Fire Management across Australia

During the reporting period AWC, in collaboration with our Indigenous partners, delivered strategic fire management across a vast 7.5 million hectares in northern Australia. The resulting metrics, demonstrate the exceptional results achieved during this period.

AWC has:

• Restored healthy fire regimes at a landscape scale through the installation of over 55,000 km of burn lines and associated lowintensity fires. Healthy fire regimes create landscapes that, as abroad patchwork of burnt and unburnt areas, are more resilient to large-scale wildfires, and trigger ecological processes crucial to the health of Australian ecosystems.
• Reduced greenhouse gas emissions by reducing large-scale wildfires. AWC’s fire management in program is estimated to abate the emission of more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon greenhouse gas emissions every year – the equivalent of removing more than 37,500 cars from the road.
• Reduced late dry season wildfires by half, on average, and in some places up to 90 per cent. This outcome has directly reduced the detrimental impacts of late dry season fires on native wildlife, biodiversity, Indigenous cultural sites, and pastoral production.
• Increased the chance of survival for northern Australia’s threatened wildlife, including the Gouldian Finch, Northern Quoll and Black-footed Tree-rat. Seed-eating birds like the Gouldian Finch benefit from the improved distribution of longunburnt vegetation through the landscape as a result of early dry season prescribed burning. Less destructive fires leave more habitat shelter for small mammals, making it harder for feral cats to hunt them.
• Delivered socioeconomic outcomes for our Indigenous partners, including training, employment, land access payments and carbon abatement programs.

In 2021, we were also able to integrate new technology (Google Earth Engine) into our fire mapping activities, greatly increasing the speed of availability of high-resolution satellite imagery for analysis during the controlled burning program.

I look forward to providing another update on this incredibe program soon.

Warm regards,

Dani