Fire is as water to Fynbos

An essential contribution to biodiversity – when correctly managed

It has been proven that invasive alien plants can burn at an intensity of ten times or more that of...displaced indigenous plants.

Drs Guy Preston (Working for Water), David le Maitre (CSIR) and Brian van Wilgen (CSIR), Letter to the Editor, 2009

Fires and Fynbos – Professor Tony Rebelo for the SHR@Home Webinar Series

Have we so lost touch with the natural order that we no longer appreciate our and other species’ need of wildfire? It seems so. The prevailing view that wildfire needs to be suppressed at all costs precludes a fundamental understanding of life on Earth.

Using humour, irony and a lifetime’s insight into the dynamics of our Fynbos Biome, SANBI’s Professor Tony Rebelo highlights how those who see “devastation” and “ruin” in regeneration and renewal have lost sight of that which sustains life and biodiversity on what would otherwise be a dead planet.

Fire, for the threat it poses to life and property, will always present a major concern to any Wildland Urban Interface, especially one as steep as that at Tokai Park. As the 2015 Muizenberg Fire showed many Tokai and Zwaanswyk property owners, alien pine plantations are not compatible with a hard urban edge.

Restored or conserved Fynbos needs to undergo relatively frequent dry season prescribed burns (every 10-15 years) and, while well-maintained Cape Flats Sand Fynbos has quite low biomass, pine and other plantations carry dangerous fuel loads, placing the community adjacent to the park in extreme danger.

Again, the Muizenberg Fire and, more recently, the Knysna, Californian, Greek, Portuguese and Australian fires of 2016-2020 bear testimony to the dangers such wildfires pose to developed urban conurbations.

Professor William Bond tells us why the global “plant trees, save the world” agenda is so dangerous:

When you support a tree-planting project, stop … think. Are the trees restoring a forest? Or are they destroying an ancient grassland? What might be lost?
Let us plant the right trees, in the right place, for the right reasons.
William Bond | The Untold Story of Grasses

By fighting fire with fire, disaster risk reduction protects all of us. National “blanket fire suppression” policies, born of centuries past, have delivered a world of pain.

Fynbos burns. Fynbos is going to burn. The truth is, we cannot suppress wildfire. It is as water to Fynbos and other fire-dependent vegetation. Almost all recruitment takes place following fire. Without wildfire, there would be no Fynbos or its associated wealth of wildlife.

Fire is thus an integral part of SANParks’ Fire Management Plan – as it is for any conservation organisation in the Fynbos Biome. If we try to extinguish wildfire, we are simply creating a larger, more dangerous problem for the future.

The 2017 Garden Route fires can teach us much that is applicable to Tokai Park:

Lesson 1: The more efficient we are at extinguishing small fires, the larger and more uncontrollable wildfires will be when they occur. Wildfire is easily controlled and contained under most conditions. According to Table Mountain National Park Fire Manager Philip Prins, only 2% of TMNP wildfires, which occur principally during extreme conditions of low humidity, high temperatures and strong wind, escape initial attack operations and become major incidents impossible to control. The only way to prevent major incidents is to undertake prescribed fuel-reduction burns or allow wildfire to burn out a management block naturally, if started by accident and under suitable conditions.
Lesson 2: Fuel is the bottom line. Fynbos will not burn without sufficient fuel, i.e. until it has matured over three to five years. Thereafter, until it is 15-years-old, Fynbos fires are easily managed under all but extreme conditions. After 20 years, wildfire is generally unmanageable even under average conditions.
Lesson 3: The worst wildfires always happen under extreme conditions. Not undertaking prescribed fuel-reduction burns results in fuel accumulating and major incidents taking place.
Lesson 4: Alien trees greatly increase the fuel available to wildfire and, thus, its spread, speed and temperature. Managing alien trees is essential to preventing disastrous wildfires. Dense alien infestations contain sufficient fuel to feed uncontrollable wildfires within 10-20 years.
Lesson 5: Landowners must control aliens on their properties as they are a serious fire risk. This is known as taking responsibility for one’s defensible space. Insurance companies are increasingly loath to pay out victims of wildfire who have neglected this basic precaution.

