Quantifying fire prone vegetation is a challenge for land managers who need explicit fuel data to manage fire hazard, predict fire behaviour, understand suppression difficulty, evaluate fire impact on human and ecosystem values and measure their carbon stocks. The Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council (AFAC) and the Forest Fire Management Group (FFMG) recognised the need for a national fuel classification to ensure a method of characterising and quantifying fuels.

 As a key feature the Bushfire Fuel Classification should enable the categorisation and organisation of fuel complexes in order to capture spatial diversity as well as dynamic and structural complexity in a way that accommodates existing models for fire behaviour and assists development of the next-generation of fire management Decision Support Systems.

The main objectives of the fuel classification are:

(i)                   to synthesise and catalogue fuel attributes required by fire behaviour models and other land management tools (e.g. smoke production, carbon release) into a finite set of classes or categories that represent all possible fuel fuel types in a region and their subsequent fire behaviour and effects; 

 (ii)                 to catalogue fuel attributes and parameters describing the dynamics and physical structure of each fuel type; and

(iii)                to maintain a fuel library (containing concepts, definitions, and references) and documentation of procedures and guidelines for assessment and inventory of fuels.

The BFC consists of a design framework and a set of standards for fuel classification. The framework provides a structure to allow fuel to be described by its component type and structural form based on vegetation and relates these to the fuel parameters and attributes. The fuel attributes are those physical and chemical parameters that affect ignition, heat release, rate of combustion and spotting potential. The completed standards are a glossary of fuel terms and a guideline for measuring fuel parameters.