 Welcome everybody to this union symposium on the role and impact of fire in the earth system across spatial and temporal scales. I will do first an introduction of some minutes and then we will have five speakers from all around the world that will present us their perspective on this topic. And then in the end we will have also time for a discussion asking questions to all of the speakers but also your questions. So if you have topics specific so to individual speaker specific questions. Please post them to the question and answer box that you find on the bottom of your room screen and in the if you have some more general questions we will pick them up from the question and answer box and we can post them later on them. So for now. The question is why are we running this session and I think many of you know from the media that or from your own research that fire is an important factor in your system. And that we are experiencing in the recent years more fires more intense fires as also reflected in the media. And even now today we are experiencing fires in many regions across the globe as you see on the on the map. And the questions are what is driving these fires what is causing what and who is crossing these fires and also how special are these fires now are they related to climate change and so on. But if we are talking about future forest management forest fire management or grassland management. We are also interested in the impact of fire on the different parts of your system. And that's why it's also good to know if there if fires are always bad or if it could be also have a good function let's say an ecological function and how all the the feedbacks and processes are working with fire and in your system. And we are discussing this at the EU General Assemblies during the last years and several questions across many divisions of the EU. And there we met the conveners met each other and we are coming from very different backgrounds. Because fire is a topic that has not its own discipline but it's researched in many different disciplines and with many different perspectives. And so we thought it would be great to have a symposium like that where we could invite some experts that are also having these very different perspective on fire on landscape burning and we will first have two speakers from Australia. That are presenting a more broad scale perspective so David Bowman will start with that and then we'll pay Johnson will take over and report on the impact of burning and smoke on human health. And then I will hand over the moderation to get a last look and she will introduce to you Gido thunder there. Christina Santin and or see Volco and then we will have a discussion on with all of them that is moderated by Catlinus though. We are starting now with David Bowman. I just a few words to yourself because you are a pyrogiographer that's really nice that you're establishing pyrogiography as a discipline. You are the director of the fire center in Tasmania and you're also fellow of many different university across the world. And it you are really for me one of the persons really influencing my fire research as well because you're providing a very transdisciplinary understanding of fire across temporal scales time scales but also on special kids. So now I hand over to you. Hi, hopefully you can hear me now. So yeah, what I want to talk about is basically really my lived experience and that is that at the end of this talk. I'm hopefully will be able to convince you that there really is a global fire crisis and there is a need to be thinking about how we're going to get out of this problem by not just continuing to walk down the same groove. We actually have to have adaptive thinking and I want to think out loud about what adaptive thinking looks like and what some of the principles might be for for fire science and and particularly how synthetic thinking like pyrogiography could become more prominent. So the global fire crisis. This is some work that I'm doing with crystal cold and and the reinsurer Munich re and we're seeing a steady but uneven increase in fatalities, fire events, economic costs, numbers of disasters, and some work we did a few years ago where we looked at truly extreme energetic fires and the disastrous fires and the top 500 energetic events and those which were disastrous we saw a concerning feature and that is that the little triangles, the red triangles are also concentrated in areas which are notorious for fire, but they're also projected to be going to a global fire crisis. So we really have the makings for an ongoing and escalating global fire crisis. And so that leads us to what we're now calling the black summer fires, the fires we've just been through. We are truly extreme fire season and for for considering that since the black Saturday fires 2009 and then here in Tasmania, the fire which saw the first pyrocumulus nimbus the fire thunderstorm which destroyed a village 2013 the wilderness fire in 2016 and then another burst of wilderness fires in 2019. Last year we had basically a continual a continual fire crisis actually went from Tasmania back to northern New South Wales and worked itself back down to Tasmania again. One of the things that I'd like to point out about this summer's fires is that there's something really peculiar about them. And that is there where they fit geographically in the top two plots on the left hand side. So we're seeing the density of where fires are in a climate space of temperature and mean annual precipitation. And we're seeing where the temperate forests to green are, and that basically these fires were concentrated in forests and in another way of looking that in geographical space, you can see the fires were concentrated in some of the most productive environments in Tasmania the forests on the east coast Tasmania, Australia, the east coast of Australia. And that is a very arid continent. These are the most productive environments. And I think right at the outset we need to be clear about something that these ecological systems eucalyptus forests have a very, very ancient pedigree and adaptation to fire. So it's not that these fires were unusual in the sense of their occurrence. These are a fire adapted system that the phylogenetic analysis we did of the epicomic buds, this unusual capacity of eucalypts to bounce back from rebuilding their canopies. The evidence is that goes back for at least 60 million years in the eucalyptus clay. So what makes us think that this black summer fire event was really unusual? Let's think of some of the causes and the consequences. And the causes actually fairly simple. It was just extraordinarily dry. The gray and dark gray bands are standard deviations and that's an index of fuel dryness. Basically, the place was really crackling dry waiting for ignitions that there was no rain. And so if there were ignitions, they were going to be basically gigantic fires. And that's precisely what happened. The ignitions, some were lightning, some were anthropogenic. But basically once the fuel was lit, there was basically an unbounded opportunity for something between five to more than 10 million hectares of forest burn in one fire season, which is just a mind bending amount of burning over about a five month period. Now, what was also concerning about these fires is that the pyrocumular nimbus, the pyro-CBs, as we call them, really classically were a black swan event. They're very rare. But in this fire season, we had something like 35 pyrocumular nimbus, which is pretty well, you know, doubling or if not an enormous contribution to the known pyrocumular nimbus fire events in Australia. There was just an extraordinary number of these events. This is a view from the International Space Station, these events punching up into the stratosphere. And one of the most extraordinary things about that was that the smoke vended a complete lap and a bit more around the Southern Hemisphere. Smoke alarms went off in Auckland, deposits of ash on glaciers in New Zealand and in South America. The smoke went right around and came back to Australia, which is just an astonishing thought that the quantities of smoke which were emitted. And that smoke exposed most of the Australian population, certainly the city-based population, to episodic and dangerous levels of smoke. So, you know, you would have seen the photographs of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra. Sometimes the worst air quality in the world was being recorded in these cities exposing the Australian population to this hazard. So, there's some of the things which I think we can be very clear about. But the politics of this became very complicated, particularly in real time, because we were asked to provide commentaries. You know, was this unusual? Was it within historical variability? What was the role of climate change? Was it the effect of fuel management? Was it the effect of forest legacies, cessation of Aboriginal burning, arsonists? How many animals were killed? You know, was Australia – were the bushfires basically a major greenhouse gas emitter? These were all very real-life political issues. The problem was that actually we don't know. That's the problem. The problem is that the hosing down those political debates in real time was impossible and, subsequently, it's still very difficult. And I would argue that you can't have bushfire adaptation without evidence-based policy. That's absolutely critical that we need that, but to have that, you've got to have good evidence. So here's just an illustration of the problem, that there are all these numbers out there of how large the fires were. To know how large the fires