Legislation changes to improve conservation may have exacerbated catastrophic bushfires in south-east Australia, according to new research.
A study by the University of Melbourne found that attempts to limit human involvement in nature and increase conservation led to widespread bushfires.
Researchers found Victoria's Land Conservation Act neglected Aboriginal land management practices and allowed the overgrowth of vegetation that increased the risk of fire.
The act was passed in 1970 and the Land Conservation Council was established to investigate and make recommendations on the use of public land throughout the state.
The act required recommendations that consider the present and future needs of people by preserving ecologically significant areas, conserving areas of natural interest, beauty or historical interest, and other conservation efforts.
Data analysed by the researchers found catastrophic bushfires impacted the region after settler burning was prohibited as part of the act, allowing more flammable eucalypts to grow.
University of Melbourne's associate professor of geography, earth and atmospheric sciences and research Michael-Shawn Fletcher said more trees grew when frequent, low-intensity fires were banned, triggering catastrophic fires that had not been experienced for nearly a century.
"If you take away frequent fire, which promotes grasses, you start to get an increase in shrubs and trees such as eucalyptus," he said
"They start to grow and get to maturity because they're not being removed by that lower-intensity fire."
Letting forests grow wild
Dr Fletcher compared landscapes in 1850 and 2019 and found that the 19th century promoted open landscapes dominated by grasses, whereas in 2019, there were more large eucalypt forests with no open areas.
"Up until the 2019-2020 bushfire, the management of the forests of that area has been dominated by quite passive management, essentially neglect is another word, in letting the forests do as they will," he said.
Forest Fire Management Victoria and the Country Fire Authority conduct planned burns five to eight weeks a year in spring and autumn.
The program manages bushfire risk by reducing the amount of flammable material through planned burning, slashing and mulching.
Planned burns too limiting
But Dr Fletcher said planned burns were too restrictive in when they could occur, as they needed to be registered a year in advance.
"Those limitations mean that there's very little opportunity to appropriately manage for the huge forest estates in Gippsland," he said.
"You focus your hazard-reduction burning around highly-valued assets, such as property, or areas you think that may endanger life if a fire starts.
"That means vast areas remain unmanaged or uncared for."
Dr Fletcher said techniques implemented by First Nations people should be used in caring for country.
"Early settler farmers clearly recognised this, and they borrowed those techniques," he said.
"It's going to take all of us, it's not going to take just Aboriginal people."
Money wasted
Research funded by the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Australian Research Council estimated that restoring the native environment destroyed by the Black Summer bushfires would cost $73 billion annually for 30 years.
"I'd like to see a smarter way of spending that money, rolling it out year after year to support traditional owners to engage with country [and] build their capacity to develop a range of programs," Dr Fletcher said.
But La Trobe University Future Landscapes principal research fellow Jim Radford said although he believed using Aboriginal burning practices more frequently may be beneficial, linking the Conservation Act to bushfires was a stretch too far.
"I also think the evidence is overwhelming that anthropogenic climate change supercharged the 2019-2020 bushfires," he said.
"I think it should be recognised that you're going to lose environmental values and … ecological values in those areas that are burnt more frequently than the ecosystem would probably be able to withstand."
Endangering wildlife
Dr Radford said burning forests too frequently could damage habitats and endanger wildlife and could increase the area's flammability.
"A fire return interval, sort of 40-50-70 years is probably appropriate, and will mean that the constituent species that make up those ecosystems have time to regenerate and mature and provide the resources that are required for a wide range of fauna species," he said.
"We know that [a forest's] flammability decreases soon after a burn has gone through, but the flammability then increases as the forest is regenerating.
"There's a lot of smaller trees and young growth and then the flammability drops again."
The types of plants are also important in reducing bushfire risks, according to some conservationists.
Conservation biologist Mark Cairns is part of the Fire Wise project developed by the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife, revegetating regions burnt down by bushfires.
He said the project, as part of a bushfire recovery program launched in 2020, aims to mitigate bushfire risk by planting vegetation that is less flammable and prone to intensifying bushfires.
"There are some native plants that just simply don't burn. Some of those include soft bushes and blue bushes and things that we find in some of the drier parts of this country and some along the coast in the East Gippsland region," Mr Cairns said.
Fire Wise will be implemented in 10 local government areas including East Gippsland, Bega Valley, Adelaide Hills and Kangaroo Island.
Mr Cairns said frequent bouts of La Niña were causing an increase in vegetation that could trigger a higher-intensity bushfire season, stressing wildlife.
"It puts additional pressure on threatened species and local species to find locations that haven't been affected [by fires]," he said.
