Solving the bushfire crisis inside and outside the lab

Primary Researcher: Professor David Bowman

Institution: University of Tasmania

Led by ARC Laureate Fellow and Director of the Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania, Professor David Bowman, the project Practical and sustainable pathways to community coexistence with bushfires comes after the Bushfire Royal Commission into the Black Summer Bushfires of 2019-20 which revealed a series of complex social, administrative, and environmental factors contributing to their impact. 

Professor Bowman’s research project aims to develop pathways for Australian communities to coexist with fire-prone landscapes in a safe and sustainable manner. It will address the immediate national and international challenges to policy and practice represented by the escalating risk of bushfire disasters.  

Professor Bowman said that approaching this challenge holistically and collaboratively is the key to achieving sustainable, practical solutions for the benefit of Australian households.  

“Pyrogeography and fire science provides a way of thinking about this problem in a holistic and complete way. I’m just as comfortable thinking about mathematical modelling to understand fire behaviour as I am working with a legal researcher to think through ways to make interventions such as bushfire bunkers and private fire shelters accessible,” Professor Bowman said.  

“You need research and development which is something that the Australian Research Council strongly supports. And then you have industry partners who are fundamental to educating the community, which leads to motivating people out of self-interest to do practical things at scale where we can really create fire safe communities.” 

“This must be done in a coordinated way with industry partners and government, it’s a shared responsibility to produce the scaling outcomes that we need to stop a fire crisis,” Professor Bowman said.

A significant aspect of this research project is the knowledge shared around traditional burning practices by First Nations community groups, which is critical to understanding how to live in flammable landscapes sustainably.    

“Here in Australia, we have a fantastic opportunity to engage with First Nations community groups which can mean helping them recover their knowledge and their agency in using fire. We’re disclosing the past, but we’re also mindful of the future.” 

“Some of the research I’m doing is targeted to restore traditional First Nations burning practices. For example, we are trying to understand whether patch burning by a tin miner in Tasmanian wilderness in the 1920s that enabled the endangered orange bellied parrot species to persist was a continuation of traditional cultural burning. We are using palaeoecological techniques to find out if this was something learned or adapted from First Nations people,” Professor Bowman said.