Aboriginal burnoffs may help battle megafires

CANBERRA, Feb 27 (Reuters) Ancient Australian Aborigines may hold the key to battling huge bushfires which have blackened large parts of Europe, the United States and Australia in recent years, fire experts said today.

Prehistoric Aboriginal people across Australia methodically burnt land to hunt and stimulate the growth of plants, as well as reduce the fierceness of natural bushfires.

They also understood that forest fuels could not go untended, in an early lesson for modern societies threatened by megafires triggered by climate change and rising world temperatures, an Australian climate scientist said.

''We have to figure out what we are reserving our forests for. If we are reserving them for big fires, then that's working well,'' Phil Cheney from Australia's top scientific body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), told a fire conference in Canberra.

Megafires occur when large bushfires merge and form super firefronts that burn with hurricane intensity, often levelling hundreds of homes and vast areas of bushland.

Megafires in 2003 destroyed thousands of homes in France, Portugal, Spain, the U.S. and Canada, while fires this year swept uncontrolled for more than a month through an area bigger than Lebanon in Australia's rugged southeastern Alps.

Top US fire expert Jerry Williams from the Brookings Institute told the meeting recent megafires were the result of political and environmental decisions globally to curtail forest burn-offs.

With the US bill for fighting fires already topping 400 million dollar a year, the cost of megafire suppression would only grow with global warming unless laws favouring environmental protection rather than deliberate burnoffs were reviewed.

''We need to take more risk in using fire,'' Williams said.

Climate experts told the conference that steady global temperature rises were leading to longer fire seasons across the world and megafires burned with such intensity that they left little behind.

''There are no refuges for fauna,'' Cheney said. ''Our choice is whether we burn frequently at low intensity in mild weather of our choosing, or whether we are subjected to the whims of nature.'' REUTERS BDP SSC1046