Prepare for this fire season, but expect worse to come

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
The catastrophic Black Summer bushfires ravished parts of Australia in
twenty nineteen and twenty twenty, burning more than ten million
hectares and mainly affecting the southeast coast. Now it looks
like we're in for another hot, dry summer, but a
bushfire expert from the University of New South Wales, Canberra
says it's unlikely we'll get a repeat of those devastating
fires this year. However, it seems things will get worse

(00:25):
for us down the track, as we may see the
impacts of El Nino build and combine with climate change
in the following seasons. Professor Jason Sharples says for now,
the multiple Aninia cycles we've seen could help lessen the impact.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
The fact that we've had three good seasons of rainfall
and even now things are starting to dry out. Add
that into the fact that you've already got the forest
burnt from the Black Summer season still growing back. Those
two things together, I mean you're not likely to get
the widespread conditions favorable for the large bushfires that we had.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
However, we have already seen the return of fires out
in New South Wales thanks to the soil quickly beginning
to dry out, and we could soon see that here
are close to us in the Capitol.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
In North Coast has recently experienced and some decent fires.
There's chances that we're going to have really bad sort
of bush fires, but they're probably going to be more
isolated and less frequent than what we had in the
black summer season.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Despite all of the recent wet weather cycles. Ever, growing
climate change is a key contributor to how frequent and
harsh our bush fires are, and heat waves in the
coming years could prove to cause intense blazers.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Climate change is still very much happening, as we can
see in the northern msphere fire season that they've been
having for months now, particularly in places like Canada. You know,
when you get really warm temperatures heat wave conditions, they
can very easily produce conditions that are very conducive for
bad fire seasons.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
Well, we may be in the clear for now. It's
important to brace ourselves for the upcoming season, but keep
in mind how climate change is going to affect our
Aussie summers in the future. I'm Hannah Donald reporting for
amplifying years and to stay up to date. Whenever suits you.
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