Sociological responses to the bushfire and climate crises

Only a few months ago, the Australian Government was accused of undermining negotiations over implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement. Today, the world’s media is reporting that Australia is on fire and the same government is facing an electoral backlash over its reluctance, among other things, to implement more ambitious climate policies.

The obvious question is whether the bushfire crisis will offer a political circuit breaker either here or abroad – an opportunity to move past the polemics that dominate climate politics and toward more meaningful and urgent action? While sociological research cannot answer this question it can provide insight into some of the possibilities. I will discuss these possibilities in this essay but my main purpose is to reflect on the broader implications of the fires for those of us working in the social sciences.

The crisis, thus far…

Life over the Australian summer, typically, moves to the rhythm of Christmas holidays, family get-togethers, trips to the beach, music festivals, reading, movies, cricket and tennis. Summer isn’t summer without hot days and balmy nights – without reports of bushfires in one place and floods in another. And while the hot, dry summers and eucalypt dominated forests of southern Australia lend an air of inevitability to fire breaking out, somewhere, summer in the north brings humidity, monsoonal rain and the likelihood of tropical cyclones – again, not everywhere, somewhere. As summer approaches, we think about fire or cyclone plans and we stock up on emergency supplies we rarely need. Someone will but, for most of us, most of the time, the rhythm of summer is uninterrupted.

The summer of 2019/2020 has been anything but typical. Neither, in fact, was the spring with very large fires burning as early as September. To date, at least 34 people have been killed and millions more affected by dangerously poor air quality. Billions of animals have perished and over 18.7 million hectares of forest and farmland scorched. Thousands of buildings and cultural heritage sites have been lost. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated and sports and cultural events disrupted or cancelled. Over 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide have been released into the atmosphere. The economic cost is expected to exceed AUS$100 billion. All this, and we are barely half way through the fire season.

Headlines proclaiming ‘a continent on fire’ exaggerate the spatial extent of the fires. What they don’t exaggerate is the cultural and ecological significance of sites that have been damaged, the public health impacts of smoke and dust plumes that continue to blanket rural and urban settlements, the direct and indirect economic costs, and the trauma and fear with which many will be left.

The climate driver

Many factors contribute to the outbreak of fire including weather, vegetation types, land management and arson. None though can explain the magnitude or duration of the current bushfire crisis independently of climate change.

While 2019 was the hottest and driest year ever recorded in Australia – 1.52°C warmer than the 1961–1999 average and 40 percent drier (Bureau of Meteorology 2020)¹ – such temperatures are no longer exceptional. Australia has warmed 1.0°C since 1910 with more frequent extreme daily heat events and more severe drought conditions developing during periods of below average rainfall (Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO 2018). Changes in rainfall have been variable across the continent but there are distinct drying trends in southwest and southeast Australia.

These warming and drying trends are associated with an increase in the prevalence of days characterised by catastrophic fire risk – that is, conditions considered so dangerous that evacuation offers the only realistic chance of survival for most people in the event fire breaks out. Fires are growing more intense, covering more ground and burning throughout more of the year, challenging our ability to prepare, respond and recover.

The politics

As the bushfire crisis intensified through December 2019 the Australian Government was strangely quiet. Disaster management may mostly be a matter for state and territory governments but, still, the scale of the emergency demanded a clear sense of how the national government would respond in both the immediate and longer terms. That responses were forthcoming only after sustained public criticism may say less about the leadership attributes of those involved than it does about the corner they have painted themselves into on climate policy.

National policy in Australia has been more notable over the last ten years for the number of climate programs abolished than it has for credible new initiatives.² Government has simultaneously professed a commitment to action on climate while deriding more ambitious mitigation targets and alternative policy measures as threats to employment and living standards. It has accommodated extreme weather events in its rhetoric by normalising the events themselves (noting we have always experienced droughts, fires and floods) and rubbishing any suggestion a political rival might make to manage them differently. But the unfolding bushfire crisis refused such accommodation. Exceeding historical experience, its scale and ferocity spoke to the inadequacies of existing policy, the poverty of rhetoric used to justify inaction, and the need to start planning for a new normal in which catastrophic fire risk is more commonplace.

