[jozzas]

In general a lot of Australian forest does need to burn, we know this. Record drought and record high temperatures over the past few years created the catastrophic fire conditions we have seen this year. Controlled burns cannot be carried out when conditions are dry and hot - the fire gets out of control. Thus there have been very few burns of this nature over the last several years.

Climate change means it's getting more and more difficult to carry out these type of controlled burns for forest management in general. Our fire seasons are longer, hotter, drier and more dangerous, and these types of burns can and do get out of control.

[xg15]

The purpose of a controlled burn is to remove underbrush and create gaps that an uncontrolled fire could not cross, right? Wouldn't it be possible to archive those goals without fire? (e.g. just going through the forest and clearing underbrush manually)

Of course some fires are still needed, e.g. to trigger fire-dependant seeds.

[duskwuff]

> Wouldn't it be possible to archive those goals without fire? (e.g. just going through the forest and clearing underbrush manually)

Not at the scale that'd be needed. Clearing underbrush is a labor-intensive process, and the amount of it involved is staggering.

[thewizardofaus]

The amount of bush in Australia is incredible.

120+ million hectares, equivalent to three times the size of California !

Doing this manually would be far too time consuming.

[rasz]

Perhaps we could introduce a non indigenous animal to do it for us, Australia had some experience in this area :)

[Nasrudith]

The kicker is that grazing animals could do it but aren't done that way very often in practice. Not without environmental costs of course.

[amaterasu]

Also, there is significant political opposition to this, specifically in the Victorian highlands.

[grawprog]

It's not just about clearing underbrush. Ecosystems that experience frequent wildfires actually need fire for succession. Long lived plants in those ecosystems tend to be more fire resistant, they're smaller with thicker bark, shrubs and herbaceous plants will have seeds that lay dormant in the ground for years until a fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ecology

A lack of controlled burns leads to a buildup of dead wood and underbrush so when there eventually is a fire, it becomes the raging out of control bushfires going on in Australia right now, or in California not long ago, or in BC not long before that.

[pvaldes]

To express it grafically I would say that ecosystems need fire in the same way as humans need to suck pacifiers.

[donavanm]

I dont have the citation offhand but some of the recent fires have simply ‘jumped’ firebreaks and cleared areas as well. Add to that the natural firebreaks of damp/wet forest lands going up like we saw in QLD.

[eskaytwo]

Many have crossed firebreaks at unprecedented levels. Throw in the self-generating storm clouds and associated lightning strikes and it’s an entirely new situation to anything seen before.