Carbon abatement through better fire mapping

Australia’s tropical savannas are extremely fire prone, with many millions of hectares burnt every year, contributing greatly to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Sophisticated fire mapping and modelling of fire severity, undertaken by the Tools supporting fire management in Northern Australia team, led by Adjunct Prof Jeremey Russell-Smith and Dr Andrew Edwards at Charles Darwin University, is helping fire and land managers assess greenhouse gas emissions and develop carbon abatement plans.

Previously, fire seasonality was used to calculate emissions, fires occurring in the latter part of the northern fire season (after 31 July) releasing double the CO2 emissions into the atmosphere than fires occurring early in the dry season. Although this calculation is based on years of data, CDU researchers are developing a new greenhouse gas emissions abatement methodology, using actual fire effect, leading to improved accuracy of the calculations of greenhouse gas emissions. Another important tool, the Savanna Monitoring and Evaluation Reporting Framework provides users with the ability to monitor their fire management and evaluate its effects, providing a single standardised reporting system to assess and compare the outcomes of fire management across 70 per cent of the continent. 

With the emergence of new industries such as carbon farming, which was officially recognised as an industry by the Northern Territory Government in October 2018, and the influence of climate change, bushfire management is rapidly changing in northern Australia, requiring decisions to be prioritised based on risk, and detailed mapping to support these decisions. With such large areas to cover, web-based mapping is fundamental to better improving these land management practices.  

Andrew Turner, Director of Strategic Services at Bushfires NT, says the organisation uses the savanna mapping tools daily.

“They are crucial to all aspects of fire management – planning, mitigation, suppression, monitoring, and evaluation and reporting,” Andrew says.

Currently northern Australia is generating over $30 million annually in this new carbon burning sector, on over 300,000 km2, still only 40 per cent of the potential extent for these savanna burning projects. The fire severity mapping process developed by the research team is an integral part of the process of improving the methodology, and has only been possible through the extensive collaboration process undertaken with other researchers from across Australia and around the world.