Australian forest fires erupted as a result of the climate crisis: study | Climate crisis news

The National Science Agency says the climate is an “absolute factor” in driving fires, as the fire season is longer and affects more areas.

New research by the Australian national science agency CSIRO has found that climate change has caused a significant increase in forest fires in the country over the past 30 years.

study published in Natural Communications, a combined analysis of previous forest fire sites with eight drivers of fire activity including climate, fuel accumulation, ignition, and fire management (prescribed burning).

He observed that fire times were getting longer and longer and that fires were more common not only in the alpine forests of the southern island of Tasmania but also in the rainforests of northeastern Queensland.

CSIRO scientist Pep Canadell said the research was important in understanding how ongoing climate change could affect future fire activity in a country that has long been on fire.

“Although all eight actors in the fire activity played different roles in causing forest fires, climate was the absolute factor driving the fire activity,” Canadell said in a note.

“The results also suggest that the frequency of forest megasutes will continue to depend on projected climate change in the future.”

In the last 90 years, three out of four megasute years have occurred since 2000, the CSIRO said. Megasu year is defined as the cumulative area of ​​forest burned over a year over one million hectares (2.47 million acres).

In the summer of 2019 and 2020, fires in the southern hemisphere shattered 11.5 million hectares (28.4 million acres) of drought-induced shrubs and forests in south-eastern Australia, creating and forcing apocalyptic orange skies. people caught to be evacuated by boat.

More than 30 people were killed and thousands of homes destroyed, scientists believed to be nearly three billion animals. killed or displaced.

The country’s weather office warned last year that Australia’s climate was expected to be warmer and drier, and blamed carbon emissions for the increase in extreme heat.

A local fire in South Australia’s Flinders Chase National Park after a fire destroyed the area around February 2020 [CSIRO]

The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) said the Climate Status Report said Australia had a climate warm up an average of 1.44C (2.6F) since the national records began in 1910, the country experienced the hottest year recorded in 2019. The seven years from 2013 to 2019 were ranked among the nine hottest years ever, the BoM said.

CSIRO scientists identified increases in fires driven by climate change against natural variability, based on 32 years of data from their research satellite data and 90 years of terrestrial data from climate and weather observations, simulating fuel loads for Australian forests.

The science agency noted that extreme heat events were rising rapidly, while rainfall was falling in the southern and eastern regions of the continent.

Comparing the first half (1988-2001) and the second half (2002-2018) of the study, the study showed that the average annual forest area burned in Australia increased by 350 per cent, and 800 per cent by 2019.

Over the same period, studies showed that the average annual burned area increased fivefold in the southern hemisphere winter and tripled in the fall, spring, and summer tenfold.

“In Australia, the frequency of fires has increased rapidly in some areas and there are now regions in the south-east and south with fire intervals of less than 20 years. This is significant because it means some types of vegetation will not reach maturity and can endanger ecosystems.” , Canadell said.

“Understanding these trends will help inform emergency management, health, infrastructure, natural resource management and conservation.”