I will not analyse the Australian Government’s responses to the fires in detail here but I will note, and come back to below, statements about the need to focus more effort on resilience and adaptation.

While still on politics it is important to note that this fire season will end and pressure on government to maintain its lack of ambition on climate policy will increase. Calls to ‘stay the course’ are circulating already among conservative politicians and media along with attempts to shift public attention by reporting implausible claims that the majority of fires were lit by arsonists, intensified by a Greens campaign against hazard reduction burning in national parks or, simply, part of a natural cycle that is unrelated to climate change.

Government, meanwhile, has been steadfast in its refusal to implement a ‘job destroying’ reconsideration of Australia’s reliance on coal for electricity generation and export revenue. That the coal industry’s contribution to employment at a national level is both small and shrinking, thanks to automation, is beside the point. It is perceived to be a job creation powerhouse and has the financial resources and lobbyists to ensure this perception persists. Those same resources and lobbyists have been mobilised, on numerous occasions, to undermine specific policy measures deemed contrary to industry interests.³ As Bowden (2018) notes, the Australian coal industry has done a very good job of convincing people it is the economy.

Can a disaster shift public perceptions?

The politics of climate denial have been ascendant in Australia not because there is a large constituency for the abolition of climate policy but because polarisation of the political and media spheres amplifies the voices of denial, promotes confusion and partisanship in the electorate, and makes policy reform difficult. The majority of Australians believed before this fire season that governments should act to address anthropogenic climate change but they were divided and uncertain about what governments should actually do (Lockie 2017).

Recent data suggest the bushfire crisis has shifted both the number of Australians at least ‘fairly concerned’ about climate change (increasing from 74% in July 2019 to 79% in January 2020) and the number reporting they are ‘very concerned’ (rising more sharply from 37% to 47%) (The Australia Institute 2020). Fewer people were ‘not very concerned’ (down from 16% to 11%) while those who were ‘not at all concerned’ remained steady at a low eight percent.

Also, by January 2020, 57 percent of Australians believed we are experiencing a lot of climate change impacts; 79 percent were worried native forests and wildlife will never be the same; 67 percent that climate change is making bushfires worse, and 72 percent that the current bushfire crisis should act as a wake-up call for the world on climate change.

But will these perceptual changes, and the political response they demand, be sustained?

A number of studies published in Environmental Sociology show that the influence of exposure to extreme climate events on climate beliefs is moderated by the same variables associated more broadly with environmental beliefs and attitudes – variables such as political affiliation, occupation and gender (Cutler 2015, 2016; Cutler et al. 2019; Milnes and Haney 2017). They also show that competing explanations for any one event may serve to consolidate existing differences in belief rather than bridge them (Houser, Stuart, and Carolan 2017). While exposure to climate extremes might strengthen some peoples’ conviction to act, others find ways to accommodate their experiences, however traumatic, within existing belief systems (Milnes and Haney 2017).

Bergstrand and Mayer’s (2017) finding that the emotional impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was the strongest predictor of subsequent political, behavioural or attitudinal change among those affected adds an interesting note here. Feelings of distress and anger did not dissipate in the five years between the spill and Bergstrand and Mayer’s study but motivated increased environmental concern, in general, and increased opposition to offshore drilling, in particular.

While we cannot assume that responses to an industrial accident in one country will be replicated in peoples’ response to a natural disaster in another, Bergstrand and Mayer’s (2017) results are suggestive both of the need for more systematic consideration of emotion in sociological studies of disaster (see also Lockie 2016) and of possibilities to break through the current political impasse on climate policy. It is, of course, possible that feelings of loss, fear and hopelessness will fade, and it is possible that the frustration and anger people are expressing today will have no long-term political impacts. But it is possible too that trauma will persist, that summer will be reimagined by many as a time of dread, and that those speaking the rhetoric of inaction find fewer and fewer people are listening to them.

