Photo by Wikimedia Commons
14 Feb 2020 Story Nature Action

Why Australia’s 2019-2020 bushfire season was not normal, in three graphs

Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Data from satellite sources assembled by the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) World Environment Situation Room confirms that the wildfires in Australia in the last two months of 2019 and the first six weeks of 2020 were far from normal.   

2019 was the second hottest year on record since 1880, and Australia recorded its warmest temperatures ever in December 2019.

“Rising temperatures continue to melt records. The past decade was the hottest on record. Scientists tell us that ocean temperatures are now rising at the equivalent of five Hiroshima bombs a second. 
One million species are in near-term danger of extinction. Our planet is burning,” says United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

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WESR Global Surface Temperatures

“The trend is very clear: 37 of the last 40 years were the warmest recorded since 1880, and the six warmest years recorded were the last six years,” says Pascal Peduzzi, Director of UNEP’s Global Resource Information Database in Geneva. “For those who think Australia is always burning, the following graphs clearly show that these fires were exceptional.”

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The number of fires in New South Wales remained fairly constant from 2003 to 2018, but more than trebled in 2019 (Fires recorded by MODIS (NASA), trend analysis, UNEP/GRID-Geneva).

 

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The months of November and December 2019 saw much greater wildfire activity than usual. The data indicates that it was mainly evergreen forest that caught fire. (Fires detected by MODIS, intersected with MODIS landcover and by province. Data sources: NASA, Data Analytics : UNEP/GRID-Geneva)

 

 

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World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA). Even protected areas, mostly forests, were affected. The graph shows fires detected by MODIS (NASA), intersected with province, landcover and World Database of Protected Areas information (UNEP/WCMC, analytics. UNEP/GRID-Geneva)

 

“This service, accessible via the UNEP’s World Environment Situation Room, is provided for all countries at national and provincial levels. It identifies trends in wildfire activity since 2003, when the data first became available and monitoring began. We have sliced and diced the satellite-based data on wildfires worldwide from 2009 to the present day. We analyse the wildfires’ data by month, type of land cover, protected area, province and nation to produce information products,” Peduzzi adds.

For more information, please contact Pascal Peduzzi: Pascal.Peduzzi@un.org