Tag Archive for: bushfires

For a waterbombing reserve, adapt ADF aircraft

Australia should buy equipment to cheaply and temporarily convert military transport aircraft into waterbombers.

On current planning, the Australian Defence Force will have a total of 34 Chinook helicopters and Hercules airlifters. They should be able to serve as waterbombers when needed. Black Hawk army helicopters can also be used.

In contrast to permanent waterbombers, these aircraft would return to normal operations afterwards rather than sitting idle and waiting for the next big fire. And they wouldn’t be called out unless civilian waterbombing was inadequate or unavailable.

In January, fires ripped iconic parts of Los Angeles, even in the middle of winter. January is also when Australia’s fire season is most intense. Usually, we would rely on seven large waterbombers to put out life-threatening blazes. However, some of those waterbombers were 12,000km away waterbombing the California hills.

In the past decade, the New South Wales government has bought a waterbomber, a converted Boeing 737, for $26.3 million and the Queensland government has agreed to pay $18.1 million for waterbombers of comparable size to be stationed in the state for five years.

Although vital when fighting a fire, outside of fire season these expensive waterbombers mostly sit idle. The current alternative—maintaining a leased commercial fleet—is also expensive: the Australian government spends $51 million a year on the National Aerial Firefighting Fleet, a collection of commercial aircraft held on at-call leases to be available for firefighting. That’s in addition to state government arrangements, such as NSW’s $40 million annual contract.

Even though that money is budgeted, there’s no guarantee all those assets will always be available as they also fight fires in Europe and the Americas. Australia needs an adaptive, government-owned backup fleet that can be cheaply deployed if commercial leases fail to appear.

The Australian Army and Royal Australian Air Force have dozens of aircraft suitable for temporary use: Hercules and Chinooks.

The tried and tested Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System (MAFFS), developed in the United States, can be installed into an unmodified Hercules plane in four hours. The current version has a capacity of 11,000 litres, turning the carrying aircraft into a class 1 large air tanker.

There are only six large air tankers in Australia’s national firefighting fleet. The federal government is spending $9.8 billion to replace the air force’s 12 Hercules with new ones and expand the fleet to 20 aircraft.

The MAFFS are reportedly inexpensive. Unlike at-call leases, Australia would own the systems, and unlike permanent waterbombers, the aircraft would remain in use outside of firefighting.

For the army’s 14 Chinooks, the equipment would be a temporary external tank made by Helitak Firefighting Equipment of Queensland. This company has been selling its equipment with US approvals to foreign customers since 2023.

The Helitak fire tank can be installed in 30 minutes without structural modification. It holds hold 11,000 litres and can be filled in 60 seconds.

Helitak also makes a tank for Black Hawk helicopters in a 4500-litre size. The army will have 40 Black Hawks by 2030.

The 2023 Defence Strategic Review emphasised that the government should have the ‘resources and capabilities to deal with all but the most extreme domestic disaster operations’ and that ‘Defence must be the force of last resort for domestic aid’.

This recommendation was made in response to increasing Defence deployment as almost a first call to respond to natural disasters and provide community assistance. Some of those deployments are rightly criticised as an abuse of Defence resources that distracts from the organisation’s core purposes. Defence work shouldn’t be manning Australia’s state borders during Covid-19 lockdowns, acting as a surge workforce in aged care homes and mopping up mud for photo ops.

However, Defence cannot expect never to be asked to respond to disasters in Australia.

In the United States, firefighting agencies can only request a MAFFS activation after all available commercial air tanker options have been exhausted. This is an important restriction, and one that Australia should adopt to protect Defence resources. It would also keep the capability consistent with the Defence Strategic Review’s recommendations.

Australia has been relatively lucky this fire season, but we must put contingencies in place now and buy systems such as MAFFS and Helitak tanks before the next inferno.

Otherwise, when lives and livelihoods are in the path of a blaze, Australians will rightly ask why the government didn’t prepare to fight the fires we knew would come.

La La Land under siege

The devastating wildfires in California have turned the City of Stars into a scene from an apocalyptic Hollywood movie.

It’s hard to fathom that a disaster of this magnitude could strike a major coastal city today, and difficult to understand how we’re still seeing widespread destruction of homes and businesses. About 12,000 structures have been lost since the fires began on 7 January, with many more likely to follow.

Like Los Angeles, Australia’s capital cities are close to national parks and are vulnerable to bushfires. In 2003 a massive fire hit Canberra. Almost 500 houses burned down, but the city lost no critical infrastructure.

Whether that was thanks to good luck or good preparations, we need to look again at protection of major cities’ critical infrastructure against increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters.

