By Sofia Levin | Melbourne Editor

Murrundindi holding bread fungus. Image: Sofia Levin

Fire abatement projects are successfully using traditional burning techniques to combat greenhouse gas emissions.

However, at the same time these projects are highlighting the lack of understanding about climate change in Indigenous Australian populations.

Deputy Director of Monash University’s Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies Professor John Bradley is concerned about the gap between Western and Aboriginal knowledge of climate change.

“I’ve been in communities and had people come up to me and say, ‘what’s this climate change thing?’ It has not even been identified yet as a priority to educate indigenous people,” Professor Bradley said.

But communication is a difficult process.

Professor Bradley speaks two Aboriginal dialects and neither have a word that represents anything close to the Western notion of ‘climate.’

Wurundjeri elder, Murrundindi is just one indigenous Australian who denies the existence of climate change, despite The State of Climate snapshot released recently by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology that stated climate change is real.

“I’m not into global warming and all this garbage. I just believe in the old way, the old people,” Murrundindi said.

The snapshot showed a continual decrease in rainfall in southern areas of Australia. But Murrundindi relies on Mother Nature to counter the report’s warnings.

“I’ve been noticing out in the bush a lot of bread fungus growing…it doesn’t usually come out until the winter, and it came out in the summer. That tells us to be prepared; we are going to have a lot of rain,” he said.

Indigenous Australians have survived enormous environmental changes such as the end of the ice age eleven thousand years ago and the flooding of the Arafura plain between northern Australia and New Guinea.

Based on their resilient history, some Aboriginal organisations have started to realise that traditional methods of land management are invaluable to helping Australia slow the rate of climate change.

Employment opportunities are being provided to Indigenous Australians because of climate change, whether they believe in it or not.

Darwin Liquefied Natural Gas pays indigenous fire managers around $1 million a year to stage controlled burns under fire abatement projects in Northern Australia. Since 2006, the project’s land managers have cut CO2 emissions by 488,000 tonnes due to reduced bushfires in West Arnhem Land.

As well as supplying opportunities for Aboriginal people to work ‘on country’ with controlled burning, some land management projects provide online information to educate indigenous Australians about how they are caught up by climate change.

According to the CSIRO, savanna burning in Australia releases a similar amount of CO2 to all Australian industrial sources and transport.

Murrundindi believes that indigenous controlled burning could have prevented the Black Saturday bushfires that occurred in early February last year.

He said the government ignored the pleas of Aboriginal people and blames poor land management for the 173 deaths in last year’s fires.

Professor Bradley said that Indigenous Australians are more than happy to be paid for controlled burning, something they have done for almost fifty thousand years.

He said a minority of Indigenous Australians view fire abatement as a solution to the release of CO2, as the Western scientific concepts that surround climate change are difficult for Aboriginal people to grasp.

This lack of understanding about climate change presents threats to indigenous populations, especially when forecasts are predicting that they will suffer the most from the effects of climate change when compared to other, more urban populations.

The Australian Government’s Department of Climate Change released a report early this month documenting the risks to Indigenous Australians posed by climate change.

The risks included an increase in extreme weather events, heightened disease and health complications, disintegration of ecosystems and entire species, and the possibility of forced migration due to rising sea levels, amongst other potential hazards.

The report emphasises the importance of Professors Bradley’s plea for programs to educate indigenous Australians about climate change.

At present, most indigenous populations see climate change as “…just whitefellas’ thinking.”