Bush fire researcher Dr Rachael Nolan leveraged the news cycle to highlight the link between climate change and catastrophic bushfires. Here, she shares her advice for researchers who need to get their message out there.
Like a kookaburra on a branch surveying the ground below for movement, Dr Rachael Nolan wisely watched and waited for the right moment. Then, she pounced.
It was the summer of 2019–20, when the worst fires ever seen in NSW would destroy 55,000 sq km of land and 2448 homes, and kill 26 people. Early on, before the fires approached Sydney, they had received little media coverage, and yet Nolan and her colleagues in fire research knew that the drought-ravaged bush was in the worst condition ever recorded, and ready to burn.
“What we saw leading up to 2019–20 was the worst drought on record, and a lot of the forests were basically turning brown overnight, and they lost all their leaves, and then they were hit by fire,” Nolan told The Brilliant. “Even before the fires, the forests were not doing well and there was almost no media coverage of this. After the fires there was a lot of focus on koalas and the devastation caused to our native fauna, but they would have been struggling well before the fires because of the severity of the drought.”
With a determination to get on the front foot and communicate the role of climate change in these fires, Nolan and colleagues pounced when the fires approached Sydney and the first ever catastrophic fire warning was issued for the city and surrounds. The warning meant schools closed and widespread restrictions were enforced. Nolan and her mentor Emeritus Professor Ross Bradstock wrote a piece in The Conversation titled Drought and climate change were the kindling and now the east coast is ablaze.
“We were really quick to get into the media cycle, because we knew that’s when we had people’s attention and how important it was to communicate the science,” Nolan says. “We had done our preparation with our science and we were able to explain what was causing these fires. It got a lot of reads and got picked up and followed up by a lot of media, so from then on, people were talking about climate change in the context of these fires.”
Nolan says it’s vital that scientists aim to inject facts as quickly as possible into an evolving news story, before the debate is hijacked by politicians or others trying to spin things. “It can become political very quickly,” she says.
Nolan, who describes herself as an ecophysiologist and plant ecologist, is based at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University. Her research on fuel loads and fuel moisture content is part of the NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub. “I’m interested in how plants work and how they respond to drought and fire,” she says. She’s also a highly successful communicator. In addition to almost 50 published scientific papers, she’s written seven articles for The Conversation, been quoted in multiple mainstream newspapers and interviewed on radio.
Having grown up in Tasmania and spent a lot of time in the bush, Nolan remembers a science field trip to heathlands near Anglesea on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria as awakening her interest in fire. “We were shown that fire can be a positive in the bush,” she recalls. “That was really eye-opening for me, because I’d always grown up with the idea that bushfire was catastrophic, but fire is actually an integral part of the Australian landscape.”
Her research since then has included dangling in canopies to measure transpiration and working on the ground to understand run-off after a fire has been through a forest. She’s helped show that, although many Australian plant species need fire to regenerate, the change in frequency and ferocity of fire can negatively affect the resilience of our forests to fire. Current research is focused on accurate predictions of where and when the next bad fire season will strike, understanding how fires and drought affect a forest’s ability to absorb carbon (which is increasingly vital for emissions offsetting), and determining how forests are recovering from the Black Summer fires of 2019–20.
Nolan acknowledges she struggled seeing the devastation of those fires, and the lead-up to it. “It felt like climate change had arrived,” she says. “It’s one thing to know it is happening intellectually but another to realise that you’re seeing it happening.”
Not surprisingly, research funding was more readily available afterwards. “Because I didn’t have a track record of winning major grants as an early career researcher, I found it very difficult to get research funding for my own research ideas until the Black Summer fires, and then I got funding for almost every project,” Nolan says. But with 10–20 years between big fire events, she knows that funding doesn’t last. “What we typically see is this cycle of bushfire, disaster, government inquiry, funding for resilience and projects, then we have some wet years and people get focused on other things and very quickly the funding disappears. People just become complacent. We’ve been doing that since 1939 and it’s incredibly frustrating.”
Getting the message out
Nolan has several tips for getting quality science messages out in the public domain.
It’s hard to know how to pitch the message so that people engage,” she says. “There’s only so many of those media articles that you want to do to say that the sky’s falling in and it’s all bad, because it fatigues the public.”
She says science education in school is a vital part of improving dialogue. “If the broader community can’t engage with the science because they can’t follow it, then that’s part of the challenge. It comes back to the scientific literacy of the community, which goes back to school education.”
Nolan says science communicators at universities or elsewhere can be a huge help to scientists in writing press releases and getting a message out. “Scientists aren’t trained to be science communicators,” she says. “I have done personal media training – a three-hour course at uni – but there’s no obligation to do that. But I think it’s crucial that we communicate our research. One of my mentors once told me that science is funded by public money so we have an obligation to communicate our science to the public.”
And she’s grateful that many years ago she had a housemate who ran a science show on community radio – a program that probably wasn’t listened to by many – and she went on several times to talk about her research. “That’s a good way to start getting practice in explaining things to people in plain language. The last thing you want is your first media experience to be with a major broadcaster or newspaper who may press you to comment on areas outside your expertise.”
Nolan says that once scientists have done their research and have a message they want to get out, they should also be ready to act. “Start off with something easy. Often The Conversation will put out a call for articles related to the news cycle of something they’re interested in. Then find a way to bring your research in.”
Article by Ken Eastwood
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