Health and wellbeing make up 32% of losses
Health, lost work and damage to public assets are helping push the cost of bushfires in Australia to an average of $6 billion a year, according to a report commissioned by Emergency Leaders for Climate Action.
Over the next 30 years, the bill tops $180 billion. ConnellGriffin carried out the economic modelling, which counts health and wellbeing as 32% of the total cost.
The modelling also includes lost productivity and damage to public assets. It says better fire preparation would save thousands of jobs each year.
One scenario in the report found that cutting bushfire damage by 10% through better preparation would save $604 million a year.
Emergency Leaders for Climate Action also points to harsher fire conditions. The material says climate pollution from burning coal, oil and gas has added two extra weeks of extreme fire danger each year since 1998.
Across Australia, fire seasons have lengthened by 21% since 1979. Fire-generated thunderstorms rose from 20 between 1983 and 2003 to 121 between 2004 and 2024.
A Black Summer-scale event is estimated at $27.7 billion and is modelled to happen roughly once every 30 years. Other damaging fires are modelled at $1.2 billion a year.
Volunteer numbers fall as risks rise
The report says the people dealing with those conditions are under strain. Australia had 10,336 fewer volunteer firefighters in 2023/24 than four years earlier.
During the same four-year period, paid firefighting positions increased by only 433. Insurance premiums have also risen by as much as 400% after major fires, while some properties cannot get bushfire cover at all.
Almost half of the 14,000 homes lost to bushfire in Australia since 1901 were destroyed after 2001. In Victoria, the worst fires once came roughly every 40 years, but three have struck in 18 years.
Peter Holding, a Harden farmer, Rural Fire Service volunteer and Farmers for Climate Action spokesperson, said his brigade had dropped from 48 members to about 12.
Holding, who received the Australian Fire Service Medal in 2019, said the remaining members were older. He said rural volunteers were being asked to face more violent fire weather, with grass fires moving faster and less predictably than 40 years ago.
He said long-running fires also leave crews without relief. “We can prepare now, or pay far more later,” Holding said.
Associate Professor Vicki Kotsirilos AM, a medical practitioner of almost 40 years and the pollution spokesperson for Doctors for the Environment Australia, linked bushfire seasons to ongoing physical and mental health harm.
Kotsirilos said smoke pollution is absorbed by the lungs and can reach almost every organ in the body. She said there is no safe level of air pollution.
She also said cutting climate pollution from coal, oil and gas would reduce air pollution and limit how bad fires get, while preparing communities earlier would cost less than the later harm.
Jan Harris, co-chair and co-founder of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action, lost her home in the 2018 Tathra bushfire.
Harris said recovery can take years even with good insurance. She said premiums were rising so quickly that some families could not get cover, and urged governments to help communities prepare and cut pollution.
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