The difficult question of adaptation

While the bushfire crisis speaks clearly to the urgency of greenhouse gas mitigation, it speaks just as clearly to the urgency of adapting to an already changed climate. Land use planning, building standards, insurance schedules, emergency services, forest management, agricultural practices, and many things besides, must be reoriented and rescaled to match escalating climate risk.

Yet it seems that the more urgent adaptation becomes the more politically fraught it becomes in the process. There is deep suspicion that the Australian Government’s new found commitment to resilience and adaptation is a diversionary tactic – a rhetorical shift that continues to elide stronger mitigation policy while reframing extreme weather events no longer as normal but as grounds to pursue dam construction and land clearing in the name of ‘drought proofing’ and hazard reduction. Just how well founded these suspicions will prove remains to be seen, but that the Government withdrew funding for climate adaptation research in 2017² certainly fuels them.

The idea of adaptation without mitigation is flawed for a number of reasons – most obvious being the increased chance of adaptation failures as atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise and with them the magnitude of environmental change and harm. Promotion of adaptation without mitigation may consequently prove a politically flawed project. Voters who think the bushfires should serve as a wake-up call and voters who are distressed and angry over the impacts of fire may not be of a mind to accept policy rhetoric weak on either mitigation or adaptation.

The politics here are interesting but operationalising the concept of adaptation poses a plethora of questions, the answers to which are not always obvious and many of which contain their own potential to spark conflict. Yes, we need to be better prepared for extreme events and almost certainly need to spend more money on emergency preparedness and response. This seems clear enough but where does responsibility lie when neither risk exposure nor vulnerability are evenly distributed and nor are people’s capacity to prepare, respond or pay? Adaptation thus raises numerous questions about environmental justice.

Adaptation raises questions too about what sorts of environments we want to live in. It is one thing to declare our intent to rebuild settlements and farms following fires or other disaster events but rebuild what, for whom, where? Do we replace like-for-like, modify plans and standards to suit a new reality, or look further ahead to climate states and risks we have not yet experienced? Can we ask these same questions even in the absence of a distinct disaster event? Urban environments and other heavily modified landscapes need to be reimagined in light of climate risk and many will need to be rebuilt. While this will afford opportunities to address social inequalities and to enhance ecological values we have seen before how disaster planning and response can instead accelerate processes of gentrification (Fu 2016) and justify the marginalisation of community perspectives on risk (Yamashita 2020).

And what of landscapes perceived as natural, wild or pristine? What will it mean to protect or conserve such spaces in a context of global environmental change? Can conceptions of first or pristine nature be reconciled with more interventionist approaches to ecosystem management – approaches that attempt to accelerate evolutionary processes and thus adaptation to climate change through assisted species migration, synthetic biology, microclimate modification, and so on? Is there a third way, for want of a better term, between hoping the adaptive capacity of valued ecosystems will be sufficient to cope with global change and bulldozing the landscape in the name of hazard reduction?

How should we respond as a scholarly community?

The most obvious answer may simply be to do more – more research, more communication and more education. Doing more doesn’t require that all social scientists drop what they’re doing to focus on climate change or extreme events. The importance of other social issues is not trumped by the urgency of dealing with climate change but, in a world in which social experience and environmental change are so visibly entangled, all social scientists should be alert to the potential relevance of climate and extreme events in their work (Lockie 2015).

The bushfire crisis does call for environmental sociologists and colleagues with similar scholarly interests to address questions evoked more directly by global environmental change. We are well-equipped, methodologically and theoretically, to track public perceptions, understand the distributional impacts of extreme events and policy interventions, and document the voices of people otherwise marginalised in policy debates. We are equally well-equipped to unpack the dynamics and implications of post-truth politics and the polarisation of public discourse on which it thrives (Lockie 2017).

Offering alternatives to polarisation is more challenging. It’s easy enough to note the importance of contributing to democratic public dialogue but opportunities for effective communication and deliberation are not always obvious. I have been pleased to see contributors to this journal operationalising participatory approaches to environmental sociology (e.g. Cordner, Richter, and Brown 2019) and I am aware of many environmental sociologists engaged in policy, advocacy and community-based work. The ways in which sociologists approach such activities is deserving of scholarship in its own right – scholarship we ought to see published in Environmental Sociology.