were, you need to know their geographical domain. You need to know when the fire season began and ended, you need to have some reliable method of mapping and classifying fires. And, basically, it's completely and utterly shambolic. Because it's shambolic, we actually don't know the consequences of these fires because that's just the area of burnt. We don't know the severity, the intensity. So what we need is nationally consistent data on extent and severity. We need data on the historical context of the fire regime, the economic costs, the causes, whether it was arson or lightning, the biodiversity impacts. We need consistent mapping. We need to understand carbon stocks, emission factors, fuel loads, and smoke exposure. And basically, it's completely chaotic. It's all been done piecemeal between competing approaches, competing teams, competing states. There is no national consistency. Therefore, no coherence. Therefore, an impossibility of putting out political dispute about what this fire event really was about. So there is an opportunity. The Australian government has commissioned the Royal Commission, which is the highest inquiry for the Australian government. It has incredible powers. It can summons evidence. Indeed, I was summons to give evidence. And it asks very deep and profound questions about legislative reform, the need for legislative and social innovation, improving environmental management, recognising Aboriginal past and present practices, trying to understand how to put fire management into some sort of economic sustainability. But most fundamentally, it's begging the question of evidence-based fire management. But I would argue you can't do that without data. What, in fact, the Royal Commission is going to do is put a dragnet through opinion. It's going to collect a lot of opinion, but it won't know how much of that opinion is just opinion sensation and how much of it is actually evidence. And, you know, evidence that can be relied on to build policy. So what is adaptive thinking? What do we need to do to get out of the global fire crisis we're in? What I think we need to do is we actually need to completely reimagine fire management to go back to the beginning and ask ourselves what is the mess we're in and what do we want to envisage? How could we make a better world? Because without a clear vision statement, without good data, we're just rowing around in circles. And I think a really good example of this is the cultural burning event which is occurring at the moment in Australia, a huge issue politically that Aboriginal people are standing up and saying, hang on, we are a stakeholder in this. We have an ancient practice and an ancient tradition. You must engage with us now because you're failing to manage this landscape. A very fascinating book has just been published by an Aboriginal man, Victor Steff-Officin, How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia. Now, I think this aspirational vision is fantastic, but there's a danger that if that vision becomes decoupled from evidence, we have to ground our vision in evidence. We need nationally consistent data. We need evidence-based policy. So to conclude, we are going to adapt to a global fire crisis and there is a global fire crisis. I assure you I've lived through one. And this is going to require holistic thinking about the environmental, the social, the historical context. It requires data collection and analysis. It requires economic analysis. It requires cross-cultural research, engagement with different communities that have been marginalised. And most fundamentally, it requires synthetic and holistic thinking that spans biophysical and social domains. So that's what I call pyrography. That's what I think adaptive thinking is. And that will lead to pyrographic practice and it will lead to pyrographic outcomes and it will create a virtuous circle. Thank you. Thanks a lot, David. That was really interesting to talk. And I see that we have a question to you and that's concerning the data collection in Australia. So what do you think is the course for having these different numbers and different type of data around? So Australia is a country where you experience frequent pyres, not just last year or last summer, but regularly. So why are these data collections so difficult? So the reason for the complexity of the data is that because we are a federation, a form of British colonies, each state and territory has actually developed its own systems. And this crisis, this summer, brought this problem into a head because the fires did not recognise the state borders. Normally, the geographical domain of a fire would be just within a state and therefore there would be an internally consistent body of data. But this fire actually demanded, and that's why there's a Royal Commission, demanded a national perspective because a state perspective was completely overwhelmed because these fires were occurring simultaneously in different states. There was no human being other than maybe the people, the astronauts, who could actually have a really coherent perspective of what was happening in Australia. There was so much happening at once and there was no national centre to make sense of all of the data input. Okay, then we have to move over to the next speaker. Thank you. Thanks, David, sorry. Good, so now it's Paye Johnson's plur here. She is a doctor and working at the MacKenzie Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania and she will provide us some insight on human health issues related to the smoke and we are really happy that you could join us here because you are also working in parallel on the COVID-19, which is also important, so even more nice that you are with us here. Thank you, thanks for that introduction and thanks for having me, lovely to be here. I'm mostly going to talk about a quick analysis we did of the smoke from the recent summer fires. I've spent a lot of time thinking about public health impacts of fires and of course there are very many impacts from loss of housing, loss of livelihoods, loss of infrastructure and power, for example. The mental health trauma of living through a severe event, so the impacts on health manifest in very many different ways and one of the ones that is sometimes less obvious but quite important is the smoke generated by the fires and that's something I've been working on for some time. So what I'll do now, because our last season illustrated this quite dramatically is just share with you what we did at the time to try and understand how big the impacts were across Australia and compare that to the previous 20 fire seasons. So I'll walk through what we did. So I'll give a bit of background. My background is health, not fire or geography so it'll be brief but I'll give a bit of context. Explain how I calculated health and economic impacts and then show the previous 20 years. So the setting here is Australia and I have a simplistic view of Australia. In the north it's tropical and the fires there are dry season in our winter months and they tend to be small, they're savanna fires. They're important for carbon emissions, an area burned but they're less important for public health impacts because so few people live in the north and they tend to be small and knock cause the huge disasters. So my talk is going to be entirely about the severe fires we get in the temperate south where we get large dense forests of largely eucalyptus trees. And the next slide just walks through what I did and I'll show you another slide first basically we had a lot of fires over summer. How unusual were they? It was a recurrent question. Certainly the smoke was more extreme than anything I've experienced in 20 years of studying smoke. So what we did was step one, we had to try and work out exactly how much smoke there was and how many people got exposed and how bad it was for how long in each city affected by the smoke and in fact it was 90% of the population of Australia that got some smoke at some point. Then work out the health outcomes and smoke has a lot of impacts. It's subtle. It's subtle until you're already vulnerable because you have asthma or because you have heart disease or you're at high risk of a heart attack and then your body's response to the stress of the smoke can cause your asthma to get worse. That one's obvious. You can feel how irritating the smoke is but it can make your blood more likely to clot and cause a heart attack or a stroke and most deaths relating to smoke are in fact more to do with the heart than to do with the lungs. These relationships have been studied. Smoke's got hundreds of chemicals but the one that drives the vast majority of health impacts are the suspended particles often abbreviated to PM, particulate matter and the relationships between the amount of particles in the air and health outcomes like death rates have been studied for years and they're well established and whether they come from traffic or come from smoke the relationships are remarkably consistent so if you know the amount of smoke and how many people are affected you can actually get a reasonably good estimate of what happened in the population even before you've had time to get the health data sets and analyse them carefully and then you can use standard economic approaches for attributing a cost and that's a helpful thing to do because in the context of fire disasters it's often quite rare. Costs of suppression, costs of loss of housing are routinely quantified. It's less common to work out the cost of the smoke. So to give you some more context here's one estimate of area burned in the top left and I'm only now showing data for the southern half of Australia