The Disconnections that Facilitate Protracted Disasters: Barriers to Adapting to Fire in the Australian Landscape

Abstract

Current disaster/emergency governance encourages individuals and communities to take ‘shared responsibility’ in mitigating risks posed by one-off, rapid-onset emergencies. However, events such as the Australian 2019–2020 bushfires—unprecedented in their scale, nature, and duration—challenge the efficacy of this approach. These fires were disastrous, but should be understood as the culmination of existing, protracted, disasters that individual residents of communities have very little ability to mitigate against. These include anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation, changing land uses, and fire regimes. These ‘slow emergencies’ challenge the idea that disasters are only exceptional events, and not part of everyday existence.

The aim of the research reported in this chapter was to identify how sixteen subject matter experts, currently working with Australian communities to improve their fire knowledge and practices, believe the problem of ‘slow emergencies’ can be addressed. They were given a future-visioning exercise, to imagine what fire-adaptive communities might look like in a 20-year timeframe; what problems would have to be solved; what capabilities would be needed; and how those capabilities would be achieved. Their responses offer an insightful look into the ongoing complexities of people coexisting with fire in the Australian landscape. Despite participants coming from a range of fire management perspectives, common themes emerged. These themes contribute to a discourse of ‘disconnection’ as a barrier to communities taking an effective adaptive approach to fire. These disconnections, often the result of power imbalances, allow the continuation of the protracted disasters that contributed to, and arose from, the fires of 2019–2020.