Australian bushfires: scientists point to British colonization

Researchers at the University of Melbourne say the catastrophic bushfires in Australia cannot be blamed on climate change alone: the British colonization of the continent played a major role. The findings were published in the journal Nature on 7 October.

Over the past decade, the south-east of the country has endured several devastating fires. In 2019–2020, according to The Telegraph, flames destroyed up to 24 million hectares, 17 million of them forest.

How the landscape changed

According to the scientists, it all began about 250 years ago, when Captain James Cook arrived, but the real problems started to build roughly half a century later, when the British began settling the continent in earnest. Indigenous people were driven off their land, and for centuries they had kept it in a particular state, including by deliberately burning and clearing forests. Left untended, those areas began to be overgrown by forest – and forest is the ideal “fuel” for large-scale fires.

Two centuries ago Australia was of course not one big treeless wasteland, but forests on Indigenous lands were considerably sparser than after the British arrived. Michael-Shawn Fletcher, professor of biogeography at the University of Melbourne, speaks of a shift in the fire regime: today fires burn hotter and spread faster. Eucalyptus trees grow quickly and densely in burned areas and become fresh fuel – a vicious circle.

“It’s not about pointing fingers, but we need to say that we have a problem, because we have a lot of forest. Burying our heads in the sand won’t help, nor will pretending that climate is the only factor,” Fletcher stressed.

Evidence from a lake

The scientists backed their hypothesis by studying sediments from Lake Elusive in Croajingolong National Park in south-eastern Australia. The area was among the hardest hit by the fires and was historically the land of the Gunaikurnai people. Lake sediments serve as a kind of calendar of what happened in nature.

Samples up to a thousand years old, judging in particular by the amount of pollen, showed that until the end of the 18th century trees covered only about ten percent of the area. The fires of that time could not have been as intense as today’s.

“But once the Gunaikurnai people are driven from the land, there is a change in the amount of trees and shrubs in the landscape, which leads to more fires. This change in the landscape precedes human-caused climate change and creates conditions for catastrophic fires,” was the clear conclusion Fletcher drew from the lake sediments.

What the researchers propose

The most effective solution, the scientists believe, is to take steps that will make Australian forests considerably sparser. The Melbourne researchers call, in rather general terms, for a return to Indigenous practices, while their colleague from the University of Tasmania, pyrogeography professor David Bowman, is more specific: in his view forests need to be thinned, and there is no need to shy away from traditional Aboriginal techniques of selective burning.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz