Australia bushfires factcheck: are this year's fires unprecedented?

By Adam Morton, Nick Evershed, and Graham Readfearn

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Australia has always had devastating bushfires, a point emphasised by some columnists and newspaper editorials, but scientists say the fire conditions this year are without parallel on several fronts.

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Let’s start with the situation in NSW. Over the past 50 years, there have been just two calendar years in which more of the state has burned than this year: 1974 and 1984. With this year, those two were much larger than any other year, as this graph shows, based on data from the University of Wollongong’s centre for environmental risk management of bushfires.

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The director of the fire centre at the University of Tasmania, David Bowman, says the unprecedented nature of the fires this spring can be seen through their intensity and geographical spread across the country, noting at time of writing there were fires in five states.

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No fire can be blamed on climate change alone, but Bowman says the rise in higher temperatures, extreme dryness, worsening fire seasons, extreme bursts of fire weather and behaviour and the spread of fire across the country all align with scenarios painted by climate change projections.

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