and the top right is the population density so you can see the population is along the east and the south and that matched very closely where the vast majority of the fires were. There were some fires in the desert where nobody lives there were some fires in the west but it was an almost perfect match of 80% of our population with this huge area burned. So we took air stations all these blue dots on the bottom left where they're monitors that measure the amount of smoke and if there was a monitor that was in a statistical area used by our Census, our Bureau of Statistics or one nearby we took data for the last 20 years but that's how we defined our study period it was where there was access to air quality data for many years in the populated centres but in fact we monitor air quality where people live and this approach captured 90% of Australians just with those areas shaded on the bottom right-hand side and then if you combine this data to get a population made at average David showed you this figure the orange line at the bottom is our usual background in summer the red line is our air quality standard and the blue line is the daily average exposure for all Australians so this is quite dramatic it doesn't look dramatic it only goes to 100 but in fact the smoke moved so some places were experiencing like a thousand like a thousand times background while other places were okay and then the smoke would move somewhere else the daily average for the whole country or our whole study period so having it elevated for this many months affecting so many people is actually quite a dramatic difference from any previous year and this is how we applied the health impacts as I mentioned before the relationships relative risk if you look at the heading of the column on the right-hand side per 10 that's the relative risk per 10 unit increase in the particular concentration the measure of smoke and roughly they've actually all got very similar risk relationships and it's roughly a 1% increase in deaths a 1% increase in admissions to hospital for heart disease and admissions to hospital for lung disease per 10 unit rise so our background level is about 6 the 10 unit rise takes us to 16 the 20 unit rise would take us to our air quality standard and then we managed to exceed that by another order of magnitude the only difference is for asthma emergency department the tendencies it's a 6% rise it's a much stronger relationship with lung outcomes generally than with other outcomes and then each of these had a cost and these were standard units that the Australian hospital pricing authority will pay to a hospital for one admission for a cardiovascular problem and that's $7,000 and they'll pay a similar amount for admission for a respiratory problem for an emergency department visit they'll pay 700 that's a lot cheaper and then deaths were valued using the value of a statistical life which in Australian dollars is 4.4 million this is based on willingness to pay to delay death it's not based on age or underlying health status or how much longer you might have to live but it's a standard way of valuing death used globally and used in very similar assessments so it's a way of giving context it's not really intended to be truth but you can add up all these costs and then you've got a way of comparing health impacts across years with one single figure that incorporates both death and hospital use and I might just add at this point this assessment we did was based on where we do have good data and known relationships there's an awful lot of other health impacts where we don't understand the relationships like attendances to a family physician or loss of work time or some rare diseases, infections that might be associated with smoke so they're not included in this assessment okay sorry three tables in a row for the season that began it went over our summer it began in well the first fires really began at the end of July which is in the middle of our winter we had some peat bogs that had dried out so much that caught fire and then we had early fires a bit south of those peat bogs which was in New South Wales and then they just grew rapidly with many more fires eventually affecting nearly every state in the country so it was over the fire season a five month period we calculated 1156 admissions to hospital for cardiovascular problems so their problems like a heart attack or a stroke or an abnormal heart rhythm we calculated a 2084 excess admissions for lung problems respiratory problems like asthma or pneumonia or chronic lung disease and we calculated 1,333 excess visits for asthma to an emergency department and 431 deaths premature deaths they're all attributable to the smoke from these fires so this removed any impact of background air pollution and these were what were attributable to the fires and then the costs of course are dominated by the costs of premature mortality because that's valued so much greater than the healthcare costs this figure shows the cumulative costs so the dollar value day by day throughout every fire season for the last 20 years so the line in red shows the most recent fire season where you can see the rapid increase and it plateaus at about 2 billion Australian dollars and then with the previous 15 seasons they're all considerably lower and in fact most of them are about an order of magnitude they're between zero and 200 million dollars then there were five other big seasons our previous one 2002 to 2003 and then a complete anomaly in the smoke and health impacts that we got in the previous year okay and here's another way of seeing the same thing showing year by year the costs and this shows the different states of Australia and we can see the biggest impacts in New South Wales and Victoria which are the two most populated states with very dense forests close to a lot of people so this kind of analysis isn't truth it's an estimate of impacts there's a lot of work that's coming out of this and a lot of epidemiological studies and that they will be essential including some of the big unknowns in health risks what happens if you're pregnant you get severe smoke exposure or very young what does the future hold for you there have been almost no studies following people through time after living through a big pollution event like this so the epidemiology and the work to come is going to be essential but it does give us a ballpark estimate it does enable us to compare with previous episodes but just a reminder that there's always limitations the way we estimated the exposure was averaging ground-based monitors because there's many techniques you can use satellite data, chemical transport modelling but we didn't have access to those for the rapidly or for the entire 20-year period the response functions the coefficients we used and all the other health outcomes we weren't able to measure are not a part of this analysis but I think we can say it was an unprecedented season the impacts were enormous it seemed to be a watershed in perceptions in the community of the problem with climate change what climate change might actually mean in reality for people's lives and many epidemiologists and health and politicians became interested in thiosmoke epidemiology which is a good thing because it's only going to increase so I think I can leave it there thank you very much and I'm sorry about the internet thank you Faye and the internet is of course not your problem but just a really quick question that was coming up in the box so what is the relationship between the exposure to the PM 2.5 and the heart problems so can you answer maybe quickly on that why is that related to heart issues the mechanism so when you breathe in, so these particles are tiny they go into your lungs they can move into the bloodstream the body recognises them as it might recognise a virus or an injury it will stimulate the defence systems the immune systems of the body and that has many good things about it because if there's a germ or a bacteria it will kill it it will bring more blood if you're bleeding to death it will help you because it will make your blood clot more easily but all those responses that can help you in one situation can harm you in another situation so it causes a lot of inflammation it makes the blood more likely to clot if you're already at high risk of a heart attack maybe because you smoke maybe because you're unlucky with your genetics it can be what precipitates your heart attack or your stroke it can make your heart beat become irregular and can cause death through that pathway so through very small changes in a normal system for people at high risk smoke nearly always will affect people at high risk it's unusual for healthy people to have a problem that they don't recover from except maybe if they're a newborn baby and their systems are still developing but really it will set off a serious event so it's uncommon but when an entire population is exposed there are so many of us at high risk of a heart attack for example that you will get a measurable increase in these kind of problems okay, yeah thanks a lot then we move over to the next speaker and I will also hand over to Gita Lasslopp introducing the speaker hello everyone I will just put up a screen welcome to the webinar also from my side it's my pleasure to introduce the next speaker who is Gita Wanderbeef and he's a full professor at the Free University of Amsterdam you can see some information on this slide here and he really did groundbreaking research about the role of fire on the global carbon cycle his work is mainly based on remote sensing and he generated remote sensing data sets and contributed to the development of