The Fire Crisis in Western Australia
BROADSCALE PRESCRIBED BURNING HAS NO PLACE IN A GLOBAL DRYING HOTSPOT
The WA Government’s fire management strategy is to maintain a fuel age of LESS THAN six years since last burnt in AT LEAST 45% of the landscape across the three southwest forest regions.
This equates to burning approximately 200,000 hectares of the southwest landscape on an annual basis.
These burns are meant to make us safer. Instead, they are destroying biodiversity, driving wildlife toward extinction, polluting our air, and having minimal effect on reducing fire risk, particularly in extreme fire weather.
Broadscale prescribed burning has no place in a global drying hotspot
Why This is a Crisis
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The climate is changing.
Long-term trends show declining rainfall in southwest WA. Southwest WA is identified as a global drying hotspot with rainfall decline greater than anywhere else in Australia since the 1970's. -
Biodiversity is under threat.
Threatened species like numbats and Western ringtail possums are being killed in prescribed burns and their habitats destroyed. -
Communities are suffering.
Smoke has caused more premature deaths than wildfires in the southwest (Johnston et al., 2020). -
Safety isn’t guaranteed.
Major escaped prescribed fires like Margaret River 2011 swept through treated areas despite years of burning (IGEM, 2015).
What’s Being Lost
- Fire regimes that cause declines in biodiversity have been nationally recognised as a key threatening process. Inappropriate fire regimes have been identified as a threat to more than 800 native species and 65 ecological communities listed as threatened under Australian legislation (as at December, 2020).
- High frequency: Too-frequent fires can degrade habitats and disrupt or prevent species from completing their life cycles. For example, plants that take a long time to mature need time to replenish or recover after a fire; if fires occur too often, the population cannot recover.
- High intensity: Intense fires are associated with higher direct mortality rates for both plants and animals due to lethal heat and smoke. High intensity fires may spread more rapidly and can prevent animals from escaping and destroy habitat.
- Large scale: Large, continuous fires can destroy large areas of habitat, leaving no safe havens for species to retreat to.
- Climate change: Climate change can worsen the effects of adverse fire regimes by increasing the severity of droughts and heatwaves, making fires more destructive.
- Between 2002–2017, prescribed burn smoke caused more premature deaths in WA’s southwest than wildfires with 21 premature deaths, compared to 17 from wildfires in the same period.
- Total estimated health costs were $188.8 million with $97.1 million (51%) attributable to prescribed burns and $77.7 million (41%) to wildfires.
- Annual smoke haze costs WA an estimated $24 million in hospital visits and lost productivity.
- Prescribed burning produces smoke that affects human health, animal welfare and climate change. Wood smoke is toxic to the heart, lungs, brain and blood vessels, and humans exposed to wood smoke have an increased risk of death, heart attacks, stroke, pneumonia, asthma attacks and birth complications.
- Children, the elderly, asthmatics, pregnant women and those with pre-existing illnesses are especially vulnerable.
The Climate Cost of Burning
- All of Western Australia has warmed since national records began in 1910. Average temperature has increased by 1.3 °C since 1910, leading to an increase in the frequency of extreme drought and heatwave events.
- Western Australia has a rapidly warming and drying climate, with 20% less rainfall in southwest WA since 1970.
- The rainfall decline in southwest WA has been larger than anywhere else in Australia and has been identified as a global drying hotspot.
- Extensive areas of native vegetation, wetlands and waterways are increasingly suffering from severe drought and heatwave impacts.
- There has been a long-term increase in extreme fire weather and in the length of the fire season across large parts of Australia since the 1950s.
- WA is expected to have longer fire seasons, with around 40% more days of very high fire danger.
While the world moves to net zero carbon, WA’s fire policy is burning its climate budget.
A Timeline of Prescribed Burning in WA
Traditional Aboriginal burning practices in WA were suppressed by colonial laws and practices starting as early as the mid-19th century.
