Climate

CAs shifting regs 

THE REPUBLICAN CLIMATE PITCH: Assembly Republicans are taking aim at some of California’s environmental mainstays, from the California Environmental Quality Act to the Coastal Commission — and they’re calling it climate action.

They unveiled a package of legislation today waiving environmental rules to fast-track the clearing of flammable vegetation around vulnerable communities and facilitate controlled burns.

Assembly Minority Leader James Gallagher said climate change is exacerbating California’s wildfires by making forests drier but that California’s policies to reduce emissions aren’t enough to fix the problem.

Hazard Reduction Burns are a staple tool of fire management in Australia, usually over winter when burns can be kept cool, slow and controllable. It's an immense and complicated task since essentially all indigenous vegetation in the most populated region of Australia (South East) is pyrophytic. 

However we're running into an unfortunate problem where the number of days suitable to conduct hazard reduction burns is decreasing because of more frequent days winter days with higher temperatures and/or higher windspeeds as a consequence of Climate Change. 

Which puts environmental planners in a difficult spot because if you do a planned burn and it gets out of control, that's obviously not good. But if you don't do enough hazard reduction that's also not good and compounds year on year leading to catastrophic events occurring anyway.

I expect this will be a worsening problem for all fire prone regions going forward.

microsub.

Horticulturalist. Environmental hand wringer. Open source enthusiast. 

mfer #9187