David Packham believes that climate change is only relevant to fires in certain types of forests, and that the main reason for our present bushfire risk is high fuel loads. Prescribed burning, fauna, and manual labour all have a role to play in fuel reduction.

Eucalypts depend on fire and it is possible that they were not dominant before aboriginals introduced fire as a management tool. Under pre-european forest management fuel loads would have been 6 tonnes per hectare and current fuel loads are around 60 tonnes per hectare. With 10 times the fuel load, a bush fire is 100 times more intense.

High intensity bushfires such as the February 2009 fires have a greater impact than a low intensity fire because they open up the canopy so that fire loving species and grasses grow. This creates an even greater fire risk in the years immediately following, and a repeat fire too soon could result in the total destruction of vegetation communities and replacement with weeds. Such fires also destabilize soils and pollute streams.

David Packham is a fire scientist with many decades of applied and academic fire industry experience both in Australia and overseas. David is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at Monash University.