Removing fuel reduces bushfires costs

                                                                                      A newly commissioned study by Deloitte Access Economics has shown that removing fuel from the bush by mechanical removal, combined with prescribed burning of trees and understorey biomass, could dramatically reduce the devastation caused by bushfires and save the community tens of millions of dollars each year.

The cost benefit analysis forms part of a scoping study commissioned by the Australian Forest Products Association to look into the benefits from increased fuel reduction in key fire prone areas.

The Deloitte study suggests that, for example, in New South Wales’ Blue Mountains area removing fuel from as little as 5% of the area each year could halve the extent of bushfires and save the community as much as AU$34 million per year in insurance claims, property loss and fire-fighting costs. This is a benefit-cost ratio of around 4.6. This is a stunning result. We need a national conversation which gets serious about severe bushfires while the smoke haze from a very difficult summer of fires is still in the air.

“For too long the idea of taking fuel out of the bush to reduce fire risk has been ignored in Australia despite being a widely accepted practice elsewhere in the world. Instead we watch as the bush goes up in flames in out of control mega fires,” said CEO of AFPA Ross Hampton.

The Deloitte study identifies a number of areas where a full cost benefit analysis would better inform bushfire policy, including the Melbourne fringe and Gippsland regions in Victoria, south-west WA, the Blue Mountains, the Pilliga and north and south coastal areas of NSW, and Tasmania.

The report identifies the benefits of using mechanical fuel removal in conjunction with prescribed burning also noting the narrow window of good weather days for undertaking prescribed burning, and the need to control fuel loads in bushland areas close to population centres or other important assets.

“The Abbott government is to be congratulated for allocating an additional AU$15 million for bushfire reduction measures in Australia,” said Hampton. “This study provides the impetus to conduct a more detailed CBA of bushfire management policy and a trial program of fuel reduction practices.

“This would help inform more effective bushfire management, rather than the usual expenditure on suppression using more tankers and water bombing helicopters. The latter approach merely treats the symptoms and fails to treat the cause.”

Article previously published at Friday Offcuts
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Northern Australia should have a say in its own future

By Allan Dale, James Cook University
Cross post under The Conversation republishing guidelines 




Northern futures, northern voices: It seems everyone has ideas about how Australia’s north could be better, but most of those ideas come from the south. In this six-part weekly series, developed by the Northern Research Futures Collaborative Research Network and The Conversation, northern researchers lay out their own plans for a feasible, sustainable future.


Recently, Australia’s north has featured front-and-centre in national debates about the country’s future; the election campaign will likely see more claims about what the north can do for the country.
 
Some cast it as the frontier saviour, a source of bold new resource and agricultural developments both real and imagined. Others dream of securing the north’s expansive landscapes as iconic wilderness.
 
Northern policy has long been a source of conflict. Debates have raged about the success or otherwise of government interventions in indigenous communities. Quick-draw policy responses on complex issues like the live cattle trade have devastated many communities. Additionally, media images of coast-bound refugees keep the north’s strategic importance centre-stage, raising unresolved tensions about our Asian-Pacific relationships.
 
Those debates are often crafted by, and for, a southern audience. In my view, we will continue to repeat the mistakes of the past until we rethink governance of northern Australia. Governance is not sexy, but it’s fundamental to making things happen. As a regional water official at a Mekong Basin workshop in northern Thailand recently stated, governance is “how society shares power, benefit and risk”.

The north needs a say too

In the 1930s, Australian treasurer Ted Theodore was calling for northern separatism; few suggest that now. But many in the north would argue there are major flaws in the south’s contribution to our governance and that major policy decisions are often made in the interest of a southern electorate.
 
The north is different to the south in many ways. It has a low population and institutional capacity. Land tenure is largely public rather than private. It is primarily an indigenous domain. It has enormous mineral and soil wealth, but resource limitations and a vastly different climate. Much of it is closer to populous Asia-Pacific capitals than to Perth, Brisbane or Canberra.
 
Northerners don’t want separatism, but they do want a genuine dialogue between northern and southern Australia; one focused on how the nation as a whole might secure better northern governance. Australian and state and territory governments should negotiate big policy decisions in the north and  manage government policy and programs in radically different ways.
This could emerge through a stronger northern Australian policy and delivery architecture integrated into COAG.
 
But to work, this kind of architecture must be powerfully engaged with a cohesive and strong pan-tropical alliance of northern Australia’s sectoral interests. It would have to include traditional owners, local government, industry, human service and conservation. Such an approach must also be independently informed by the north’s research institutions.

