Fire-adaptive communities in Australia

Australian communities shouldn’t be asked to just ‘adapt’ to more bushfires. Community-level ‘adaptive approaches’ to fire in the landscape could offer more constructive pathways into an uncertain future. But perhaps first we need to confront some deeply rooted fears, and embrace some uncomfortable conversations.

I was really pleased to hear CSIRO’s Justin Leonard touch on his ideas of ‘adaptive’ communities working collectively to reduce their vulnerability to bushfire during his presentation at the National Fire Fuels Science webinar series.

Both he and Oliver Costello from Firesticks Alliance put forward their ideas of people working together to use fire in the landscape. The narratives they put forward hold positive ideas – if communities plan their built environment properly and use fire well, they could not only reduce bushfire risks in local landscapes; they could also promote ecological health and diversity; and, as Oliver argued, achieve some social justice.

So why is it that these and similar ideas seem to be so difficult to act on? This is one of the questions that I’m hoping to be able to address through PhD research on fire-adaptive communities in Australia. I’m asking if taking an adaptive approach to fire could reduce the vulnerabilities of communities to bushfires. And if so, how could this change in approach be accomplished – who should be adaptive, and in what ways?

Justin’s narrative about fire is about people learning to live sustainably in the Australian landscape, recognising that fire is an inevitable, perhaps even welcome, part of that. Oliver’s narrative is about cultural knowledges, caring for Country, and righting social injustices. Both narratives are important, and fit into larger social and environmental issues that Australia should be addressing. But I wonder how they compete – especially after the 2019-20 bushfires – with a third, and seemingly much more compelling, narrative of fire as an emergency. Uncontrolled fire is deeply feared in Western cultures. We use the dramatic language of war to describe the work of emergency service personnel. Our attempts to control and suppress fire are deeply entrenched not only in our language, but also our legal system, our government policies and practices, our built environment and our community education and development practices.

Each of these three narratives co-exist with each other. However, each has, at its heart, different ideas about the relationships between people, the Australian landscape, and therefore fire. Each of them prioritises different values, objectives, knowledges, actions and even identities.  

I’ve found these differences important to consider when thinking about the attributes of fire-adaptive communities in Australia. ‘Adaptive capacity’ is considered by social science researchers to be an important trait for communities as it reduces their vulnerability to natural hazards. Adaptive capacity is, of course, more complex than the ability to adapt to different uses of fire in the landscape. In the Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index, for example, adaptive capacity is quantified using ten indicators in the areas of social and community engagement, as well as governance and leadership.

I suspect that these three fire narratives have implications for what might motivate a community to adopt a ‘fire-adaptive’ approach; what decisions they make; what processes they use to take an adaptive approach; and who might be involved in the decision-making process. And that has everything to do with a community’s adaptive capacity: those areas of social and community engagement, as well as governance and leadership. How willing are fire management agencies to include diverse local voices and knowledges? How much discomfort would it cause to include those diverse elements into decision-making processes? What would broader communities gain by doing so?

Encouragingly, I know that several fire management agencies have actually begun down these pathways, and it's these examples that I’m hoping to examine in my research.