Climate Change – The Burning Issues

Climate change is the most serious issue we face today

Whilst climate change is a relatively new problem, one of the techniques that we are focusing on in northern Australia has been around for millennia.

Indigenous Australians have been here for over 60,000 years and in that time they have shaped the land. They would light small fires as they moved around the landscape, which helped them hunt for food, clear pathways and regenerate the bush. Our native plants and animals have evolved around these burning practices. But, when European settlers arrived, the traditional landowners were dispossessed, the fires stopped and the land has suffered.

“Managed correctly, fire can have huge benefits for people and nature, including tackling climate change.”

How Can Fires Combat Climate Change?

Working with Indigenous partners, we combine traditional ecological knowledge with the latest in fire science to help deliver fire programs across vast areas of Australia. This work has prevented hundreds of thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere by changing fire management across many millions of hectares - the equivalent of taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road. Watch this short video to see just how it works.

Combating Climate Change With Fire - The Process

• When – controlled burns, started by people, take place in the cooler, early months of the dry season (May and June).
• Why – lightening strikes often spark large wildfires late in the dry season. The small, controlled burns reduce the amount of fuel available for the wildfires and provide physical barriers to prevent them spreading. This reduces the size and intensity of the wildfires.
• Where – we are involved in a number of projects across the tropical savannah of northern Australia – from the Kimberley in Western Australia to Cape York in Queensland.
• Who – we partner with a number of other conservation groups and Indigenous communities across northern Australia to carry out these controlled burns.
• How – by reducing the size, intensity and number of wildfires, we reduce the emissions released into the atmosphere. These in turn generate carbon credits, which can be traded to provide vital funds to continue with land management.

The Benefits

Global warming affects us all. So reducing emissions is good for everyone. These projects also provide a direct and vital benefit to Indigenous Australians who are employed in these projects. New conservation jobs are created and the money received by selling the carbon credits allows the continuation of essential conservation work year after year.

The smaller controlled burns do not affect larger, more mature trees that could be consumed by wildfires. Birds like the Gouldian Finch depend on small fires to clear the ground so that they can forage for seeds and they also prefer to nest in areas that have been burned the previous year.

So far our Indigenous carbon fire project, has helped abate 5 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere.
That's the equivalent of taking over 2 million cars off the road!