Amid the devastation in LA, some buildings remain unscathed. These structures show the importance of preparedness and attention to disaster-resistant design and resilient building materials.

Two particular examples of resilient building design and materials that have been making headlines worldwide are in Malibu and the Pacific Palisades. Buildings there incorporate a range of wildfire-proofing measures, including fire-resistant roof materials and absence of eaves and roof vents.

Internal features include tempered glass and class-A wood, which is as ignition resistant as concrete or steel. The structures also have walls that resist flame and heat for up to one hour. Externally, sparse desert-style landscaping and concrete retaining walls provide effective setbacks.

Meanwhile, the Paul Getty Museum is an example of resilient infrastructure. It sits on a ridgeline in the Santa Monica Mountains and has withstood several wildfires, with this month’s Palisades fire coming within 1.8 metres of the eastern walls. Completed in 1997, the museum features fire-resistant landscapes, materials and systems, including a network of underground pipes connects to a one-million-gallon water tank for emergency sprinkler activation.

Built to the highest fire-resistive standards, it has exterior features including 300,000 travertine stone blocks, and roofs covered in crushed stone. Interior walls are concrete, and the building’s self-contained design includes air pressure systems to separate different areas and prevent smoke infiltration.

So far, the LA wildfires have destroyed an area of about 60 square miles (approximately 16,000 hectares), an area larger than the city of Darwin. In comparison, the Australian 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires burnt more than 16 million hectares of land, resulting in a loss of about 5900 buildings and an estimated insurance loss of $1.34 billion. The economic, social and environmental impacts are still felt.

Reinsurers in Los Angeles have indicated that they will face significant losses and will seek to recover their costs. This will have affect insurance premiums globally, and any may result in rising insurance costs and difficulties in securing coverage. According to climate-change risk analysis modelling, one in 10 properties in Australia will be uninsurable within the next decade. Meanwhile, Australia is experiencing a cost-of-living crisis, where insurance is increasingly seen as a luxury expense and is often deprioritised in favour of essential needs such as housing and groceries.

As insurance becomes unaffordable, the government should shoulder the burden of protecting infrastructure. This raises an important question: how well-prepared are our major cities’ critical and social infrastructure to withstand and respond to the increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters that climate change is driving?

50 years ago, Cyclone Tracy was, at the time, the worst natural disaster in Australian history. As reflected in ASPI’s special report Cyclone Tracy: 50 years on, the disaster played a pivotal role in the development of the National Construction Code, which established a standard to enhance resilience against natural hazards such as bushfires, floods and earthquakes. It wasn’t until 1991 that an Australian standard was set for improving the fire resistance of homes in bushfire-prone regions.

The LA wildfires have shown that natural disasters do not respect boundaries set by urban planning. Many of our major cities, including major Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, are bordered by big national parks, making the urban edges highly vulnerable to bushfires, especially as climate change makes conditions hotter and drier.

A reform of the National Construction Code and Australian fire resistance standards are needed to ensure new infrastructure can withstand major weather events. This could be similar to the implementation of sustainability and energy-efficiency standards for new buildings. Governments at all levels can lead by example by improving the disaster resilience of their own assets.

Implementation of a government-led rebate system, similar to the Australia’s solar rebate system, is an example of how government can help offset the costs of adapting existing structures to make them more resilient.

In the short term such a reform would not only reduce the loss of structures during natural disasters; it would also cut building-lifetime energy costs. Over the long term, it would help lower the cost of insurance premiums and, importantly, reduce post-disaster recovery time.

The LA wildfires have underscored the urgent need for governments to rethink their assumptions about bushfire risk and infrastructure resilience. LA is facing a long road ahead to rebuild its infrastructure and restore essential services. Australia must take steps to avoid experiencing a similar crisis.

LA fires: changing climate demands constant and focused preparation

The fires in Los Angeles are estimated to be the most expensive disaster in US history at US$250–275 billion, or 24 to 26 percent of Australia’s annual GDP. That loss has accrued in just over a week and is rising.

This was not a natural disaster. That would imply a lack of human responsibility. Rather, this is what happens when a human-warmed climate catches us off-guard—even in a city that knows fire.

Australia has done significant work since the 2019–20 Black Summer fires, and the floods that followed, to appreciate climate risks and prepare for them. However, much of that work, including the National Climate Risk Assessment and the National Adaptation Plan, is yet to be released. As the federal election nears, all parties should remind themselves to not treat climate as a political football—a priority only when disasters strike or when it’s convenient.

