Jack Rush, Senior Counsel assisting the Bushfires Royal Commission, has reportedly urged that the Royal Commission recommend immediately more than doubling the amount of public land burnt each year to 5 per cent, or 385,000 hectares.
This reiterates the recommendation of the Victorian Parliamentary Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, which I criticised last year as a Big Dumb Number approach.
Despite the claim by Mr. Rush that “the supporting science was clear” in support of such a target, the expert scientific panel from which the Royal Commission sought advice, whilst generally agreeing that something in the order of 5 to 10 per cent of treatable public land should be burned as part of an effective hazard reduction program, was not generally of the view that a specific hectare target was the way to go. According to Professor Mike Clarke:
Assume we have plucked a number out of the air and we have said 130,000 hectares or whatever. My concern is how much have we reduced the risk by burning that area of the landscape or that percentage of the landscape. One hectare in the Mallee has not appreciably reduced the risk to the same extent that one hectare in the Dandenongs may have reduced, yet when the reporting comes they are often bundled together and we report state wide that we have burnt X hectares this year. That is my concern with targets; it is how they are used and that they are uninformative in many cases.
According to Dr. Kevin Tolhurst:
I guess I would agree with the others that we need outcome based targets, not just simply hectares targets. You may end up with hectares, but it needs to be outcome based targets. I think that is really quite important.
The argument that any prescribed burning program needs to be framed primarily in terms of higher-order outcomes rather than numerical hectare targets was also put by representatives of the Department of Sustainability and Environment, and by the Victorian National Parks Association.
For reasons I outlined in my previous post, framing public policy goals in terms of Big Dumb Numbers has a certain appeal to politicians, especially as a means of attempting symbolically to “tame” wicked problems such as bushfire hazard management. For different reasons, it also appeals to lawyers with their tidy-minded desire for clear metrics to which people can easily be called to account. It certainly appeals to the media. However, generally speaking it remains an unsatisfactory approach to public policymaking on difficult issues.
Ahh, lawyers and their so-called expertise.
I thought it was the role of the commissioner, Bernard Teague, to make those sorts of declarations? What role does Rush SC think that he has?
Powercor is talking up a proposed power cut in certain areas during xtreme days.
This is the best new idea I’ve seen since BS. ( Reported in central Vic local news)
Hmmm. Who would have ever thought it?
The continuing grilling of Christine Nixon in the commission over things that would have made SFA difference on Black Saturday also appears to me to be a prime example of a prosecutor’s mindset. Singling out individuals for responsibility should be a minor component of the commission’s work.
The VNPA research on fire in SE Australia has been wonderful.
Tragically, Jenny Barnet, who was working on that very thing, was killed in the Strathewen/Kinglake fires.
A double blow because her work was helping to shed some light on the problem.
http://www.vnpa.org.au/subsubsection.php?subsection_id=9&subsubsection_id=290
“The Big Dumb Number approach”
You mean, like “400 ppm CO2″ or “2 degrees”?
Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
I guess the real problem is that people continue to build homes among gum trees while loudly claiming they love the ‘bush.’ The fact that such trees, if fire comes, can and do kill seems to be incidental.
Then they want the authorities to burn everything surrounding their ‘piece of paradise’ in case fires break out.
The topic, PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY is discussed on another thread. It seems pertinent on this one too!
No, you can’t, evidently.
Sam demonstrates that many a true word is oft spoken (or typed) in jest. The 2 degree target for limiting global warming really is a Big Dumb Number as it has created a false sense of security that as long as global average temperatures don’t rise by more than 2 degrees we’ll be OK< which as the Climate Code Red people have shown is not the case.
I’m working on the difference between perceived and calculated risk at the moment. So a big dumb number is to help you feel safe until the next time something goes wrong.
Which it will. Because it’s a big dumb number.
Of course Paul, the problem with 2 degrees is that it’s actually a small dumb number, so people feel doubly safe (even though they shouldn’t).
I feel a bit number every time I see that number.
Professor Mike Clarke makes a good point when he says that “My concern is how much have we reduced the risk by burning that area of the landscape or that percentage of the landscape. ”
My concern is how much risk is increased when people with a “big dumb number approach” are responsible for risk-based decision making.
Different areas require different regimes. Unfortunately, the big dumb number approach doesn’t recognise this.
This area has burnt three times over the last ten years (at least once reburning areas which had been burnt three years before, hint hint). So of course there’s a bit outcry for reduction burning.
Which ignores the fact that it’s mostly mountainous, alpine territory that doesn’t recover well from being burnt, because traditionally it hasn’t burnt very often. Mountain ash and snowgums don’t regenerate in the same way that their lowland cousins do, and mountain ash can in fact be wiped out by too frequent burning.
This happened in the 1939 fires around Healesville, which killed the new and regrowth trees from 1927. The Black Spur area had to be replanted by hand, which suggests that in ‘natural’ circumstances, mountain ash forests burn in cycles of well more than 12 years.
Since 1939, the Black Spur has not been reduction burnt, as it was part of the MMBW catchment and the MMBW (as they clearly stated in their submission to the Royal Commission into the 1939 fires) did not believe in reduction burning for those forest types (their theory was that forests, left to themselves, accumulated so much litter that the forest floor was basically rotting and thus too damp for a fire to catch hold).
Yes, the Black Saturday fires whipped through there (I had driven down there only two hours before, in a supreme act of stupidity). But the forest appears to be regenerating well and is certainly less impacted upon around the old MMBW area than in similar areas around Marysville.
What we need is further research – most of what we have is based on anecdotal evidence and ‘guesses’ about what the aborigines did.
We’ve had ideal situations for this research, with the three fires I talked of above, but noone has done the simple task of looking at areas which where fuel reduction occured and comparing the impact of the fires with similar areas where it didn’t.
BTW, let’s also not fall for the idea that “recent poor maintenance since the Kennett privatisation” is the main factor in power-transmission ignition of bushfires.
A survey done after the Ash Wednesday fires (1983) concluded that a significant proportion of serious bushfires in Victoria from the 1960s to the 1980s were “SEC fires”.
No David, Sam had it wrong. He meant 2,000,000 micro-degrees
LOL.
Are these numbers equivalently ‘dumb’? 400ppm of a globally well-mixed,persistent gas is very different from 400,000ha of diverse forest types over varying terrain,aspect,access and weather conditions.