remote sensing data sets that really form the basis for many fields of research for ecologists but also for people who try to model fire occurrence and also as input data sets for atmospheric science so it's really a great pleasure that he agreed that he would contribute to this symposium and he will talk today about fire climate interactions in the warming world well thanks Gita these kind words, let's see if we can get this going so my talk today will be basically about global maps of emissions, wind area and I like to put the year 2019 in perspective so this work we're doing with the GFED team and GFED is the Global Fire Emissions Database we meet every two weeks and we always start with maps of the area trying to see what we can improve on those and that's a lot of work done by Lois Giglio and Jim Nendersen for the people not familiar with these maps do the things that you really immediately see out of Savannah State Park out here, 1500% burning every year the lower bar basically shows the fire return time so everything in that burns frequently and then if you go and move towards the forest you see that's really burning but the thing that strikes me always here is like hey, the whole world basically burns months in a while the problem is that we don't know the actual burnt area this is a few graphs showing what we think is going on so this is some old data from MODIS relatively large fires and detected really well by this data we see about 300 million actors globally burnt so that's the size of India for example but at some point we realized we realized that there's a lot of small fires being undetected by this burnt area people start to incorporate this and more recent estimates of burnt area are a little bit higher etc but the key question still what is the actual burnt area we map large fires reasonably well but we have problems with the smaller ones some information on how this might look like may come from Africa we have the same sequence we have some older burnt area data sets then we include small fires and you see the burnt area increases and the most recent burnt area data based on course resolution data already shows a little bit of an increase but for Africa we do have some estimates of the full burnt area this is work done by the fire CCI based on burnt data at all and you see over here there's actually a pretty big increase in burnt area if you include all those small fires so that's really cutting edge research I think of the next years we have wall to wall local burnt area based on this high quality relatively high resolution data so that's the first step if you want to get emissions burnt area then we have to multiply them with basically the biomass load you can imagine the fire in Savannah releases much less emissions per unit burnt area than the fire in the forest and that's the map shown over here where you see basically inverse relation with burnt area places the burnt fire frequently in general burnt grasses so the emissions per unit burnt area are lower if you combine it to previous maps so burnt area and multiply them with the fuel consumption you get actually what I'm talking about rest of this talk is emissions you recognize the patterns that were shown in the first graph but what really stands out now is that the forests have a larger value so they have relatively low burnt area but because of so much fuel consumption they really pop up here and also look for example at Indonesia we have very high fuel consumption because you're only also burnt on organic soils and the same applies to some regions in the boreal so this is a map of average over the last 20 years and let's move on to 2019 what the map shown over here is basically what happened in 2019 related to what happened in the previous years everything in blue shows lower burnt area or lower emissions than the climatology and the thing that really stands out for example out of Savannah regions and that's part of an ongoing trend where we see basically frequently burning Savannahs being converted to agricultural lands which leads to a decline in burnt area so that's what's going on over at least the past 10 years and probably a longer period so you see not of area but as less emissions in 2019 compared to other years but if you look a little bit more in detail and let's do this in a chronological sequence you see in 2019 first we have high fire emissions in that Siberia pretty far north actually in the Arctic Circle then the Amazon came in the news with relatively high emissions in Indonesia as well and of course we just heard about Australia and talked everything so let's go and have a look at those regions and the first thing I'd like to sort of show is how important the length of the time series is because I think one of the reasons why South America was so much in the news was basically this news report by BBC saying that Amazon fires increased by more than 80% and that's also what we see in the data, if you compare 2018 2019 we see an increase of 80% if you look at the longer records you see that 2019 was not as anomalous as you would expect from the news reports and if you go even further back in time you see that of other years that were substantially higher and then if you get the full observational records and this is starting in 97 based on satellite data and going back using proxy data for example visibility you see that 2019 was a relatively high fire year but it wasn't a record year you see an overall increase over the last decades and this is something you see in other regions as well but you also see that 2019 was not as exceptional as you would think however that doesn't mean that there was nothing going on because if you look at the Brazilian Amazon big fire years for example 2005 2007-2010 you see how you mentioned because there is a drought that leading to a lot of fires but for the rest it's mostly driven by deforestation and you see deforestation declined after the 2000s and in most recent years you see deforestation increasing again and that's what we're worried about basically the increase in fires that we see now are related to more deforestation and like the fire records it's also important for example if you look at Alaska if you look at the G-fed time series so 97 through now you see a lot of variability from year to year but it's difficult to say whether fires are on the rise or not if you include earlier years and this is based on NASA data you do see that the last decades were definitely higher fire than previous decades partly related to warming some of Africa for example looked at this and also shown that it's not just warming leading to a longer dry season and to higher fuels but also because of more lightning you get more fires so the length of the fire record really matters the last three beaches I'd like to look at is Siberia, Indonesia and Australia just putting them in perspective what happened in 2019 compared to earlier years so Russia if you look at all of Russia 2019 was a high fire year but not exceptional but what I've done is I've tried to see which part of the fires were happening actually in Arctic region and then you suddenly see that 2019 was really exceptional there's an increase in trend in fires 2019 was by far larger than any other year Indonesia you really see the influence of El Nino all the big fires are big El Nino except 2019 this was actually one of the first years when you had a relatively high fire year that was not related to El Nino or Australia we just heard about you see in dark blue basically the fires more in the northern part of the country also benefires burn very frequently but then you see also the part in South Wales and Victoria where you really had an exceptional fire year so to some degree 2019 was unprecedented definitely in the Arctic definitely in South Australia's forests but what made 2019 so special was that a lot of regions had anomalous fire emissions so normally every year has some region that burns more than average 2019 just saw a combination of many regions that burned much more than we used to and that brings me basically to my final set of slides what I've done is make time series starting with burnt area and just normalize them and this is something that has been known for a few years quite a few papers have been studying this saying okay there's a decline in burnt area that's basically driven by Susanna's mostly in Africa and South America if you look at emissions then you get a little bit of different story yes there's a decline and it depends on the time series you take 97, 98 into account but you see that the decline is much smaller than the decline in burnt area and if you look for example at something like carbon monoxide emissions there's a signal of incomplete combustion in forests and organic soil actually there's a slight increase although I guess the statistics are really poor but the key message here is is that the global decline we see in burnt area is not the company by a global decline in emissions and the underlying reason basically is that Susanna's are driving this burnt area signal but other regions for example forests are driving the emissions so there's a compensating effect with the decline in Susanna's leading to lower emissions at the same time you see an increase especially if you take the 70s and 80s into account in both deforestation zones and some often more quarry forest regions basically to my conclusion I think biogeography, depending on how we define it but it has been changing over the past decades and I think it will continue to do so Susanna fires you see decrease related to increased population density at the same time forest fires are on the rise for the deforestation