These events will continue to surprise if we fail to understand and address the locked-in disaster risks, and they will occur at greater frequency and cause greater loss if we continue warming the atmosphere.

While climate change isn’t the only factor in play in LA, it’s a big part of why officials were taken by surprise. Compound climate-amplified disasters build quietly but strike swiftly. In this case climate appears to have primed the intensity of the fires.

California is no stranger to whiplashing climate conditions. It experienced a three-year drought from 2020 to 2022, followed by two years of significant rainfall—recording LA’s seventh-wettest year in 2022–23. That rainfall drove vegetation growth, then a sustained drought and higher than average temperatures at the start of the current winter dried much of that new vegetation.

The Santa Ana winds that fanned the flames with hot, dry air are typical for the area in winter but were particularly strong with gusts at nearly 160km/h last week—at times grounding firefighting aircraft when they were needed most, pushing fires faster down hillsides where they’d normally slow, and spewing embers far beyond firelines. The winds may have been strengthened by warmer than average ocean temperatures and a meandering North American jet stream, which has been increasingly disrupted by climate change in recent years and may have also contributed to the atmospheric rivers dumping rain over LA in the years before the fires.

Yet those factors alone don’t explain why the fires started, why they’ve been hard to control, or why they’ve caused such damage.

Clear answers on the origins of the fires will come once investigations conclude. Speculating now doesn’t help. Misinformation abounds online, as it increasingly does after disasters, with harmful effects on responders, confusing the response and muddying the analysis needed for future preparation. For example, conspiracy theories hold that the US government used weather control to intensify Hurricane Helene—which struck the southeast United States in September last year—to cause widespread damage. That led to Federal Emergency Management Agency responders facing armed threats.

The Eaton fire, the second-largest in LA, may have been sparked by damaged electrical infrastructure from powerful Santa Ana winds, as has happened in the past. If that’s the case, it adds more pressure to California’s ongoing efforts to prepare its infrastructure for intensifying natural disasters.

Preparation has been underway for some time, but risks remain—in part because there are no cheap solutions. By California’s own estimates, burying all distribution and transmission lines in the state could cost US$763 billion—roughly 70 percent of Australia’s 2024 GDP—and would take years. Nonetheless, the economics of such climate adaptation has become clearer since just a single week of fire has reached a third of that cost.

Urban development has also played a role. Malibu and the surrounding area are traditional fire country—the chaparral vegetation evolved to undergo periods of fire. But there are now eight million people living in fire-prone areas in southern California. Fire-resilient building designs as well as fuel reduction and landscaping around houses might have slowed the growth of the fires in urban environments, protecting more homes. There is no easy way to get around the consequences of building and living in high risk areas; all we can do is try to avoid it in future.

Even though many affected communities are aware of climate and fire risk, they clearly didn’t believe they were vulnerable. Rebuilding with fire resilience in mind will be necessary, especially as fire insurance will become unaffordable for many.

While much focus has been on insufficient water supplies to fight the fires, most reservoirs were full—contradicting misinformation that California’s environmental planning restricted access to upstream sources.

A more plausible explanation for California’s underpreparedness is that urban water infrastructure simply isn’t designed for wildfire.

The Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, where many celebrities lost their homes, is at the end of the local water line, so receives less water pressure. As hydrants were tapped for water, the pressure dropped, draining emergency tanks in the neighbourhood.

An investigation will assess the reasons for, and effect of, the ongoing closure of the Santa Ynez reservoir in the Palisades area—hopefully including why it wasn’t rapidly brought back online late in 2024 as climate conditions worsened.

That brings us to the funding, staffing and preparation of LA’s fire authorities. Attention focused on the mayor’s budget reductions, but they were only a 2 percent cut from last year. While that may have had an effect, clearly the scale of the need was far beyond a few percentage points.

Inadequate staffing was a pressure early on, even with 9000 firefighters in LA County alone.

That isn’t a cheap solve, either. If LA needs greater capacity on hand at any time, its budget would have to grow significantly. That demand would have to compete with resources needed to prepare for and reduce the risk of future fires, including potential private firefighting capacities. Again, early investment in preparedness will reduce the complications in and need for future reactive responses. But building out future response capacity will take time.

The bottom line is that LA’s various failures in preparation means it was caught off-guard, but this disaster wouldn’t have been so extreme without climate disruption priming such an intense and unexpected set of fires.

The same dynamic has occurred in Australia, and it will continue if we don’t take climate risks seriously. These events are no longer surprising; they’re sad, they’re painful, but also entirely predictable.

