Where did the policy of burning [at least] five per cent of public land every year come from? The material below is taken from the submission by the Victorian National Parks Association to the current enquiry. As readers will remember, the enquiry is being held to decide whether a blanket five per cent policy, or a policy based more precisely on risks and benefits should be implemented.
The full text of the VNPA’s submission can be found here. A submission more locally focused on box ironbark woodlands can be found on the Living with ecology and fire website, together with much other useful information on fire in our environments.
The VNPA’s background to the policy runs as follows:
A brief history of the 5% burn target
The 5% annual burn target has been recommended by two fire inquiries in Victoria: a 2008 Parliamentary inquiry, and the 2010 Bushfires Royal Commission. However, perhaps because of the often contradictory advice those inquiries received, and the lack of clear evidence that the target would work in a Victorian context, both inquiries recommended monitoring and reporting on a hectare-based target’s effectiveness and impacts. Both inquiries effectively asked for this current review.
1/ The Victorian Parliamentary Environment and Natural Resources C’ttee (ENRC) 2008 inquiry
A 5% state-wide annual burn target (c.390,000 ha) of public land was first formally recommended in the ENRC inquiry into The Impact of Public Land Management Practices on Bushfires in Victoria. However that recommendation (Rec 2.2) was largely based on flawed evidence supplied to the inquiry:
–The evidence misquoted a reference for burning in some forests in the USA, which actually recommended an annual strategically applied burn target of 1-2% of the landscape if strategically applied, or 2-5% if burns are random. (In any case, applying any target from a totally different forest type on the other side of the world has questionable value.)
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