Friends of the Earth has a new open letter to be sent to the Fed Govt. FOE says:
For decades, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA have shared firefighting equipment and personnel when fire seasons overwhelm local capacity.
During Black Summer (2019/20), hundreds of overseas firefighters came to help, and 11 of the 12 large air tankers used were sourced from overseas. The arrangement has worked because northern and southern hemisphere fire seasons had historically occurred at different times of the year.
As was noted by the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action in their recent report Prepare or Pay, things are now changing. Between 1958 and 2000, dangerous fire weather in eastern Australia and western North America overlapped only once. Since 2000, it has happened at least seven times, and the length of that overlap has been growing by one day each year since 1979.
Since Black Summer, governments have invested in Australia’s own aerial firefighting fleet. However, national capability for large air tankers still relies almost entirely on contracted arrangements with private aircraft companies based in the northern hemisphere.
As fire seasons lengthen and overlap across both hemispheres, that contracting model will come under increasing pressure. It is most likely that increased competition to secure Large Aircraft (which are increasingly now also being deployed in Europe) will see lease arranges becoming harder to secure and more expensive.
A key option for boosting Australians’ bushfire preparedness will be to develop an Australian fleet of large firefighting aircraft suited to our landscapes and conditions.
As fire seasons get longer and more intense and competition to lease large aircraft increases, now is the time to establish a publicly opened fleet.
Please sign our open letter [details in link] to the federal Emergency Services minister, Kristy McBain, urging the federal government to get on with purchasing a publicly owned fleets of LATs.