What mercenaries can teach us about climate-fuelled disaster responses

The devastating fires in Southern California, many of which are still burning out of control, have exposed a controversial and increasingly attractive disaster response alternative that engages the private sector.

California’s private firefighting industry, which most haven’t even heard of, is growing rapidly in the face of deteriorating climate conditions. Proponents contend that private industries ‘can fill gaps when public fire departments aren’t able to meet the demands of their local communities’. However, without careful planning and public sector engagement, expanding the industry may actually exacerbate those gaps.

We can learn from another type of privatised force: mercenaries, or private military companies.

The United Nations Mercenary Convention defines a mercenary as an individual who, among other factors, is recruited to fight and is motivated to take part by the desire for private gain. As private firefighters can be similarly defined, we can use the experiences of mercenaries in warfare to predict challenges and inform policy.

Mercenaries are paid far better than their counterparts in national armed forces. Similarly, private firefighters in California are allegedly being paid up to US$2000 an hour for their services. Comparatively, the average public firefighting wage is US$30 an hour.

The profit-fuelled growth of such private industries at the expense of losing personnel and expertise from public services presents community risks. Private contractors will act in the interest of their stakeholders and not necessarily in the interests of affected communities. For example, private firefighters may be contractually obliged to remain on standby to respond to requests from clients, rather than helping others at risk.

Public sector personnel shortages can also force governments to outsource operations to contractors, initiating cycles of dependency. This is already occurring within defence organisations: In a paper published by the Land Warfare Studies Centre, Lieutenant Colonel Ian Wing wrote that ‘many functions are now so reliant on contractors for their performance that modern military forces would find it very difficult to deploy for prolonged periods without them.’

Wing also wrote that military contractors ‘may not wish to completely resolve conflict, as to do so would remove the requirement for further contracts.’ This is concerning in the context of disaster response: firefighter arson is already a well-known phenomenon. Greater monetary incentive, in addition to desires for excitement and recognition, could further motivate contractors to commit arson and delay the extinguishing of fires.

Government employment of private contractors can also subvert accountability and undermine trust—an important aspect of effective disaster management. Compared with public operations, private contractors’ activities ‘can be attractive [to governments] as their undertakings are not as visible or readily scrutinised by the citizenry who empowers them’. For example, in the warfare mercenary context, it is alleged that the Australian government was able to maintain domestic political palatability of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars by increasing the number of contractors and thereby reducing ADF commitments and fatalities.

Although many governments may accept such a scapegoat, a lack of transparency and accountability can undermine public trust in government, jeopardising disaster management as a result. From heeding early warnings and emergency information to accepting help and guidance from institutions, trust is essential for community resilience and recovery.

Nevertheless, the benefits (for example, agility, precision, and surge capacity) of private contractors in disaster situations can be significant, if the risks have been addressed. The Australian government should begin planning and preparing for an increase in demand for large-scale private disaster industries. This should be done in consultation with states and territories, as well as local communities. The government should develop an enabling regulatory framework and identify which areas of disaster management are best placed to be supported by contractors.

Private contractors are potentially well-suited to supporting disaster planning, training, and mitigation. However, given the associated risks, Australia should consider whether these entities should be involved in disaster response.

Diverse approaches can help build resilience if they are coordinated and complementary. The government must ensure that such approaches do not come at the expense of community cohesion, and do not undermine national preparedness and efficient disaster response.

Back-to-back La Niñas highlight stakes for Australia at Glasgow climate talks

Before the end of this month, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is likely to announce the arrival of a La Niña weather event, the second in two years. The announcement will be a useful reminder of the issues at stake for Australia in the climate negotiations currently underway in Glasgow.

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation is the single most important source of weather variability globally, including extreme temperatures, droughts, heavy rains and tropical storms. Climate change is rapidly increasing their severity and extreme El Niño events are expected to double in less than 10 years.

Australia is among the countries most severely affected. El Niños typically bring dry conditions to eastern Australia. Nine of the 10 driest winter–spring periods on record for eastern Australia occurred during El Niño years. The severe droughts of 1982, 1994, 2002, 2006 and 2015 were all associated with El Niños. The 2015–16 event significantly damaged agricultural productivity and contributed to coral bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef and an early start to the fire season. Globally, it was associated with droughts that created a humanitarian emergency affecting 60 million people across four continents.

By contrast, La Niña conditions tend to increase the frequency and severity of cyclones and bring higher than average rainfall across Australia. Between 2010 and 2012 ,for example, successive record-breaking La Niña events triggered devastating floods in Queensland. More than 78% of the state (an area larger than France and Germany combined) was declared a disaster zone and more than 2.5 million Australians were affected. The 2010 event also had major global impacts, including in Pakistan, where extreme flooding triggered a humanitarian emergency affecting 20 million people.

