The wildfires raging across Australia in 2020

The impact on wildlife was far more devastating in Australia

Australia’s devastating fires

Emergency airlifts, scorched koalas, hazardous air quality – wildfires raging across Australia have taken a devastating toll on the nation.

The bushfires, which have been burning for months in 2020, killed at least 25 people, destroyed 2,000 homes, and killed an estimated 500 million animals. In all, more than 15 million acres burned across the country – an area roughly the size of West Virginia.

Australia typically has a fire season that runs from December to March, but human-caused climate change has made this year particularly catastrophic, experts say.

Human-caused climate change lengthens the fire season, decreases precipitation, and increases temperature, fueling the blazes, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The year 2019 was both the hottest and driest year ever measured in Australia, the bureau said. December was one of the top two hottest months on record for the nation.
“Climate change is supercharging our natural disaster risks,” Greg Mullins, former Fire, and Rescue commissioner of New South Wales said. “I wish we were wrong, but we’re not.”

“Most Australian landscapes are in tune with small-scale summer fires, but not the fires of the proportion and intensity that we are observing,” said Katja Hogendoorn, a professor at the University of Adelaide’s school of agriculture, food, and wine.

“These incomprehensibly large and devastating fires are caused by a combination of lower rainfall and higher temperatures, both consequences of climate change, and here to stay and worsen unless drastic action is undertaken worldwide,” she said. “As the driest and hottest continent, Australia is at the forefront of this environmental disaster.”

The highly sensitive home of the green carpenter bee — which already is extinct in two Australian states and is a food source for larger animals — faces dire straits. Much of the bees’ remaining habitat has burned experts said.
For firefighters and their defenses on the other side were also struggling as well.

“It makes it hard, because you got locals there that want you to help them, but realistically, in the end, my crew’s lives are in danger, and I’ve got to protect them from something that we might not come out of,” said Gary Jenkins, a volunteer firefighter who battled the flames. “It was probably one of the worst things I have been through.”

Across Australia, there is introspection on the topic of climate change — whether the country could have moved faster to acknowledge the causes of warming temperatures and better prepare for the effects.

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