[W]ildfires burned 15 000 ha around the town of Knysna in the Western Cape, destroying > 800 buildings, > 5000 ha of forest plantations, and claiming the lives of seven people. … One third of the area that burned was in natural vegetation (mainly fynbos shrublands), and more than half was in plantations of invasive alien (non-native) pine trees, or in natural vegetation invaded by alien trees.
Kraaij et al An assessment of climate, weather, and fuel factors influencing a large, destructive wildfire in the Knysna region, South Africa, Fire Ecology volume 14, Article number: 4 (2018)

Of fynbos shrublands, the CSIR tells us:

Scrub woodland is an indigenous forest type which is a transition between fynbos and thicket or forest and has developed as a successional stage from fynbos in the absence of fire.
Frost et al The Elandskraal Fire, Knysna – A data driven analysis CSIR 2018

Acting as fuses, alien trees allow wildfires to cross the Wildland Urban Interface to devastating effect.

Carrying up to eight times more fuel and burning up to ten times hotter than Fynbos, Pines, Gums and Wattles are all fire-promoting species notorious for fuelling uncontrollable fires. Such trees carried wildfire into Knysna in 2017, causing inestimable destruction and loss of life while indigenous trees inhibited fire spread.

Two years before that, similar wildfire visited Tokai.

Residents on the border of the Tokai plantation should be most concerned about their safety. It is vitally important, as an urgent public-safety issue, that we encourage SANParks management to conduct prescribed burns appropriately and timeously.

Ultimately, all fires are potentially dangerous. However, Pine or any other alien wildfires burn far hotter than the average Fynbos fire due to their greatly increased fuel loads.

Where residential developments on the WUI are exposed to extreme wildfire conditions and homeowners have not paid adequate attention to their defensible space, i.e. their home and its immediate surroundings, built structures and people are endangered.

Philip Prins | Fire Manager: Table Mountain National Park (TMNP)

Prescribed restoration, maintenance and stack burns

There are three types of prescribed burn at Tokai:

Fynbos restoration burns follow plantation removal and are critical in allowing the Fynbos to reestablish itself from dormant seedbanks. These burns need to be undertaken at a time satisfactorily close to the Fynbos cycle, i.e. not winter.

Fynbos maintenance burns replace natural wildfire and are needed for fuel reduction, Fynbos regeneration and to preclude wildfire occurring under uncontrollable conditions.

Stack burning is in no way similar to restoration burns. It burns piles of slash from cleared alien vegetation and rids the area of the high biomass, thereby reducing fire risk. Stack burns are also less ecologically sensitive than restoration burns as they scorch the earth beneath the stacks, treventing seed stimulation around them.

Lower Tokai Park

The mature Fynbos at lower Tokai (there is none in upper Tokai) is not due to burn for another five years, but inspection of the species suggests that the area should perhaps be burned at a slightly more frequent interval, perhaps in 10-year cycles rather than the generally recommended 15 years. There is a block ready for a prescribed maintenance burn under this 10-year cycle, but the restoration burns take precedence.

Note: Prolonged restoration burns at Tokai Park are a direct result of the pine plantations and the fires going underground into the old pine stumps – where they smoulder. After an initial post-pine restoration burn, Fynbos fires are relatively quick to burn out and do not continue for several days. Any lingering palls of smoke affecting surrounding suburbs are the direct consequence of inappropriate land use and are a short-term, one-off problem when restoring endangered ecosystems and species. Natural Fynbos burns do not cause these problems.

Upper Tokai Park

The 2015 fire precludes the need for prescribed maintenance burns in upper Tokai until 2030.

It is imperative that Tokai’s Fynbos be managed correctly. Appropriate fire management and the removal of dangerous invasive alien trees at Tokai are the only ways to significantly reduce the risk of wildfire spreading from Table Mountain National Park to neighbouring areas.

Tokai Park is behind its prescribed burn schedule. We need to petition Table Mountain National Park management to adhere to a strict and detailed programme of prescribed burns. Just as it is up to us to take care of our defensible space, Table Mountain National Park risks evasion of its responsibility by not undertaking strictly-scheduled restoration and prescribed fuel-reduction burns.