons on the rise, combining science, strategic planning and proactive management can help us face these mounting challenges
Published 14 January 2025
Research funding
Globally, wildfire seasons are getting worse with climate change, resulting in more frequent, more severe and larger wildfires.
The recent LA fires are emblematic of fire behaviour changing in unexpected ways. These fires, occurring during winter and outside the traditional fire season also follow an extremely hot summer and prolonged drought in California.
While the winds driving the LA fires are not uncommon, the lack of precipitation preceding them was extreme and similar drought events are likely to become more frequent as climate change intensifies. As these conditions become more frequent, we can expect that wildfire regimes are going to change.
Wildfire regimes – the patterns of fire activity over time – are now shaped by two major forces: climate change and human actions (both through intentional fire management programs and through continued habitat destruction or alterations to the landscape).
Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts and unpredictable weather patterns are fuelling more intense and frequent destructive fires.
Similarly, human interventions, like prescribed burning and firefighting, play a critical role in shaping fire behaviour and mitigating its impacts.
All this can end up causing an increased risk to people, property, and the environment.
Protecting people and the environment is not as simple as fighting fires when they happen. It requires strategic planning, proactive and innovative management, and critically, understanding the trade-offs between values.
More than just fighting flames
Fire management is extremely diverse, but the two main approaches are fuel management and suppression (also known as firefighting)
Fuel management involves altering the amount and structure of flammable material in a landscape, often through prescribed burns or mechanical treatments. These strategies aim to lower fire intensity and rate of spread by simplifying fuels
Suppression focuses on controlling and containing fires once they start, as well as protecting assets like buildings, roads and powerlines by deploying people, fire trucks and aircraft to slow or stop the fires and in turn reduce damage.
But neither approach alone is a silver bullet.
Fuel management requires careful planning and is often constrained by weather conditions, public perception and considerations of key trade-offs to environmental and human assets.
Suppression, while critical, can become very dangerous and expensive during extreme fire seasons.
The solution lies in finding the right balance between these approaches and tailoring this to a region’s climate conditions and distribution of important assets.
With limited resources and an uncertain future that is changing with climate, how do we make the smartest choices?
Decision support tools, like fire behaviour simulators or the Australian fire danger rating system, play a critical role in quantifying fire risk across landscapes, and provide information that supports managers to make necessary trade-offs.
However, they do not replace the decision-making process, and the responsibility remains on managers to balance priorities, risks and costs in fire management planning.
Evaluating the trade-offs of fire management
Our research explored this problem for regions in Victoria by combining climate data, fire simulations and cost data to develop a framework for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of various fire management strategies now and into the future.
We developed a model designed to capture uncertainty and evaluate the outcomes of hypothetical fire management strategies under varying climate scenarios.
This approach enabled us to analyse data from over 1,200 fire regime simulations, covering 16 modelled management strategies across six regions and six climate models.
This meant we could characterise a range of potential future outcomes and evaluate them against one another for current and future conditions.
The model evaluates how management strategies affected risk to key assets, including people and property, infrastructure, agricultural production and environmental services.
From this data, we determined the cost-effectiveness of each strategy by weighing the expense of implementing fire management programs against the reduction in economic impacts of wildfires.
Targeted fuel management and suppression can significantly reduce wildfire impacts and costs.
However, as the climate continues to warm, even the best strategies face mounting challenges.
Action beats inaction
Not all management strategies were considered equally effective.
The most cost-effective approaches generally combined prescribed burning and suppression. These strategies varied significantly between regions, but generally reduced wildfire impacts more efficiently than doing nothing or the most intensive interventions (i.e. throwing everything we have at it).
Doing nothing is not a cost-effective option.
Under current and worsening climate conditions, the cost of inaction was consistently higher than any management strategy.
These costs are all impacts on societal values and the environment. Wildfires which are left unmanaged under changing climate led to severe damage and skyrocketing costs, resulting in losses to communities and ecosystems.
This was considerably worse under future climate projections.
Conversely, strategies that involve high levels of burning or excessive fuel management do not deliver a cost-effective program either. This is because of the elevated costs to environmental values and human health, primarily through the negative impacts of smoke.
Targeted, strategic management interventions could have fewer adverse impacts while delivering similar risk reduction benefits.
While the exact effectiveness varied by region, the overarching trend was consistent: proactive fire management pays off.
The rising costs of climate change
Despite the benefits of proactive management, our study also revealed a sobering reality: costs are rising.
While these are only modelled results (and should not be considered guaranteed in the future), they paint an important picture of the impacts of changing climate on fire regimes.
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Costs of managing wildfires under future climate scenarios increased across almost all regions and strategies.
This reflects the escalating difficulty of controlling fires in hotter, drier and more volatile conditions. Even the best strategies will face limits as climate change continues to amplify fire risks.
No single strategy can eliminate risk
For policymakers, fire managers and communities, our research offers a framework for evaluating management programs at a time of high uncertainty.
It highlights the importance of investing in proven strategies like prescribed burning and suppression while recognising the need to adapt as conditions change and become harder to predict.
It also serves as a stark reminder that failing to act will lead to greater costs – financial, social and environmental.
We need to rethink how we manage fire in a changing climate.
No single strategy can eliminate wildfire risks, but combining science, strategic planning and adaptive management offers the best path forward.
By prioritising cost-effective actions now, that have longevity under future conditions, we can reduce impacts, protect vital assets and ensure a safer future for communities on the frontlines of fire and climate change.