Editorial | Australia’s bushfire warning to Jamaica

We don’t expect that the Jamaica Fire Brigade is significantly better manned, or equipped than it was four years ago or that temperatures during the coming summer will be cooler than in recent years, or, if they are, to be substantially so. The point is, global warming and climate change, as in the rest of the world, are upon Jamaica, and, we, too, have to be alert to the ways of mitigating their short-term effects even as we remain part of the global coalition trying to reverse the worsening dangers.

The immediate context of these observations is in regard of the ongoing bushfires in Australia’s south-east, especially in the states of New South Wales and Victoria, which, over the past several weeks, have killed at least 17 people, seven since Christmas Day, and a similar number are missing in the latter state. Additionally, tens of thousands have been forced to evacuate suburban homes in long motor vehicle convoys as some of the 150 fires have moved within shouting distance of major cities, including Melbourne, the capital of Victoria.

With conditions expected to worsen over the weekend, with higher temperatures and strong winds, authorities have conceded that they lack the capacity to contain the blaze in many areas. “The fires are going to do what they are going to do, and people have to get out of the area,” said Rob Rogers, deputy commissioner of New South Wales’ Rural Fire Service.

Australia is in the midst of a long drought, and record temperatures during its southern summer have created tinder-box conditions that have facilitated these fires. It is not only Australia that has recently contended with extreme bushfires as a new normal. The US state of California has the same problem.

In 2018, for instance, more than 8,500 wildfires burned nearly 1.9 million acres of land, destroyed nearly 23,000 buildings, and killed 106 people, including six firefighters. The situation wasn’t nearly as bad last year. Up to late December, more than 7,800 fires had burned a fraction of the land of the previous year, but still, five lives were lost. Experts say that California and other western states are having fire seasons that start earlier and run later. They attribute this to global warming.

To many Jamaicans, the concept of global warming may seem a scientific abstraction, with little to do with us. Except that we face the same, and potentially worse, crises from the climate change phenomenon as Australia and California. As a small island state, Jamaica is susceptible to rising sea levels subsuming coastal areas without the benefit of a large land mass within to retreat.

TEMPERATURES Rising

Further, climate change is making the weather unpredictable. Hurricanes are more frequent, and those that reach land in our region tend to be furious and destructive. Neither is there any longer any certitude about our dry and rainy seasons. What, though, is clear is that average annual temperatures are becoming hotter, creating conditions for bushfires – whether from spontaneous combustion, or accidentally set – to thrive. In the event, we suspect that Jamaica’s brigade isn’t gifted with the same resources as those in Australia or California to confront a crisis of relative magnitude.

In 2015, in the face of a spate of bushfires, mostly in the hills of St Andrew, the then fire commissioner, Errol Mowatt, lamented that his brigade didn’t have the resources to adequately confront the problem and called for a ban on open fires by individuals and households. Happily, those fires didn’t emerge into the threatened major disaster, but we have a recent appreciation of the potential economic impact of wildfires. During the past summer, a fire in Flagaman, St Elizabeth, consumed hundreds of acres of crops in the field, affecting the livelihoods of approximately 50 farmers, pushing up prices for some fruits and vegetables in the markets.

There are several takeaways from these developments, not least of which is the need for Jamaica to develop a prevention and mitigation strategy for bushfires, including continuing education about their dangers.

Critically, too, must be our reinforcement, expansion, and execution of the national policy against carbon emissions and of Jamaica taking a vibrant place in the global discourse to prevent the galloping rise in world temperatures. This should include calling out Donald Trump on his voodoo science that rapid global warming isn’t a man-made phenomenon.