Imagining and designing coherent, adaptation-oriented laws about wildfire

Webinar recording.

Since 2010, Australian national and state governments have commissioned at least 101 post-emergency inquiries and reviews, each of which makes recommendations to improve the way we prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from wildfires. Many of these reviews recommend specific changes to laws and policies, for example, to simplify permitting processes for clearing native vegetation and mitigating fire hazards. Of course, catastrophic wildfires are a growing challenge around the world, not just in Australia. Fires are breaking records for size, severity and cost every other year, and ‘unprecedented’ events are becoming distressingly common. As a result, recognition that changing fire regimes will require changes to the rulebooks, is also not limited to Australia. In California, governments have passed laws that have begun to address issues with liability and insurance arrangements for prescribed fire and to promote the reintroduction of cultural fire management. In this presentation, we take a step back and ask: What might it look like to design a great legal framework for the kinds of fire regimes that we are going to see in future? And how might we improve the role of law in facilitating rapid adaptation to increasingly frequent and destructive wildfires, to preserve the hope that we might one day live well with fire?