Library & Innovation Centre

Bushfires and grassfires are common throughout Australia. Grassfires are fast moving, passing in five to ten seconds and smouldering for minutes. They have a low to medium intensity and primarily damage crops, livestock and farming infrastructure, such as fences. Bushfires are generally slower moving, but have a higher heat output. This means they pass in two to five minutes, but they can smoulder for days.

Bushfires are unpredictable and happen every year. The single biggest killer is indecision. To survive a bushfire you must be prepared to make your own decisions.

Covers tips and links for the following hazard types:
Bushfires, Storms, Cyclones, Floods, Earthquakes, Smoke haze;
Also includes: Health emergencies, Heatwaves, Marine hazards

Australia has a history of floods, causing devastating human and economic impact.

Flooding occurs most commonly from heavy rainfall when natural watercourses do not have the capacity to carry excess water. However, floods are not always caused by heavy rainfall.

Australia is a continent defined by extremes, and recent decades have seen some extraordinary climate events. But droughts, floods, heatwaves, and fires have battered Australia for millennia. Are recent extreme events really worse than those in the past?

Australia is prone to drought partly because of its geography. Our continent spans the latitudes of the subtropical high pressure belt. This is an area of sinking, dry, stable air and usually clear skies.

From the Bureau of Meteorology: includes videos and links

A look at some of the worst cyclones to lash Australia since 1899.

In the past 250 years, foreign species have been introduced and many are disrupting the established ecosystems that evolution created, with potentially devastating results.

Australia is home to many plants and animals that have been introduced since European settlement. Some of these have become invasive — they have spread and multiplied to the point where they damage the environment, threaten the continued existence of native plants and animals, or create significant problems for agriculture.

They’re one of the most damaging environmental forces on Earth. They’ve colonised pretty much every place humans have set foot on the planet. Yet you might not even know they exist.

Climate change is the single biggest health threat facing humanity, and health professionals worldwide are already responding to the health harms caused by this unfolding crisis.

Researchers are redoubling efforts to understand links between biodiversity and emerging diseases — and use that information to predict and stop future outbreaks.

The COVID-19 pandemic sweeping across the world is a crisis of our own making.
That’s the message from infectious disease and environmental health experts, and from those in planetary health – an emerging field connecting human health, civilisation and the natural systems on which they depend.
They might sound unrelated, but the COVID-19 crisis and the climate and biodiversity crises are deeply connected.

It’s easy to blame a bat, but is our wanton destruction of nature and the traditional habitats of species responsible for the pandemic gripping the world right now? Experts concur that the loss of biodiversity, mainly because of humans, is directly connected to the spread of deadly diseases like COVID-19.