In January, bushfires tore through Wyperfeld National Park and destroyed a revegetation project that would have taken 500 years to reach maturity. The saplings were too young to survive.
"It was too hot and too soon," Greening Australia program specialist Jess Gardener, who helps manage the project, told the Brolga.
With summers getting hotter, revegetation projects like Gardener’s are becoming increasingly fragile as extreme weather events become more frequent and more intense.
❓ What happened: In January, bushfires destroyed parts of a Wyperfeld National Park revegetation project that had been replanting native buloke and pine trees. A large portion of the trees, which take centuries to reach full maturity, were still saplings when the fires came through.
Program specialist with Greening Australia, Jess Gardener, told the Brolga the damage was “devastating”.
🗣️ “It was so big and so fast, a lot of wildlife was impacted and we know it’s going to be a long path to recovery.”
Image: Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo, a key native resident
While brutal, Gardener said the team would use the loss to evaluate what to do better in the future to protect projects, and improve their resilience.
🌳 Why does it matter? For the plants at the centre of the project to recover from something like bushfire, they have to be a certain age.
“Some of our early work is recovering quite well, but some of it was too young,” Gardener said. “It was too hot and too soon.”
🌏 The bigger picture: Data from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCEEW) shows extreme heat events are becoming more common on both a national and global scale.
Doctor Annette Stellemma, a Research Scientist at CSIRO, said this changing climate will cause temperatures to continue rising over the coming decades.
Here we go: With an El Niño event declared, drought is also more likely in the coming months. This will raise the risk of extreme heat, bushfires and marine heatwaves across the country.
Andrew Watkins, an adjunct professor with Monash University in the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, explained to the Brolga that an El Niño event isn’t a complete assurance drought will occur, but amplified by climate change it does create a “double whammy”.
What’s the outlook: For revegetation projects, an increased likelihood of bushfire can mean a greater chance of projects being damaged.
It also means repairing biodiversity in some areas is made all the more difficult to achieve.
Approximately one third of emissions reduction required to help stop climate change could be achieved through protecting and improving nature’s ability to absorb emissions within its natural landscapes.
Revegetation projects are set up to support this.
What next? Gardener said while the loss is disheartening, there is an opportunity to use it to inform future projects and improve resilience in revegetation work.
“Everyone really supports each other and we’ve gotta pick ourselves up and get ourselves out there,” she said. “What’s cool about this story is that we shouldn’t be afraid when things go wrong. It’s a chance to keep constantly reviewing our strategies and learning from what we do.”