Problems that need attention

There are land use and tenure conflicts across the north (the dispute over what to do with Cape York is just one example), and we need innovation to solve them. This requires a long-term, cohesive and regionally driven approach to land use and infrastructure planning.
 
We also need a more consistent approach to negotiating major project development, to build the long-term foundations for regional community development.
 
Alongside this, we have an opportunity to create a northern-specific ecosystems services economy
– an economy that benefits from conservation. We could deliver land owners real economic benefit for managing extensive landscapes better.
 
Despite the Intervention, the fundamental (top down) model of both local government and indigenous community development has not changed much in 30 years. These approaches disempower and deliver stop-start progress. Fragmented, welfare-oriented, inflexible and annualised government programs simply do not build lasting human capacity.
 
Finally, to shift the whole economy from an historically boom-bust cycle, the nation must build a tropical knowledge economy. This could underpin productivity in existing industries (minerals, energy, agriculture, fishing, tourism) and help us think about export opportunities right across the globe’s tropical latitudes. This will rely on Australia investing in tropical knowledge development (such as tropical health, agriculture, environmental and disaster management, design and energy) within the north, brokered into the wider tropical region through long term partnerships, trade and innovation clusters and foreign investment.

A smart north is good for all Australians

A progressive and productive northern Australia, with a strong identity and great lifestyle, tightly integrated with its Asia-Pacific neighbours, should attract a diversity of people (with a wide skills base) interested in playing a strategic role in the Asian Century.
 
We can transform our reputation from the wild frontier on the northern margin of a vast empty continent, to a naturally blessed region providing high-value knowledge-based services in the south of a dynamic, rapidly growing region of 500 million people.
 
This is indeed about how society shares power, benefit and risk.
 
If we don’t get the governance right, we run big risks: we’ll entrench a boom/bust economy, whole regions of multi-generational disadvantage and degradation of the nation’s cultural and environmental jewels.
 
If we can more equitably share power and benefit across the north, we can capture opportunities that may hold the keys to the whole nation’s future.
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Allan Dale receives funding for a day a week under the Northern Futures Collaborative Research Network. He is Chair of Regional Development Australia Far North Queensland and Torres Strait.


This article was originally published at The Conversation
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Blokes, man flu is real

The trauma has just been renewed, the old wounds reopened, just recently I had a bout of the dreaded man flu and in summer time to make it all the worst. Right when a man is most vulnerable, when the sinuses are blocked up, every bone is aching, a tightening sensation of the skull any exertion is as ponderous as a moon  walk we have to endure on top of it all the uncaring implied remarks that men just aren’t as tough as women.

We seek refuge of the armchair, comforted by the sport on TV and hanging on for dear life to one of life’s essentials, the remote control; make simple requests to aid the recovery from our plight such as the medicine found in the “square bear”.  Surely in our condition a rum every half hour is needed?  We are told that we are the ones that sound like a bear; well maybe the man flu does make you grumpy. That the point it is one of life’s most debilitating diseases and us mere males are scorned in our suffering.

But be reassured my friends for man flu is real and has now been scientifically proven to be so. This very week news has come via The Examiner in Tasmania, Research backs up 'man flu' sufferers, that reports on the findings from a university in Britain

Britain’s Durham University, has reached the conclusion that men really do suffer more with coughs and colds as they have more temperature receptors in the brain.

Dr Ellison said the difference lies in the area of the brain which balances a variety of bodily mechanisms, including temperature.

Men and women start out as equals in dealing with colds because the area, known as the preoptic nucleus, is the same size in children.

But when boys hit puberty testosterone starts to act on the area, which is in the brain’s hypothalamus and attached to a hormone gland, making it larger.

Dr Ellison, a senior lecturer at Durham, said: ‘’When you have a cold one of the things that happens is you get an increase in temperature to fight off the bugs.

‘’The bugs can’t survive at higher temperatures. When your immune system is under attack the preoptic nucleus increases temperature to kill off the bugs.

‘’But men have more temperature receptors because that area of the brain is bigger in men than women.

‘’So men run a higher temperature and feel rougher – and if they complain they feel rough then maybe they’re right.’’

Lot of big words in there but maybe our standing in family unit can be restored; maybe we are the stronger sex after all. We should remember this doctors name who vindicated our right to complain about the crippling fate of the man flu.  What’s his name, I hear you ask?  Well the article says Neuroscientist Amanda Ellison.

Amanda! Maybe this is a bit like saying, ‘I’m the boss of the house because my wife allows me to say that?