Forests won’t disappear, so our behaviour around them needs to change - Editorial
- Fire and Emergency NZ says 97% of wildfires are caused by people.
- Recent fires in Tongariro and Hawke’s Bay highlight the increased risk this summer.
- Communities are urged to change behaviours and adopt proactive measures to prevent wildfires.
This time of year always brings a risk of wildfire in rural New Zealand, but the scale of them in the past few months means this summer shapes as a nervy one for firefighters.
Tongariro, in particular, has been hammered by two massive and separate blazes within a month.
In Hawke’s Bay, two separate pine forests have ignited in a month, an Ikea one near Porangahau and a Pan Pac one near Wairoa.
There’s a tendency in communities surrounded by new trees to blame the change in land use from farming to forestry for these fires.
Certainly, the added fuel ramps up the danger, if not managed properly, but the vast majority of forests are managed well.
Mitigations to prevent fire risk, such as shelters and lakes are built into their plans.
The containment of the Pan Pac fire by forestry firefighting teams to just 5 hectares on an extremely hot Hawke’s Bay day shows the power of proactivity.
It’s rare for a fire to start inside a forest and there has never, to this writer’s knowledge, been a fire that has started because of a forest.
The reality is that it’s almost always us to blame, not the trees.
Fire and Emergency NZ says 97% of wildfires in New Zealand are caused by people.
We have campfires, light fireworks, do burn-offs on the wrong day, forget to check old ash piles, mow stony lawns in a heatwave and just generally, we’re still complacent around the risks of fire spreading.
It’s possible that sparks from a camper bus towing a trailer, which was missing a wheel on the left-hand side, caused the second Tongariro blaze.
We can’t change that we have more pine trees now, and more will grow in the coming years.
What we can change is our own behaviour.
It’s time to start treating our little shaky isles in a similar way to our neighbours across the ditch over summer.
Australia has thousands of years of experience with wildfires and how to deal with them.
Controlled burns are key, as are building standards that require gutters to be cleared of debris each summer.
But the most important thing is the education of its people.
Australians understand how dangerous wildfires can be.
A New Zealand version of “Ash Wednesday” should not be our nation’s education.
It’s on all of us not to be complacent this summer.
As Fire and Emergency NZ says, just because it’s the silly season, doesn’t mean it’s the time to get silly with fire.