Contributing to dialogue about responses to environmental change also requires us to ask difficult questions of ourselves, confront the limitations of established theory and methodology, and reflect critically on the ontology and epistemology of both the social and natural sciences. The idea of deliberately accelerating evolutionary processes, for example, in what are generally perceived as natural ecosystems is not controversial simply because some politicians might think it a good excuse for weak mitigation policy. It is controversial because imagining these ecosystems as in some way untouched has so long provided the rationale for both their management and the research effort that supports it. Accelerated evolution is controversial because redirecting ecosystem processes in a context of global environmental change – a context in which novel and potentially unforeseen climate states are likely to emerge – invokes high levels of uncertainty. And it is controversial because, no matter how much research we do in advance, acting prospectively to influence evolutionary processes will still challenge what we are able to know until after we have acted.

There is a good deal of excellent sociological work available already on the management of environmental risks under conditions of uncertainty (e.g. Gross 2010) and on the institutional and methodological innovation behind what is now mainstream climate science (e.g. Beck and Mahony 2018). But where forecasts and scenarios once stood at the vanguard of climate science, serving as cautionary tales about futures best avoided (Lockie 2014), increasingly science is called upon to offer solutions and to project and evaluate the implications of emerging technologies and policy interventions (Beck and Mahony 2018). It is critical social scientists are actively involved in this anticipatory work if opportunities to inform transformative and just social responses are to be realised (Tàbara et al. 2019). The projections and evaluations science provides may only ever be provisional but they will play a role, nonetheless, in the assembly of possible futures.

But what of today? Apprehending climate change is as much about the here and now as it is about forecasts and scenarios. Apprehending climate change is about the chance of extreme events today or, if not today, soon – if not here, somewhere else. It is about the return time of extreme events. It is about consequences and accountabilities. It is about understanding the multi-scalar relationships between climate risks and our attempts to mitigate them.

The temporal and spatial discontinuities of climate change demand significant theoretical and methodological innovation of environmental sociologists. Of course there are existing theoretical frameworks that speak to the non-linear temporalities of environmental change (see Lockie and Wong 2018) just as there are useful threads to be found in the literatures on reflexivity, social learning, anticipation, materialism, and so on. While I have no desire to trivialise these contributions I think there is more developmental work to be done, nonetheless, on sociological frameworks capable of engaging critically and creatively with prospective action on climate.

Conclusion

This has been a deliberately parochial essay. I am all too aware that the same weather systems responsible for catastrophic fire conditions in Australia have been responsible for widespread flooding in East Africa, India and Indonesia. Australians are certainly not the only people for whom the rhythm of daily life is punctuated by the need to plan for and respond to dangerous weather.

There are numerous ways in which sociologists might respond constructively to the challenges of climate change and extreme events. I have discussed here opportunities to: consider the relevance of environmental change to other matters of social scientific concern; pay greater attention to the roles of emotion and embodiment in the experience and politics of extreme events; adopt a scholarly, research-based, approach to communication, engagement and education; contribute sociological insight to anticipatory or solutions-based science; and develop more innovative theoretical and methodological frameworks for dealing with the multi-scalar nature of environmental change. There are many other potentially constructive sociological responses but there is just one more I will mention here, and that is the opportunity to ask difficult questions and contribute to public dialogue without being drawn in to the polarising rhetoric of post-truth politics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Globally, 2019 was likely the second warmest year on record (Bureau of Meteorology 2020).

2. Since 2013, the Australian Government has abolished the independent Climate Commission, repealed a carbon-pricing scheme, lowered the national Renewable Energy Target, de-funded the National Climate Adaptation Research Facility and attempted, unsuccessfully, to abolish the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. In place of these policy and institutional arrangements it has implemented an Emissions Reduction Fund that utilises reverse auctions to provide financial incentives for carbon abatement.

3. See Bell, Fitzgerald, and York (2019) and Marley (2016) for insight into similar coal industry public relations and political campaigns in the US.