Wildfires: Can we adapt to live with them?

This time last year, as Australia emerged from winter to spring, the first flames of the devastating season that has since become known as Black Summer, had already begun burning their way through areas of bushland.

Although at the time long-term drought had rendered the ground and vegetation across much of the country kindling dry, and though scientists were warning that conditions were ripe for danger, the scale of the inferno to come would have been hard to predict.