zones the rise has been mostly from the 60s to 70s towards the current periods but also there's a lot of literature now showing that in the boreal region we see more fires also something like the temperate region for example Australia we see more fires than we saw in the past also means that the length of the fire record really matters I showed the example for South America if you focus on two years in a very variable system it's very difficult to say something about roads and the trends I think 2019 was exceptional and basically because you see multiple regions that had above average fire prevention so it's not just something we see in other years but sometimes in Asia it burns more sometimes in South America it burns more in 2019 you see several heat fire regions really but more and maybe a final note I guess this is far from perfect and I hope see everybody in person soon but I think we as a scientific community really have to think like hey can we improve the amount of meetings and make sure that we keep our CO2 levels low thank you yeah thank you Guido for this very interesting insight in what you learned based on the remote sensing over the last couple of years so there's one question by Zeb Breitenbach and he's asking whether you can loot a bit to fire intensity which is certainly also an important aspect of fire regimes have you also looked into fire intensity measures or can you draw conclusions on fire intensity based on your analysis not really on our analysis I mean that quite a few people including David Bowman for example they looked at FRP and they see that for a unit fire basically intensity increase in some regions but I'm not a person to say something conclusive about this and then another quick question maybe is by Benjamin Vallibald how does it how do CO2 emissions by forest fires compare with the fossil CO2 emissions yeah what we estimate that CO2 emissions from fires in total are about 20% of global fossil fuel emissions but that's not a fair comparison because for example, you get CO2 emissions and then this consecutive wet season CO2 will be taken up by regrowth so if you want to do a fair comparison you should only take deforestation fires into account and that's about 5% of total global fossil fuel emissions yeah then thank you again for taking the time and preparing the presentation answering the questions and then I would like to continue with our next speaker who's Christina Santin yeah Christina is an associate professor at Swansea University in UK and research focuses on the impacts of fire on soil and hydrology and she's doing fieldwork as you can see in this nice picture but she also connects to doing research on the global scale so she provided a very nice review on the fate of the solid pyrogenic carbon and with her work she bridges between local and global scales but also between for instance soil science and atmospheric sciences and so today she will talk about what happens after the fire thank you Gita and let me see if I can do this correctly yeah so can you hear me well yeah so good morning everyone and thanks to the conveners for organizing this fire symposium and for inviting me to participate I want to talk a little bit about the environmental aspect of fire and I'm going to do that by using two of the main actors after the fire and these are charcoal and ash before that I would like to remark that fire can have many forms we have seen that in the previous talks already so we can have this devastating huge intense wildfires but we can also have low intensity natural wildfires and of course we also have many different forms of man made fire so because fire is a different range of things it can also lead to a different and wide range of environmental effects today I'm not going to talk about effects in animals and plants I think Orsi is going to cover some of that in her talk next and I'm not going to talk either about the impact on soils that can be really really important so as I said I'm going to focus on something else but also I included here in this slide some pictures to remind us that not all the environmental effects of fires are actually negative and in many ecosystems around the world fire is an important part of their natural cycle and actually some key animal and plant species need fire to survive so moving on now to the topic of this talk charcoal and ash in a post fire landscape I chose this because these are quite ubiquitous in the post fire environment so if I ask all of you to imagine a landscape burned it doesn't really matter what type of landscape and what type of fire you choose but I'm pretty sure you all will have some ash and some black char stuff around so let's start with the black component so the fire derived organic materials after a fire are again they are a huge range of components they can be tiny little particles that go into the smoke as soot or black carbon they can also be tiny particles that go into the water like carbon or we can have the typical charcoal that we can see in this picture here coming from a group but all of them we tend to talk about them as perogenic carbon so it comprises all of them in one single word so perogenic carbon has many effects in the post fire environment and I'm going to just talk briefly about three of the I think are the key ones regarding the perogenic carbon mechanical functions to start with the most probably or at least to me the most important for sure the best study is the carbon sequestration ability of perogenic carbon what is this so through burning through charring the plant molecules become more chemically recalcitrant and that means that it is more difficult for the microorganisms to degrade these molecules so when this material into soils, into sediments and into waters many times not all of them but a big proportion of them we take longer to degrade than the other materials and therefore they can be seen additional carbon sink so if they have carbon sequestration potential so this is important to have into account because it's true that a huge proportion of the carbon is emitted by fire as Guido explained earlier but we have also some carbon that it actually going into the environment to be stored for longer periods of time this is just just a soil profile with layers that are up to 8000 years old so another important function of perogenic carbon is due to the high bio oil it will improve the water holding capacity of the soil the gas exchanges in the soil and as you can see in this picture over here sometimes it can even help as a refugee for some microbes so in a nutshell it sometimes and again it's not always but many times it increases microbial activity in soils the third important mechanical function of perogenic carbon is through sorption reactions and this is really important because it will affect a lot of biochemical cycles in the environment cycling of nutrients organic compounds and it also changes the composition of the native soil organic matter in soils so it makes sometimes it makes this organic matter decompose in a faster and sometimes slower and I really like this picture over here because this is an experiment that was done 100 years ago or a bit more where it actually proved that by including charcoal in the soil you can also have an increase of plant productivity it is also important although it's not so well studied that perogenic carbon can be also a source of pollutants like poly-aromatic hydrocarbons but also very recently with Gabriel Sigmund from Vienna University we have been looking at the concentrations of the environmental persistent free radicals in charcoal so these are new trends that are starting in research and that I'm sure they will be further developed so this is my last slide talking about the black component of perogenic carbon and it's about its global significance and I wanted to put this here because over the last decade or so there have been quite a lot of debate whether perogenic carbon is important enough in quantity in low terms to really be more considerate and we did this study last year with DIBO so we use DIBO as a database to produce the first especially geographically production around the world and you can see here that the amount of perogenic carbon produced every year is equivalent to around 11% of the carbon emitted by fire so I think this really proves that this the global significance of perogenic carbon so if we now move into the white component the ash I have to start by saying that ash is not always white so it can be sometimes like in this picture when you have a very complete combustion of the fuel but generally speaking what we have is more what we can see this other picture where ash or wildfire wildland fire ash is a mix of mineral and charroganit material so it can actually have a lot of perogenic carbon in it so talking about on-site environmental effect of ash the main one is actually an increase of soil fertility and this is because when we have so the nutrients that are in the vegetation when the vegetation burns most of the carbon, oxygen and hydrogen is emitted but most of the other elements get actually concentrated in the trash so these nutrients can improve soil fertility as I said and also ash has a very high pH what can lead to lime in effect that is important especially for poor acidic soils and this knowledge is actually not new at all because it's the underlying principle of the traditional agricultural practice of slash and burn so basically where people burn their crops and let the ash there to help fertilizing the next generation of crops but because the ash has really high concentrations of many different elements it's also a very important pollution source