Australia braces for heightened bushfire risk across nearly all states as El Niño strengthens
Australia is bracing for an elevated bushfire threat across nearly every state and territory this spring, with authorities warning that a strengthening El Niño has left large parts of the east drier than usual.
The seasonal outlook from the Australian and New Zealand Council for Fire and Emergency Services covers September to November, the southern hemisphere spring, and flags above-normal fire potential everywhere except the Australian Capital Territory, the small region around Canberra. The council cited dry conditions in the east and heavy fuel loads across central and northern Australia as the main drivers, with soil moisture deficits spreading through the east and deepening in Western Australia during July.
“The variety of risk factors across different regions reinforces the need for communities to understand their local conditions and prepare early,” said Rob Webb, the council’s chief executive. “While some areas are facing an elevated risk of fire this spring, bushfires can still occur in regions with a normal seasonal outlook.”
The warning comes after a northern hemisphere summer marked by record heat and severe wildfires. Belgium has been battling its largest fire on record, which has scorched 3,000 hectares, while more than 320,000 people had been evacuated in France and Spain by late July. Wildfires continue to flare as heatwaves persist into mid-August.
In Australia, much of the Northern Territory south of Timber Creek and Borroloola faces heightened danger, a legacy of last wet season’s heavy vegetation growth, particularly in the Barkly region and the south. Andrew Warton, commissioner of Fire and Emergency Services NT, said areas where grass had gone unburnt for a year or more were expected to be most at risk. The territory’s fire risk is elevated even though forecasters expect above-average rainfall in coming months, because the grass that grew after this year’s floods will dry out and burn regardless.
“More intense rainfall, followed by accelerated drying conditions have left landscapes in the NT a tinderbox ready to burn,” Alex Vaughan of the Arid Lands Environment Centre told the Guardian, describing it as the climate and nature crises in action. He said the effect was worsened by buffel grass, an introduced pasture species that now dominates large areas of inland Australia and burns readily.
In New South Wales, the identified areas include country burned during the Black Summer fires of 2019-20, in which 33 people died and more than 3,000 homes were destroyed. “We do know that a lot of those areas have regrown since that time and the fuel loads are now able to carry fire once again,” Ben Millington, deputy commissioner of the NSW Rural Fire Service, told the newspaper. “With the dry conditions we're seeing at the moment, they've been identified as high risk.”
Millington said the state had come through an unseasonably warm winter with below-average rainfall in the north and south, and forecasts pointed to more of the same through spring. He urged residents to clear gutters and overhanging branches and to draw up a bushfire survival plan, adding that this might be the first summer some people experience fire activity since the 2019-20 season.
The northern tablelands around Armidale and a stretch of the far south coast near Bega are among the areas named in New South Wales. Victoria faces one of its warmest and driest spring outlooks in some time, according to the council, with East Gippsland, the far south-west, the Surf Coast and the country west of Geelong all flagged. North-east and eastern Tasmania, south-east Queensland, parts of Western Australia and grassland in northern South Australia described as nearly ready to burn are also on the list.
The Bureau of Meteorology declared an El Niño in June, and the event has the potential to become the strongest recorded. The pattern develops when ocean temperatures in the central Pacific run unusually high. In Australia, it is associated with reduced rainfall in the east and higher temperatures in the south, though its effect in any given year is hard to predict because other drivers, including the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode, also shape conditions. Models suggest a positive dipole could form before spring, compounding the effect.
Climate scientists say the interaction between El Niño and background warming from greenhouse gas emissions is making it harder for emergency services to forecast fire risk accurately.
David Bowman, professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania, said forests recovering from the Black Summer fires had produced prolific growth that would not take much to dry out. “If we were to go into a summer under this El Niño where we had what we call flash droughts, which is really strong heatwaves, we can switch up landscapes into extraordinarily dangerous conditions,” he told ABC News. “In eastern Tasmania, there's been a very sustained drying trend. We have had water, but basically it won't take much to nudge landscapes back into a deep drought.”
Bowman said the heat that comes with a warming climate was particularly dangerous alongside El Niño, because plants that normally control their water use can be stressed and dried out rapidly by strong heating, leaving landscapes open to high-intensity fire. “I have every reason to believe that we will see equally extraordinary fires. If it's not this summer, it's certainly going to be in the next,” he said.