With the ongoing bushfire crisis, it is clear that we are in the middle of a historic event that will change the way we manage fire in the Australian environment.

As a bushfire protection scientist, I am mostly focused on the practical problems these major events have given rise to, what went wrong or right, how we can solve these and prepare for the future.

My personal perspective is based on working as a fire protection planner in the aftermath of the 2003 Canberra fires and the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday fires. These events resulted in significant changes to how we protect communities, which have been successful in a lot of cases. There are still several months to run in the current fire season, but we can already start to look to the big questions that we will need to answer once the fires are finally out.

We fight fires with data as much as water these days. Apps and social media are now an essential part of warning communities and coordinating evacuations. While this is an amazing capability that simply did not exist at the time of the Canberra and Victorian fires, it was clear from tweets by fire protection experts, such as Bianca Nogrady in the Blue Mountains, that our telecommunications system was being pushed to its absolute limit as people tried desperately to keep on top of where the fires were.

The data-hungry nature of modern bushfire management isn’t just in the emergency operations space. Following Black Saturday, I was part of a team that used state-of-the-art fire prediction models to design bushfire shelters for Victorian public schools, as well as enhanced ember prediction models for the design of new suburbs in Canberra.

Previous disasters have taught us lessons around designing houses for bushfire that have served us well in the current situation, but I predict that coming out of this current fire emergency we will see another review of building standards in bushfire zones, as well as an increased focus on adapting Indigenous burning prescriptions to create a more open, park-like vegetation structure near our suburban edges.

These two broad approaches complement each other – both reducing the hazard and increasing the resilience of housing stock.

Building standards will be a good starting point, as we have control over the design of bushfire resilient houses, and there is a well-established testing and verification system. There is almost certainly going to be an adjustment to building standards, particularly for Queensland.

New South Wales has recently reviewed the bushfire planning system, and has effectively prohibited building in areas where there is likely to be direct flame contact with houses.

The fire danger index we use to scale the fire models was previously set at 50 (out of 100) for Queensland. We are now regularly seeing conditions in the 80-100 range, something that was previously an extremely rare event in northern areas of Australia.

This was predicted in climate change models, with humidity and moisture dropping to levels similar to NSW and Victoria pretty much when they were expected to. It’s time to adapt our new buildings and look seriously at what we can do to strengthen existing stock that was built to an older, gentler climate that no longer exists.

The inevitable calls for more broad-scale hazard reduction burning remind me of the saying that for every complex problem there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.

It seems so obvious – burn the fuel while conditions are mild and dangerous fire weather has less capacity to harm us. Like most things in life, the reality is more difficult – large scale fuel reduction is one of the most complex land management treatments to organise and implement.

Weather conditions and fuel moisture have to be in a “goldilocks zone”, allowing the fire to burn hot enough to consume lots of fuel, but not so severely that control is impossible. Treating a large enough area requires large numbers of staff (paid and volunteer) to control the burn and protect assets. Even when everything goes right there is the further complication of smoke pollution affecting vulnerable groups.

Despite this, agencies met or exceeded their hazard reduction targets this year, which highlights how overwhelming the fire weather extremes have been – in a lot of areas the fuel reduction simply didn’t work. As has been reported several times there have been significant losses during the current fires even in areas where hazard reduction burns had been carried out. The structure of these forests still allowed damaging crown fires to develop, even where the low-level fuels had been reduced.

Improving the effectiveness of hazard reduction in the places where suburbs and bushland meet is going to be a major focus. I spend a lot of my time working to balance fire protection with maintaining aesthetic and ecological values.

The analysis of house loss on Black Saturday recommended changing the structure of forests and woodlands immediately adjacent to houses. This involves significant thinning of trees and shrubs in the areas near houses to create an open, park-like look and feel that can be maintained in the long term. This needs to be combined with resilient house design and intensive fuel reduction in the immediate surrounds of houses (within eight metres) for maximum effect.

So we need to look at approaches that allow us to safely and intensively reduce fuels close to the urban fringe and deliver this vegetation structure. This has led us back to some of the original methods used to work with fire and the landscape, perfected by the oldest continual culture on our planet.

Our growing respect for Indigenous culture has seen an increased use of traditional knowledge in fire management, and I have worked on recent projects where we were able to embed this approach in management systems. We are increasingly seeing Indigenous fire managers working alongside bushfire assessors, and it has been fascinating to see how they measure the right time to burn based on fuel condition and knowledge of local weather.

There are two significant advantages of traditional burning that make it a good fit for property protection. Firstly, it can be implemented safely close to assets with minimal equipment. The second advantage is that it has an ecological end-state as an objective, often aiming to create an open, park-like vegetation structure that has much less potential for damaging crown fires.

The obvious and significant disadvantage is that so much knowledge has been lost, coupled with significant increases in permanent (and very valuable) assets in the landscape. It is critical that we take advantage of the elders who are focused on preserving Indigenous burning regimes and adapt these to fit our modern lifestyles.

As a minimum every fire manager should read Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. The chapters on fire provide a well-researched summary of how Indigenous fire management worked that is accessible to a wide audience.

The houses and lives lost hit us hard as fire planners; it is more than just a job for most of us. We are going to honour those people by learning as much as we can from this disaster and continuing to adapt.