Fire Webinar Series Provides Timely Insights by Suzanne Cavanagh, Member of AIDA, Aireys Inlet & District Association
“Fires are burning in Siberia.” This comment by Mary Lush from Friends of Lorne [FoL] ushered in the start of a recent webinar series by FoL and Aireys Inlet & District Association [AIDA], setting the scene for a powerful webinar on the increasing volatility of wildfire activity, framing the series with the question, What’s the future of living in bushfire prone regions? An eminent speaker line-up graphically sketched what is becoming increasingly a lived-experience for communities – changeable fires patterns, escalating threats, more hazardous and frequent fires, fire incidents in previously unimagined places – much of which is linked to climate change and human behaviour.
tendency to view crises in this way, in an endeavour to return quickly to ‘lifeas-it-was’. The problem however, as amply being shown with COVID-19, is that these are not simply discrete events, but are interconnected events that to a large degree, are reflective of our increasingly volatile, uncertain and complex world.
normal and that we will need to become more expert at proactively managing change, and that mitigation, often where most energy is placed, will not be sufficient to manage our future.
Too often fires are thought of as ‘freakevents’. There is a natural human
The big-picture message from this fire series was that ‘change’ is our new
However, the exceptional nature of the series lay in the eminent expert speaker line-up, and their diverse professional backgrounds – yet their near-consensus views arrived at on key issues.
Six speakers, six panelists, three online events and 1,095 registrations … such was the scope of the webinar series designed by Friends of Lorne.
David Lindenmayer [ANU] spoke of the long-term insights into the impacts of and responses to wildfire in Victoria. He highlighted the depressingly large losses in our biodiversity and provided transparency to our actions in how we are making our forests more fire-prone. He stressed the importance of growing and retaining older forest. Steven Farrell, founding partner of Spatial Vision, joined David in session one. He addressed climate, in particular the increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall and explained what these changes may mean for unplanned fire. His simulation models sketched a fascinating scenario for Aireys Inlet. The second session took us on another part of the journey, an understanding of human contribution to fire occurrences, with Janet Stanley (University of 14
NewsAngle | Publication of the Anglesea Community House | Community Houses are for Everyone
