Extract from ABC News
By Bridget Judd
"State of emergency declared", read the headlines in the days leading up to Christmas last year.
Twelve months on, and some Australian communities once under threat from fire now find themselves grappling with a new emergency as a La Nina weather pattern takes hold.
In parts of northern NSW, where flood warnings were issued this month, consecutive days of wild weather caused thousands of residents to remain on standby for evacuation.
And with the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO's latest biannual report on the climate observing "a more tangible shift in the extremes", questions are emerging about what the summers of the future may hold.
"The idea that we can use the past as a reliable index for the future has sort of been dynamited at the foundations," says David Bowman, a fire ecologist at the University of Tasmania, "because we're seeing such extreme unpredictable things."
'We're talking about really major extremes'
It was around this time last year — just as a series of bushfires that would later be known as Black Summer were beginning to escalate — that Bowman was fielding calls from journalists.
"The year 2020 has been historic in the sense of completely reframing how our modern civilization feels about its place in the environment," he says.
"And certainly the catastrophic bushfires in Australia, and again, in California ... they've all underscored that the earth system is responding to global heating."
Last summer's fires claimed the lives of 33 people, garnering international headlines and prompting an outpouring of donations and support in the months shortly after. But Bowman believes the coronavirus pandemic "papered over the shock of the bushfires".
Now, as we enter a new summer, "all those anxieties and unfinished business is bubbling up in a way that's different", he says.
"Because during the pandemic — and during winter, strangely — bushfires felt a long way away," he says. "The declaration of a La Nina, I think, was a bit of a false flag game that sort of provided a sense that we were going to be avoiding bushfires."
Bowman points to the K'gari-Fraser Island blaze, which burnt through nearly half the World Heritage-listed site before being contained by heavy rain.
The problem, he says, is "the lining up of the heatwaves and the flooding events".
"Unfortunately, what happened in south-east Queensland is that there was this stupendous heatwave that enabled a fire to occur during a La Nina year," he says, adding: "We wouldn't have predicted such an intense fire".
"And now, literally in days, it switched from an uncontrolled bushfire burning Fraser Island to this side of a category one cyclone in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales.
"So ... we're talking about really major extremes."
Could our coastal environment change?
Days of heavy rain and powerful winds in border communities have eroded some of the country's most famous beaches.
Rodger Tomlinson, director of the Griffith Centre for Coastal Management at Griffith University, says areas like Byron Bay — where he has been studying erosion more broadly — were "hit very badly" by the major storm system.
"Generally speaking, if we're going to have more storms, we're going to see more coastal erosion, more rainfall and wet weather, such as we've been seeing," he says.
Asked if today's beaches will be the same in a few decades' time, Tomlinson says there is a risk of change in areas "particularly vulnerable to increased storminess, or if there's no management strategies to keep pace with those events".
"But the general projections in the long-term is that we will see changes to our coastal environments due to climate change," he says.
The key to preserving these coastlines for summers to come, Tomlinson says, will come down to our ability to adapt.
Sea walls are one option, he says — noting that they have been unpopular in the past — as is the long-term possibility communities may need to "be moved away from that erosion".
"But that's very problematic, and there's no evidence of that being seriously considered anywhere on our coast," he says.
"After the floods in 2011, in the Lockyer Valley, the community of Grantham was relocated to higher ground. But applying that kind of a process on the coast is a lot more difficult, mainly because of the intensity of development in nice locations."
Looking — and planning — ahead
As communities in northern and eastern Australia prepare for a wet summer — vastly different scenes to those witnessed just a year ago — Bowman cautions we are not out of the woods yet.
"It's really going to get down to when did the rain come? And when did the heatwave come?" he says.
"What happened on Fraser Island is that the order was wrong. It just got this incredible heatwave, then it got the rain."
Reflecting on the Black Summer bushfires, Bowman believes political leaders need to look beyond simply funding new firefighting equipment, and invest in bushfire mitigation strategies for future.
"Really, where I'm at 12 months on, is not asking 'Was there a royal commission? Was there soul searching? Was there grief and anxiety?" he says.
"All of those things are absolutely true. But what we haven't done is committed to an adaptation pathway."
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