WA Bushfire Regulations were passed in 1847 which limited Aboriginal cultural burning practices and punished people for lighting fires outside of designated periods. Punishments included fines, compensation for damages and even public flogging of Aboriginal people and boys under 16 years old. This was legislated as “An Ordinance to diminish the Dangers resulting from Bush Fires.”
Source: https://www.legislation.wa.gov.au/legislation/statutes.nsf/main_mrtitle_10973_homepage.html
On private lands, fire was widely used as a management tool, often indiscriminately to clear vegetation for agriculture, and to promote 'green pick' for stock grazing. On public lands, fire was generally viewed negatively for its destructive capacity.
Some deliberate burning was done in public forests by foresters but not in accord with any organised
plan or approach, at least prior to 1939 (Pyne, 2006).
Some settlers adopted and adapted Aboriginal burning methods:
- Season: autumn after first rains
- Frequency: mostly 3-4 yrs (2/3-8/10)
- Size: mostly 10-50 acres (0.4-20 hectares)
- Patchiness: high (Abbott, 2003).
Broadscale prescribed burning of southwest WA forests became formal policy in the mid-1950s.
From the mid-1960's, the development of aerial incendiaries enabled large remote areas to be lit quickly and inexpensively when conditions were deemed suitable (Luke and Macarthur, 1978). Aerial incendiaries are small, capsule-like devices dropped from aircraft to deliberately start prescribed fires. These capsules contain flammable material that ignites after a short delay.
The target to burn 200,000 hectares was developed in the late 1970's and early 1980's by the WA Forests Department and implemented in southwest WA forests. It was formally adopted by a Ministerial Review Panel in 1994.
It was notionally set by the average number of prescribed burning opportunities that could be expected to present themselves, the resources available to undertake them and an estimation of how much of the landscape needed to be maintained in a low fuel condition to reduce the risk of landscape scale bushfires.
This target equates to approximately 45% of the southwest landscape maintained at less than six years since last burnt.
There is general agreement that inappropriate fire regimes, including those resulting from prescribed burning, can damage biodiversity and other environmental and community values and that there is an ongoing need for more research (Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council Limited, 2015).
Fire regimes that cause declines in biodiversity have been nationally recognised as a key threatening process.
Frequent broadscale prescribed burning and quota-driven targets remain the current practice.
In southwest WA, recent research shows no reliable link between total area burned and wildfire extent (Campbell et al., 2022).
To be continued
What Aboriginal Fire Knowledge Teaches Us
For millennia, Noongar Traditional Custodians cared for Country and used fire for spiritual and cultural purposes and to effectively manage the land. Cultural burning is fire applied in the right season, at the right time and in the right way.
Cultural burning is about healing land, not hitting quotas.
Today’s broadscale, industrial burns disregard this wisdom — and the country suffers for it.
- Cool, small, patchy fires create mosaics of burnt and unburnt areas for animal refuges and allow wildlife to escape.
- The fire burns slowly and flames stay low, preserving the canopy of trees.
- Seasonal timing promotes ecological renewal and keeps country healthy. Seed germination is supported and flowering and nesting seasons are considered.
- Not all ecosystems were burned. Tall forests, including tingle forests, and peatlands were never intentionally burned by Noongar people.
Reform must mean listening to Indigenous voices; respecting and supporting cultural fire knowledge, values and practices.
Community Voices
![Dr. [Name]](https://draft.fabwa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/quote-right-solid-full.svg)
If Nothing Changes
If WA continues blanket broadscale burning every year
Species like the numbat and western ringtail possum could face local extinction within a decade (Leeuwin Group, 2019).
Old growth forests will continue to collapse and deteriorate and be replaced by dense, highly flammable regrowth
Communities will face an ongoing smoke-related health crises.
This isn’t a distant risk. It is happening now — and accelerating.
Why Change is Urgent
Abandoned its hectare target in 2015, adopting a risk-based approach (Safer Together) that targets burns in area where they matter most (IGEM, 2015).
Uses Bush Fire Risk Management Plans that prioritise community safety, not annual quotas (NSW RFS, 2020).
California and Portugal emphasise rapid detection, early suppression, and cultural fire.