Tag: David Bowman

Bookmarked I’ve studied fires for 40 years and I keep coming back to the same solution (ABC News)

We need to put some serious thought into what future life will be like under climate change, and shifting the peak holiday season to the cooler months could be the place to start.

David Bowman suggests moving peak holiday period to March or April.

Scheduling the major Australian holiday at the same time as bushfire season also makes things extremely difficult for the enterprises that depend on the holiday trade. You need certainty to run a business and timing the major annual Australian holiday period with bushfire season strips certainty away from these business owners.

This is similar to the argument made by James Purtill in regards to summer music festivals

For Lost Paradise, it had recruited a private force of 12 professional fire-fighters along with vehicles and a 10,000 litre water tanker.

But this season’s fires have proved too ferocious to handle – organisers knew that however many precautions they took, if the Gospers Mountain mega-blaze happened to come their way, they would be powerless to halt it.

Although holidays and music may not be the same in autumn, these are some of the challenges that we will need to face in adapting to a new world.

Bookmarked A crisis of underinsurance threatens to scar rural Australia permanently (The Conversation)

One lesson from Australia’s past bushfire disasters is that too many homes are underinsured. But it’s a lesson we’ve failed to learn.

David Bowman, Christine Eriksen and Chloe Lucas discuss the problems associated with under-insurance and the challenges with rebuilding communities after bushfires. Some of the issues include the lack of rentals, the increase in building costs during such times and threat to communities when people decide to leave rather than rebuild.