and this is especially relevant if we consider the off-site environmental effect of ash so let's imagine let's go back to our postfire landscape we have this ash layer on the ground that is highly mobile it's going to be moved with wind and also with water and when this happens it can lead a lot of different environmental effects. Just to give a few examples here it has already been improved and actively being involved in the generation of debris flows as in this picture here it can also lead to really negative impact on freshwater ecosystems I don't know if you can see but these are all fish that are dead this was this happened in Australia a few months ago after the fire and the after the fire it took a lot of ash and sediment into the river basically suffocating the fish and also ash can be an important threat for drinking water so this is a picture of again in Australia a reservoir that had a lot of input of ash after a fire and because we have seen that ash is really enriched in nutrients it can increase the algae growth and even get into as we can see here algae blooms that obviously have really nasty consequences for drinking water. I just want to finish my presentation with an example coming back to Australia sadly enough it's quite we all need to talk about this unprecedented fire season and I want to show you here this was one of the fires in January 2020 that burned really close to Sydney and if you can see here in blue this is the main or the largest reservoir for the whole Sydney it burned around 30% of the catchment this specific fire and probably as you all know too after the Australian fires they also experience a record torrential rains so again if we think about all these things that we have now in the landscape and this is highly mobile what happened is a lot of it was transport within the landscape and eventually into the reservoir so in this picture over here you can see that the water is actually pretty dark because of all the floating material many of it much of it pyrogenic that was in the surface of the reservoir research group was and is still working very closely with the water company there so we were trying to help them anticipating the potential implications for drinking water they are prepared because this area of failure as we have seen is quite fire from and even if these were unprecedented fire they had already mechanisms that they could put in place so this for example was a boom net just to try to stop the sediment advancing into the reservoir and they had many other mechanisms that I can't discuss here but anyway made the water closer to the dam not that affected by the ash so I wanted to finish with this slide because again this is an unprecedented event but we are seeing more of this and we will be seeing more and more of these in the future and not only in these fire prone areas that at least at the extent they are adapted fire we are starting to see in these in other areas as a Kido show where fire is not so common so we really need to get ready and prepare for this so that's all from my end thank you very much for listening thank you very much Christina for this presentation on these important impacts of ash and charcoal and I think it again highlights the need for interdisciplinary research also and the importance of having such a symposium here and so the first question that I would like to ask you is by Lobke Rothevel and the question is how long does the fertilizing effect last after fires well that's a really good question it doesn't last very long so the increase in nutrients maybe for a few weeks and months and the pH effect can last for a bit longer maybe up to a couple of years but these effects are usually a short term and then maybe another quick question by Zeb Breitenbach it's about the global distribution map of pyrogenic carbon that you showed and he's asking how do you measure pyrogenic carbon globally yeah so this study that again we did with Kido and John Matthews was the main author in it so what we did was to compile a database with our own field data and also data from previous studies from all around the world so different pyrogenic carbon figures from many ecosystems and of course the database was very good but it was not complete so we had to make some assumptions and extrapolations so basically it's coming from only field data and I would really like to continue asking these questions so thanks to everyone who's putting up these questions here but I think we should move to our last speaker our last speaker is Oshoya Michael and she is a research group leader at the center for ecology in Hungary and research compliments the talks before by investigating the role of fire in landscape management and nature conservation and with this we include in the symposium beside climate change also linked to another grand social challenge and that is the loss of biodiversity and so hopefully she may also give some insights how the global fire crisis can be faced in the future and so in her talk she will explain to us the contradictory role of fire in nature conservation thank you very much Gitta for the introduction and in my talk I would like to introduce the differential role of fire in nature conservation and tell you some examples about our research related to the fire effects on plants and animals so as we all know fire is a globally very relevant disturbance and for the point of view of the animals and plants it's a very important biomass consumer and also it factors the biogeochemical cycles in several ways that is why many plant and animal species develop several different evolutionary adaptations to cope with fire and to co-exist with fire as it was already said by David and Cristina and there are many fire pronical systems were applied but in our era there are several human use changes in the fire regimes so we people modify for example the ignition probability of the fires due to the global climate change and due to the global change of fuel availability there are a lot of human use changes in the ignition probability also we change fire regimes in several ways through the land use changes and human mediated changes in the landscape composition and also there are several direct human effects on the fire regimes such as we said a lot of arson, the technical fires, illegal burning and of course the fire suppression measures are also important in current fire and what are the effects of fire on the flora and fauna we can categorize the effects to two major groups the first order effects include immediate effects for example the death or injury of the plant or animal individuals which can be very detrimental for the individuals but can have different effects on the population also there are several second order fire effects which modify the environment of the plants and animals for example modify the microclimate the micro bioactivity, the productivity and many other things so the effect of fire on the flora and fauna depend on two major components the biotic factors and the fire regimes and their interaction so what are these biotic factors for example several attributes of the ecosystems the phenology, mobility, adaptations and regeneration potential of the plants and animals and these interact with the fire regime components for example if you look at these nice bird species the lapwing it can easily escape from fire when it is adult and it can fly but of course the chicks cannot easily escape so this is an example of the interaction of the biotic factors and the fire regime components let's see some examples from our researches for example the fire frequency so in these nice foot hill steppe grasslands in Hungary we found that very frequent and yearly burning leads to the very important degradation of these grasslands we found that if we burn the grasslands annually then the biomass of weed and disturbance and plant species increases and the biomass of specialist plant species which are the most important for the conservation it decreases but in the same ecosystem fire can also have a positive effect so for example we found that if the fire is not in every year just occasional it decreases significantly the amount of litter and this decreased amount of litter can be very good and it can support the germination of specialist and protected plant species such as this very nice flower Positila grandis another example is about the timing of the fire these pictures show several endangered and protected plant species early spring early spring geophytes which are protected at the European level and if the fire occurs in the early spring it can have their germination if the fire occurs when these species are flowering then it can be very detrimental for them an interesting fact that for example in Central Europe many people just do illegal burns during the Easter time so it's very important in the calendar but time is the Easter if Easter is early in the spring it's not so detrimental for plant species but if it's in the late spring then many species can be damaged by the illegal burning another example of the for the timing of the fire this bird species is the great bastard the largest European bird species which is endangered and protected and it's a ground breeding bird so if the fire occurs in the nesting season it's very detrimental for it but we found that if the fire occurs in early spring it creates very optimal sites for mating of the species and it can be very good for another example is about the extent and severity of the fire in this very nice open landscape in eastern Hungary we found that burning in small plots 50 by 50 meters in the dormant season can be very good for the nature conservation viewpoint