Allan Sefton Memorial Lecture

Hub Founder, Senior Professor Ross Bradstock presented on The Science of Bushfire Management at the annual Allan Sefton Memorial Lecture.

The NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub invites you and your colleagues to attend a webinar series presenting research projects undertaken by the Hub to assist the NSW Bushfire Inquiry. The Hub supported the inquiry by providing analysis, technical and scientific advice and recommendations to ensure the inquiry has actionable, evidence based and rigorous information. The themed webinar details and links are as follows:

California is ablaze, again. Currently, the second and third largest fires in the US state’s history are burning at the same time, and are only partially controlled. Already, seven people have died and 2,144 structures are damaged – and their fire season still has months to run.

The drought in eastern Australia was a significant driver of this season’s unprecedented bushfires. But it also caused another, less well known environmental calamity this summer: entire hillsides of trees turned from green to brown.

As bushfires in New South Wales are finally contained, attention is turning to nature’s recovery. Green shoots are sprouting and animals are returning. But we must accept that in some cases, the bush may never return to its former state.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.

How do you support people forever attached to a landscape after an inferno tears through their homelands: decimating native food sources, burning through ancient scarred trees and destroying ancestral and totemic plants and animals?

Images of desperate, singed koalas in blackened landscapes have come to symbolise the damage to nature this bushfire season. Such imagery has catalysed global concern, but the toll on biodiversity is much more pervasive.