NZs genuinely worried for our neighbours
we are defiantly one
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Ecological disaster: a kangaroo escapes as a fire front approaches a property in Colo Heights, New South Wales. Photo/Getty Images
Australia in crisis: Can Australia change after the bushfires?
The worst fires in Australia’s history have delivered a climate-change lesson its leaders tried to ignore and cast a shadow over the nation’s economy. So what comes next?
Outside the small town of Cobargo in southern New South Wales, Bruce Leaver has semi-retired to a leafy, rambling home on the edge of fire country. The historic town 16km west is a ruin, twisted and blackened by the towering flames that raced up the main street on New Year’s Eve.
Although homes and land close to Leaver’s house burnt, his didn’t. That was partly good luck and partly design. Leaver, a former forester and one of Australia’s top conservation administrators – last year made a member of the Order of Australia for his life’s work – dreaded this summer because he knew what was coming.
“The big disaster this time was the drought,” he tells the
Listener, gazing through the smoke haze from his dining table across a vast, bone-dry eucalypt forest that didn’t burn in the New Year’s inferno that hit Australia’s south-east but still might.
“So, you had these forests drying out for the past two or three years … that’s what’s happened,” says Leaver. “I was looking at the extended drought and it was just clear to me with my forestry background that it was going to be very severe because all the fuels were dried out.”
After warning his closest neighbours in the rural hamlet of Coolagolite, Leaver spent months doing all he could to fireproof his own home. It has roof and perimeter sprinkler systems rigged up to a full 44,000-litre water tank. All around his property’s edges, Leaver cleared away dried timber and leaves – anything flammable. He moved his woodpile further off. And just in case all else failed, he stacked containers of firefighting gel at his front door, ready to ward off fire from whatever might be his last line of defence.
Leaver’s fears, we now know, were entirely justified. An area of Australia larger than Scotland has burnt, more than two dozen people have died – including at least five firefighters – and more than 2000 homes have burnt down since the largest fires in the nation’s history began in September.
Read more:
Australia bushfires: An account from smoke-filled Sydney |
The economic effect of Australia's bushfires on New Zealand could be enormous
Ecologists estimate a billion wild animals have been destroyed in New South Wales. Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley believes koala losses alone are so high that they will need to be declared endangered, at least in some parts of the country.
The effect has not been confined to Australia. The smoke blew more than 2000km to New Zealand, coating the South Island glaciers in dust and ash. A faint smoke cloud even travelled more than 12,000km to the heights of South America. Australia’s fires have pumped about 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further fuelling the climate change that’s already intensifying the nation’s blazes.
That’s more than the combined annual emissions of the 116 lowest-emitting countries. It is nine times the amount produced in California’s record-setting 2018 fire season. It also adds up to about three-quarters of Australia’s greenhouse-gas emissions in 2019.
Deaf, blind and holidaying
If Leaver saw the catastrophe unfolding months ago, how was the Australian Government so spectacularly unprepared and Prime Minister Scott Morrison so at ease that he took off on holiday to Hawaii as the fires built in the days before Christmas? Says Leaver, a former head of South Australia’s national parks and of Australia’s Heritage Commission: “You very quickly get into the debates of climate change. In Australia these are absolutely toxic. The conservative side of politics has grimly refused, because of the importance of the fossil-fuel industry to the Australian economy and the way our politics is funded through donations … so when they should have been listening, they weren’t. They were tone-deaf to the thing.”
Morrison still a
Australia in crisis: Can Australia change after the bushfires?
