The list of human and animal victims of the fires in Australia continues to grow, the smoke has reached as far as South America and, perhaps, one species has already gone extinct.
Last updated 16 January: the article has been corrected following a clarification by Australian law enforcement on the number of arsonists arrested (180)
Pyrocumulonimbus clouds blotting out the sun, an orange light casting an air of unreality over the surrounding landscape, charred carcasses of koalas and kangaroos, entire towns razed to the ground. If this isn't the apocalypse, it comes close. Australia has been burning like a matchstick for more than four months, killing people and thousands of animals, incinerating ancient forests and spewing millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Read also: Climate crisis: 8 alarming records from the decade we've just lived through
The situation does not appear set to improve in the short term; on the contrary, the fire season is still a long way from over, and temperatures — which have already hit an all-time high — are forecast to keep rising, further fuelling the flames, which could potentially burn up to 15 million hectares.
The fires that have been raging since last September, caused mostly by lightning strikes, have burned approximately nine million hectares of land — more than twice the total area of Belgium, and four times the size of Lombardy. "In only four seasons over the past 50 years has the area burned in New South Wales exceeded one million hectares, and today it has almost reached double that of the second most devastating season (1974, with 3.5 million hectares burned)," explained Giorgio Vacchiano, a researcher in forest management and planning at the University of Milan.
The flames have destroyed vast woodland areas surrounding Sydney, including national parks and protected areas such as the Blue Mountains, which are home to particularly protected animal and plant species.
Smoke from the fires, which has travelled thousands of kilometres, reaching New Zealand — where ash has turned glaciers yellow, thereby accelerating their melting — and even South America, has made the air unbreathable in many Australian cities. In Canberra, a large inland city, the worst air quality in the world was recorded last week, while in Sydney, shrouded in a cloud of fine particulate matter, hospital admissions rose by 10 per cent.
Read also: Australia, the abnormal heatwave breaks every record
Since the fires began, the flames have claimed 28 confirmed lives, including three volunteer firefighters, while four people are currently listed as missing in the states of New South Wales and Victoria. More than 1,500 homes have been destroyed, 900 in New South Wales alone — the state most severely affected by the fires, where around 50 blazes continue to burn.
Read also: Australia is burning, dozens of fires in two states. Emergency declared
The town of Balmoral, located to the south-west of Sydney, was almost completely destroyed by a fire. Thousands of people have been evacuated and the military has been deployed to bring food, water and fuel to the worst-affected towns left in isolation.
A few days ago, an ecologist from the University of Sydney had attempted to estimate the number of animals killed in the fires, based on calculations of habitat loss. According to the estimate, approximately 487.5 million animals had died, including birds, reptiles and mammals. This catastrophic figure could be a significant underestimate; according to WWF Australia, more than one billion animals have in fact died, either directly or indirectly.
These figures are particularly alarming given the distinctive nature of Australian fauna, made up of creatures found nowhere else on Earth, which evolved in isolation from the rest of the planet on their island-continent — 87 per cent of species are endemic. The best-known animal victims of the fires are koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus), whose populations are thought to have suffered a drastic, and possibly irreversible, decline.
Lesser-known and less iconic species, but no less precious, could also be wiped off the face of the Earth forever by the fires. Among them is the Anthochaera phrygia, a bird listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List (International Union for Conservation of Nature), of which only between 250 and 400 individuals survive in the wild. Around 80 per cent of breeding pairs live — or perhaps it is more accurate to say lived — in the Blue Mountains, among the forests most severely affected by the flames. Another is the Assa darlingtoni, a tiny frog with sophisticated parenting behaviour that inhabits the ancient Gondwana rainforests and requires particular conditions of humidity to survive, as well as the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis).
The Australian bush and the species that inhabit it have, however, Vacchiano pointed out, evolved to coexist with fire. "This is vegetation that was born to burn: the climate of central Australia has been very arid for the past 100 million years, and fires caused by lightning have been so frequent that plants have been forced to evolve in order to cope with them in the best possible way: by letting themselves burn! Fire, while on the one hand it destroys existing vegetation, on the other opens up new spaces for plants to reproduce and regenerate. However, this time the drought conditions are so extreme that even forest ecosystems that are traditionally more humid and rarely affected by fire are ablaze. Animals, too, know the danger and know how to respond; many animals will no longer find suitable conditions, while many others will in fact find even better ones."
More than a third of Kangaroo Island, located off the coast of South Australia, consists of nature reserves to protect its wildlife. A few days ago the island was also struck by violent fires that killed two people and thousands of animals. According to the authorities, around 25,000 koalas perished in the flames — half the island's population, which before this tragedy was considered a kind of insurance policy for the survival of these marsupials, since the island's koalas were the only ones not affected by chlamydia (Chlamydophila pecorum), a bacterial infection similar to HIV.
The island was also home to a small endemic marsupial called Sminthopsis aitkeni. This small mouse-like mammal could be the first species to have gone extinct as a result of the fires in Australia. This rare subspecies lives only in an area at the western tip of the island, which was completely destroyed by the flames. According to the NGO Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife, the entire habitat of the species, which numbers only 300 individuals, has been burned. The aim of researchers, once the flames have died down, is to search for any survivors and breed them in captivity to prevent their definitive extinction.
In an alarming vicious circle, the bushfires — fuelled by the unusual weather conditions brought about by climate change — are exacerbating the already severe climate crisis under way. The flames are said to have caused the emission of more than 300 million tonnes of CO2, equivalent to almost all the annual greenhouse gas emissions produced by the whole of Australia. Despite this, the Australian government continues to deny any link between climate change and the bushfires devastating the country, and shows no intention whatsoever of improving its inadequate climate policy.
Read also: Australia, gli incendi boschivi hanno provocato l'emissione di 250 milioni di tonnellate di CO2
Australia, the Facebook page CrowdForest recalled, "spends around one thousand dollars per inhabitant per year on coal industry subsidies, exports coal amounting to twice the emissions it produces domestically, and follows decarbonisation commitments compatible with a global temperature rise of 3 degrees." Australian Prime Minister, the conservative Scott Morrison, flew to Hawaii for a holiday in the middle of the crisis and declared that his government would not strengthen policies to combat climate change.
To understand, at least in part, the scale of the Australian fires, one need only consider that the smoke from the blazes has travelled more than 12,000 kilometres. The smoke cloud was indeed spotted in Chile and Argentina, according to reports from the meteorological services of both countries on 6 January. The smoke, according to the meteorological institute Metsul, could reach Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state.
As if the extraordinarily hot climate and the drought that has persisted in some areas of the country for nearly three years were not enough, human hands may also lie behind the fires, though to a lesser extent than initially reported. The figure of 183 people arrested for deliberately starting fires has in fact been denied by the Australian police. This number does not refer to arrests but to police actions taken against suspected arsonists, and does not relate solely to this fire season but to the whole of 2019.
Victoria police also clarified that there is no evidence to suggest that the devastating bushfires that struck the state were of criminal origin. The inflated figures regarding the number of arsonists arrested are said to have been used to undermine the link between the particularly extensive and devastating fires and climate change. The British newspaper the Guardian repor