we found increased plant diversity more flowering shoots increased litter increased green biomass after this small scale burning and it did not affect the negative with the soil dwelling earth reports because they could easily escape and recolonize these small burn plots but in the same ecosystem if there is a very large and severe fire then it can cause very large changes and higher mortality rate and it's very difficult for the animals to recolonize the large burn areas so if we know these facts about the fire regimes and their interactions with the ecosystem attributes we can use the fire wisely for protecting several components of the biodiversity if we manipulate and control the fire regime components by prescribed burning to achieve specific conservation goals and the prescribed burning is a widely applied conservation tool for example in prairies or conifer forests or heathlands but in Europe it's rather rarely applied and very rarely applied in grasslands so I would like to show to introduce you our review about the prescribed burning in European grasslands where we wanted to evaluate the European results of prescribed burning studies in grasslands and compare it to the North American studies because in North America prescribed burning has a very long tradition and it is applied for many conservation problems very successfully and I will summarize the studies which are dealing with prescribed burning in Europe you can see that there are very few studies I would like to highlight only one important thing that most of these studies were conducted for many many years and they used yearly burning so it means that they burned the same plots for 20 or 28 years which is a logical experimental setup but it doesn't resemble the natural fire regimes so that is why most of these studies found that burning is not proper for conserving the European grasslands but I would like to stress that yes, yearly burning is not proper but perhaps some sophistication of the burning regime can be a good solution for some natural conservation problems we established four objectives for which prescribed burning might be a good option in European grasslands after careful testing the first objective is the reduction of accumulated biomass because the dormant season fires can effectively remove the litter and we have to make sure that we do not apply too frequent burning because it might result in untargeted species composition and we should test the proper fire return periods before application another important objective could be the supporting of several target species because the literature mentioned several positive effects on certain species but for this we need more case studies focusing on particular species another good objective could be the management of open landscapes because fire can effectively suppress wood encroachment in open landscapes and the combination of grazing and fire management can be a very good tool for increasing landscape scale heterogeneity and functional diversity and finally the last objective could be the control of invasive and alien species this is not much studied in Europe but from North America we have several positive examples and we think that it could be very important and interesting to test the use of fire for several invasive species control programs in Europe so to conclude this talk I would like to mention that the evaluation of fire effects on the biodiversity largely depends on the ecosystem attributes and on the fire regime the same fire regime can have different effects on different ecosystems and in the same ecosystem different fire regimes can have very different effects so that is why we would need respect bonding experiments to understand more the effects of fire on the biodiversity and this way we could develop effective measures for minimizing the negative effects of fire and arson and we could test the effectiveness of a potentially feasible alternative management tool precise learning thank you very much for your attention thank you very much very interesting presentation we've received a couple of of questions to your talk for instance in what way does early fire create optimal nesting opportunities for the great bastard asked by Dave van Bees this is a very good question it's not for the nesting but for the mating so the species it's a very interesting mating system the males display competitive performances for the female and if there is a recently burned area the males can be more attractive there they are more conspicuous and the more females gather near the males and also there is more food for both the males and females so this increased the chance of mating and another question by Kevin Ganga does germination of the plant species after fire is it a result of litter removal or is it breaking the dormancy of seeds or perhaps both this is also a very interesting question and I'm sure that both mechanisms operate together and then maybe the last one is about why are there so many fires in Europe around Easter this is a tradition to the ancient pastoral traditions but nowadays I think it's more like some habit and which they are used to it and it does not have a real reason but in many places in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria Slovakia it's typical that the whole landscape burns around Easter okay thank you I would like to thank you very much again for your presentation and for the answers to the questions to everyone who was asking questions I would hand over to Pestlan Stof who is leading our final discussion round thank you Elizabeth is there something you would like to add in the meantime or you come at the end no I have just an announcement for the end so just go ahead thanks all right cool well thanks a lot to our speakers and for everybody attending by the way the people you see in the screen are first Chloe Hill from EGU who worked around the clock to really she said emails day and night to organize this all so a big thanks to Chloe then other than that the people we haven't heard speak yet are the conveners so Elizabeth is our main convener and we have Alicia Coppola and Sanne Vraave Baker and then Liza Laszloch who just moderated the previous part my name is Katalina Stof I work at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and I'm the creator and the leader of FireLife which is an innovative training network on integrated fire management and we're training 15 PhD candidates and some of you are on the on the call actually right now the the goal of this last 15 minutes is to have a plenary discussion and the question I have for the panelists is fire is extremely interdisciplinary and I wondered if what do you think we as scientists can do to better manage the global fire crisis to do better research or to have more impact on policy or setting research agendas I would like to think outside of the box but maybe you have a message for everybody about the 250-300 people who are attending right now who would like to give their perspective Kristina, I see you smiling do you I'm just going to say one thing because I'm sure all the others will have other things to add but I think we absolutely need more social science and not only more social science but we need to work more with like we environmental scientists need to work more with social scientists especially in Europe where many of us are now and where fires are a problem not as big in proportions as in Australia but they are really important big environmental issues with us and here most of the fire is a human cause so we definitely need to understand more of the social implications of fires thank you what is your perspective what is your message for everybody attending so we can all better prepare for the global fire crisis it's a very difficult question and very interesting I think that we should separate somehow different fire regimes because we cannot talk about fire in general but only about specific fire regimes from the viewpoint of both the people the society and the ecosystems so it would be very important to separate these and for me as an ecologist it would be very important to test more realistic fire regimes because generally we focus on some controllable yearly burning or we can have some snapshots about different burning histories but it would be very interesting to know the history of fire regimes and test something like that nice you say we need to look at more separate fire regimes that makes me think of a comment from Marc Castell now I probably know he's a fire chief of the Catalan fire service and he said fire is the same language everywhere we just have different dialects and we need to understand those dialects better coming from northwestern Europe where people say fire is different here I liked his way of phrasing that if I could chip in as a genetically European but very much a systemically an Australian go for it David I think that there's a misapprehension certainly in western view that there isn't a fire culture and what I think Europeans need to do is actually dig into their own past and the few times I've been to Europe it's actually surprised me that there are still folk traditions or very close proximity to those folk traditions of the use of fire and also there are prehistoric traditions and so really the question about human coexistence with fire is how much of it is doing this from scratch and how much of it's actually facing up to your own culture and environment because the solution to coexisting with fire and the global fire crisis is actually very much exactly the same solution as the pandemic and that is that the solution is going to be place based it's going to be local and global perspectives are