Australian Philanthropist Travels to the U.S. to Seek Support for Plan to Prevent Wildfires

Australian philanthropist Andrew Forrest and his wife, Nicola, have pledged $48 million in response to the bushfires raging in that country through their Minderoo Foundation.

Part of the money will go to mobilize specialized volunteers to respond to the bushfires and to provide relief to victims. But the lion’s share of the gift — more than $34 million — will go toward conducting research, studying mitigation techniques, and developing a plan to prevent future fire disasters, both in Australia and around the world.

“In the face of a planet which is slowly warming, the Australian bushfires are a red warning light on that dashboard,” Forrest said.

The Australian billionaire is taking that message to the United States, where he is currently meeting with philanthropists, conservationists, and others to seek financial support for the research project. The Minderoo Foundation has set up a fire fund to accept donations. It hopes to raise more than $344 million for the fire-resilience blueprint.

Once the richest man in Australia, Forrest made his fortune as founder of the Fortescue Metals Group, one of the largest iron-ore producers in the world. Forbes estimates his net worth at almost $9 billion.

Forrest declined to say who he has met with during his trip but said the meetings have been positive. “We have spoken to a number of very high-profile people, and there is not one who hasn’t said that they are prepared to get in and help.”

Unimaginable Destruction

Last week, Forrest visited a small town on the front lines of the unprecedented bushfires. The devastation was unlike anything he had ever seen.

Residents recounted their terror at seeing an enormous wall of fire approaching the community. The firestorm threw embers out ahead of the blaze horizontally at great speed.

“People who had set up their homes to be as fireproof as possible realized that they would never survive an onslaught this big and just made it down to the local river where they had to stay for two hours to get protection,” he says. “They, of course, lost everything.”

The damage to the environment caused by the fire is hard to fathom, Forrest says.

“It didn’t just burn the trees. It scorched the earth. It removed the biota of the topsoil. So the topsoil turned from what was quite rich soil held together with worms, animals, plants, and tree roots to sand,” he says. “When the first rains came, the steep hills no longer had any topsoil protected by biota and floated like sand into the river, filled up the river, and extinguished the endemic platypus habitat.”

Forrest says he still cannot believe the scale of the destruction.

“This cannot be allowed to continuously affect any country, let alone one as beautiful as Australia.”