Campus Review Podcasts

In part three of our podcast series on the megafires that brought destruction to Australia this summer, Campus Review spoke to a world-authority in land management practices - Professor David Bowman from the University of Tasmania. This episode focuses on the the challenges of reducing fire loads, the ability of megafires to overcome fire containment lines, and a question that is leading to intense debate in the field: Will more fire burning lead to more carbon emissions in the atmosphere than intense bushfires or even megafires in the future? And what will be the implications of this?One of the salient points Bowman makes is that Australia, as a landscape, is not an idealised environment that makes controlled burning easy. As he puts it, Australia "is not a frictionless surface" : it is full of mountainous streams, rivers, tributaries and a whole host of other complicating factors. He also warned that the scale of controlled burning required to establish fire breaks across the country would be "mind-boggling