Prescribed Burning

Revise DBCA’s Southwest fire management strategy to prioritise rapid bushfire detection and suppression and only carefully applied burns in strategic locations at appropriate times, instead of large-scale frequent burning. Fire-sensitive species and ecosystems should immediately be excluded from prescribed burning.
Mandate periodic and rigorous assessment of DBCA’s annual prescribed burning program by a well-resourced and independent EPA.
Implement more cost-effective, safer and less destructive approaches to fire management over prescribed burning, in particular, early detection and rapid suppression of unplanned fires before they become wildfires. Require full transparency on reasons to utilise prescribed burning instead of alternatives.
Prohibit fire-sensitive and long-unburnt ecosystems from inclusion in DBCA’s annual prescribed burning program. DBCA’s unnatural fire regimes threaten ecological communities such as EPBC-listed Empodisma peat swamps in the Walpole Wilderness Area and Red, Yellow and Rate’s tingle forests. Areas of long-unburnt forest, woodland, heathland and wetland should be protected as a baseline against which to measure impacts and as habitat for species that rely on long intervals between fires.