Bushfire preparedness assessment for 2025 and 2026 across SE Australia in early November 2025

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A key issue relates to the extent of preparedness mitigation treatments across forest and woodland landscapes, including prescribed burning, mechanical treatment, grazing and other treatment in each state and region. Annual rates of prescribing burning of forest areas are less than 1 to 2 % of forest areas per year across SE Australian states, these rates of prescribed burning are not going to be effective in reducing bushfire extent, intensity, severity and long duration bushfires. The author considers that there is inadequate bushfire preparedness for communities, firefighters, infrastructure and ecosystems in relation to inadequate forest mitigation.

Another issue relates to the extent of bushfire preparedness of nominated wilderness areas. Large areas of wilderness areas don't receive any or limited prescribed burning or very limited areas of low intensity bushfires. Intense bushfires in wilderness areas are a major risk issue with heavy fuel build ups, and in some cases repeat intense bushfires. This risk worsens with miniscule fuel mitigation in the areas surrounding wilderness areas.

In relation to the extent of bushfire fuels from large scale bushfires in previous years with dense understories and standing and dead trees, the author notes there is inadequate bushfire preparedness with increasing understory and dead tree fuels (standing and on the ground) across forested landscapes where intense/ severe bushfires have occurred. Taking this into account, future bushfires in these areas are going to be intense.

Effectiveness of fire interval and community and firefighter fire safety policies is an important bushfire preparedness issue. There is inadequate bushfire preparedness in relation to fire interval policies. Current fire interval and community/ firefighter fire safety policies do not appear to be effectively linked, putting communities, fire fighters and indeed whole ecosystems at risk. Prescribed burning fire intervals are too long and fire return timeframes are increasing. There is inadequate fire mitigation close to towns and cities, within towns and cities and also across landscapes with very high fuel loads, often contiguous high fuel load areas. It is also essential to understand the difficulty of fire fighting in such situations on bad fire days, the 2019/ 20 bushfires highlighted this. Other factors that need to be considered include days with numerous lightning strikes and firebrand generation and travel.

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