PLEA Network

25 May 2020 The Guardian, Australia’s severe bushfire season was predicted and will be repeated, inquiry told. Forecasts that turned out to be accurate were made available to governments and fire agencies in the middle of 2019. The fires that caused 33 deaths, destroyed more than 3,000 homes, and burned more than 10m hectares of bushland were accurately predicted by the Bureau of Meteorology and in line with predictions Australia’s peak scientific body laid down 30 years ago. And according to evidence given in the first day of public hearings in the royal commission into national natural disaster arrangements on Monday, fires of that scale will occur with greater frequency as the climate continues to heat. “This isn’t a one-off event that we’re looking at here,” the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate monitoring, Dr Karl Braganza, told the hearing. “Really since the Canberra 2003 fires, every jurisdiction in Australia has seen some really significant fire events that have challenged what we do to respond to them and have really challenged what we thought fire weather looked like preceding this period.” Read more here