Sydney

With bushfires raging around Sydney for the second consecutive summer, Australia is turning to science for guidance on land and fire management. On 10 December, science minister Peter McGauran announced that A$25 million (US$14 million) will be spent on a multisite centre devoted to the study of bushfires.

The Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) will commence work next July, and will involve participants from several universities, fire and emergency services, national parks and land-management groups.

Announced as part of a package of 12 new centres of this type, the bushfire initiative will be funded initially for seven years with the federal money and a further A$87 million allocated over that period by its various participants.

“The centre will have a focus on reducing risk to life and property,” says Leon Collett, programme coordinator of the Australasian Fire Authorities Council, a representative body for fire and emergency services and land-management agencies that led the bid for the centre.

The CRC will have its headquarters in Melbourne, but the research will be carried out across the sites of the participating groups. “The history of bushfire research in Australia has been too small, unfocused and not well integrated. What the CRC does is assemble a critical mass for scientists working on a broad set of problems,” says Collett.

The centre will investigate fire behaviour and ecology, smoke hazards, building design and construction materials, and will develop education programmes for the public. It will also investigate the impact of prescribed burning — the contentious practice of lighting controlled fires to remove hazardous build-ups of vegetation.

But some researchers have expressed disappointment at the centre's emphasis on fire management near urban areas — an issue of pressing relevance to Australia's heavily populated southeastern states. They point out that most bushfires actually occur in the less-populated northern reaches of the continent. “We would have preferred a more national approach to bushfire research,” says Jeremy Russell-Smith, a fire-management consultant at the Bushfires Council of the Northern Territory.

This was the third attempt by various parties to set up a bushfire research centre. The success was due to having “the right mix” of participants, says Rodney Weber, a mathematician at a campus of the University of New South Wales in Canberra who plans to model bushfire ecology for the CRC.

This year's fires have already wreaked significant destruction around Sydney, with about 730,000 hectares burned in New South Wales so far, signalling another season of damage and uncertainty around Australia's largest city. The fires are being exacerbated by searing temperatures, strong winds and drought conditions.