very useful but they're also potentially very dangerous and we're going to have to what the pandemic is teaching us back to being where we are and being who we are and not trying to find a global and a generic solution and which one of the impulses in the scientific tradition is that there's going to be a global or a universal explanation and that's possibly the global and universal explanation is that there isn't one it's actually local and that you actually have to dive into your culture and into your environment and actually understand that and that's why I thought the example from Hungary was so beautiful because that was actually very close proximity deep ecological knowledge which is seen to be in some way it's got connected to Christianity Christian tradition but actually it's far deeper than that clearly it probably goes back well into the whole scene and when I was in France last year it was quite clear that there were traditions from the Pleistocene in Europe that people haven't understood that that they see that there's a disjunction or a break and they haven't understood that actually it's part of a continuity and that there's in a sense scientifically and also in the European tradition amnesia that needs to be got over and I tell you what coming to Australia being an Australian and interacting with Aboriginal people is the best cold shower you can have it wakes you up and the Aborigines are reserting themselves and saying you know we have a tradition we have a culture we have a knowledge you have to work with us and I think that Europeans have got to look into themselves and say we have a tradition we have a culture and a knowledge we have to work with ourselves so a call for going back to their roots digging back into the history to look at the local at the local expertise that there is or was and linking with a great compliment you made about the Hungarian story from Ursula about that very nice Hida what is your perspective what do we scientists need to do to better manage the global fire crisis and have more impact I want to have more impact I think this kind of conference is always a good start right I think the first thing you need is a realistic view look at the fire talks over here talk about air quality talk about carbon stuff fire stuff but also more ecology focus basically a lot of these things are trade-offs and choices we talked about the deforestation in Amazon and that's related to for example reef production so I guess once you understand all those aspects I guess the second one and then I definitely agree with Ursula social sciences involved and trying to relate it to the public my perspective always a huge challenge to spend all our lives trying to get this knowledge and then you want to do something with it and I figured out what the best way is I don't know if that's a useful answer but it's more like something I'm struggling with Does anybody on the panel or maybe one of the conveners have a solution for that struggle that Hido indicates and I'm sure many of us have I'm also I'm multi-tasking also reading some comments I see no solutions then another question from the for the panelist is if we do better prepare for that global fire crisis what is in your view the most important limitation for progress in fire research is that the observations that we have or the gaps in our knowledge or the understanding of the tools what is the biggest challenge let's frame it in another way what is the biggest challenge for that better integration between the disciplines because fire is spread across all disciplines and there were ideas to make a fire division at the EGU a few years ago but we don't have a fire division yet so what can we do to better integrate us as researchers it might start with I mean a lot of scientists do experiments and try I mean I think that could be a start and I think for example the EGU work group try to do that like if you have an experiment somewhere people understand how to try to get different disciplines involved I mean for example by diversity I mean we try to do early season burning to mitigate carbon that may effect by diversity in something we never really thought about so getting those big experiments going people from different disciplines that might be an easy start and you mentioned the name of a work group can you say more about that is that a work group where people are brought together that do experiments and then invite other people that's coming more from the atmospheric sciences so that's IBI I double B I they have one of those goals but that's I mean I think this fire is so this is an area even if I think from an atmospheric point of view where they think of so many different groups and then you only have the atmospheric point of view yeah but it takes your point is valid I think because I know how much energy and planning it takes to plan a fire and to conduct a fire so and maybe not everybody can use experimental or prescribed fires but there's definitely room for more collaboration that can go into that planning maybe that is something that the EGU could play a role in as well or like the networking so if I could say something I think that there are in terms of the barriers I think one of the problems the division between scientists and managers is that we haven't encouraged curiosity in managers that managers are actually doing experiments where we're learning by doing and there's a huge debate here in Australia about prescribed burning and it's quite strange because it's a debate being acted out with very entrenched views overlaid on rapid climate change and so even if either side one side was more right than the other it's actually a little bit irrelevant because the solution whatever the solution was or could be is very much a retrospective thing because it's now being overlaid on all of these other rapid changes which go with the Anthropocene including a pandemic and so that in other words if you don't have curious managers if you don't have people who are looking at a system with curiosity and interest then they're not actually going to be understanding that effectively they're doing experiments and learning by doing and sometimes that has to be rigorously evaluated but sometimes that can just be used to motivate people to excite community groups so let's try this you don't need a boring scientist to make it into a factorial experiment that would ruin the fun but sometimes you do need a boring scientist to say hang on if you do that at scale you could really do serious harm here so there needs to be an understanding and maybe you know we're expecting too much of ourselves but then you have to go back to the fact that these folk traditions arose from somewhere and they were reasonably adaptive because if they weren't there wouldn't be any biodiversity so there's clearly humans and fire can work together very effectively that Australia was so beautifully biodiverse rich a year 200 years ago before a whole bunch of Europeans turned up and set to work on it in complete ignorance of all of the complexity of the socio-cultural traditions which were wrapped around managing that environment so you need this curiosity trial and error and also all of the virtues of science but a real honesty that there are many vices in science science can be divisive it can be dangerous it can be self-serving it can alienate it can have a lot of very negative factors and that can scale through to people dictating how savannah fires should be worked in countries that aren't their own I mean that you have to be extremely mindful that there are local and national political cultural differences too and scientists have to understand that and I think that's a very good point that you have to be very mindful of the local understanding the customs and working with the people in the interest of time I have to wrap up this discussion so basically the needs that you will indicate are that we need more social science and we need to work more as environmental scientists we need to work more with social scientists we need to look more at separate fire regimes or understand those fire dialects we need to dig into our own past to link what we do now based on what we've maybe already done in the past so we only need to reconnect to that and see how we can use that and we need to approach fire from a holistic view and then see if we can get more collaboration for instance on experiments not just among scientists but also with managers and with that we have a load of unanswered questions in a chat we will be discussing amongst the conveners and also with Chloe and with the panel how if it's possible for panelists to see if they can answer them either we share them on Twitter or we share them on the IG website I don't know what is possible I see Chloe doing like this so yeah if they're so the recording of this webinar will be published on the IG website and we will include information there on how we treat those answers and I see Chloe nodding with that I give the word back to Elizabeth thank you thank you to everybody here and for all the speakers and maybe I'm sharing the wrong screen again but anyway the main messages you probably can see here so we will continue the discussion because all the rest of the there are several prior sessions going on and we will provide also probably some questions answered to questions later on but please when you leave the session now please provide us some of your feedback there will be a feedback button when you leave the webinar and it would be great if you can fill that up so thanks to all the speakers again thanks to all my conveners and to Chloe especially and to all of you for joining thank you bye