In March, a La Niña contributed to severe flooding across coastal New South Wales, marking the wettest week the region had experienced since recordkeeping began in 1900. Less than seven months separate the conclusion of that La Niña event and the emergence of the one likely to be announced in a matter of weeks. The BOM announcement will mean we can expect a wetter than average summer with a higher risk of cyclones and extreme rainfall.

Ordinarily, a wetter season decreases Australia’s bushfire risk, but it’s important to keep in mind that above average rainfall from consecutive La Niña events will also increase vegetation growth in many parts of the country, including regrowth of forests devastated during the Black Summer fires of 2019–20. That may significantly raise the bushfire risk in subsequent years, particularly given the generally hotter conditions we can expect from climate change. The summer of 2022–23 is worrying in this regard, particularly if it coincides with the emergence of an El Niño.

One of the reasons El Niño and La Niña impacts are becoming more extreme is that they’re occurring alongside climate change. In effect, El Niños are now amplifying what are already record-setting heating events. Similarly, La Niñas are amplifying cyclone risks that are increasing due to climate change, such as more destructive storm surges linked to sea-level rise. The destructiveness of these events will increase rapidly as the climate continues to warm.

Experts are also clear that our ability to reliably predict impacts will be increasingly tested. Bushfire expert David Bowman has warned that we should be prepared for big surprises. The interactions of climate change with El Niño and La Niña events and other natural climate drivers will confound our expectations of what is ‘normal’. They will increasingly contribute to compound hazards with cascading impacts that will overwhelm the resilience of Australian communities.

Australia is hugely exposed to these climate hazards. Twenty per cent of our GDP and 3.9 million Australians are in areas with high to extreme risk of tropical cyclones, and about 11% of GDP and 2.2 million people are in places with high and extreme risk of bushfire.

And the costs of responding to disasters will increase rapidly. A report just released by the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience suggests that the annual cost could jump from $38 billion today to more than $90 billion by 2060. As the report also acknowledges, even this immense increase is a significant underestimate of the actual costs because the analysis assumes that climate-induced disasters will occur separately rather than simultaneously as compound events, which is much more likely.

This is the Australian climate context for the ongoing Glasgow negotiations. Australia is highly exposed to climate risks and the global window of opportunity to prevent the worst of the impacts is closing rapidly. Unlike with other policy challenges, there will be no second chance if our efforts fail. The inertia in the climate system will make it impossible to reverse the damage later.

It should be an urgent foreign policy priority for Australia, given our exceptional exposure to climate risk, to mobilise faster global reductions of greenhouse gases. But the effectiveness of our advocacy on this front will depend significantly on the credibility of our domestic measures to cut emissions. In this respect, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s recent announcement that Australia will reduce greenhouse gases to net zero by 2050 is a step in the right direction. But we will need to demonstrate greater domestic climate ambition than this for our global advocacy to be taken seriously.

ASPI’s decades: Cop this in the era of disasters

ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.

We cop it from climate change. Now we seek to cope. The job of COP26 in Glasgow is to come up with a fair cop for the planet.

Part of ASPI’s response to the ‘cop this’ of global warming was an all-hazards approach to natural disasters, linked to the all-hazards approach to terrorism.

ASPI’s risk and resilience program, led by Paul Barnes, ran from 2014 to 2020. The program explored disaster risk reduction in the Indo-Pacific region, researched climate impacts and worked to strengthen Australia’s critical supply chains (road, rail, aviation and maritime).

Australia needed a new and continuous conversation about resilience, Barnes wrote. Prevention was important, but we also needed better preparation and planning for what was coming:

Natural disasters are partly surprises: while we can’t predict when they’ll occur, we know that they will happen. To prepare, we must plan ahead, but we re-relearn lessons and often make the same mistakes. Given the many royal commissions and other investigations into disasters over the past few years, the lesson book is a thick one.

The 2016 defence white paper pointed to six key drivers shaping Australia’s security environment to 2035. One of them was ‘state fragility, including within our immediate neighbourhood, caused by uneven economic growth, crime, social, environmental and governance challenges and climate change’.

Climate change would be a major challenge for countries in Australia’s immediate region, Defence said, causing higher temperatures and increased sea-level rise and increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events: ‘These effects will exacerbate the challenges of population growth and environmental degradation, and will contribute to food shortages and undermine economic development.’

In 2018, Robert Glasser joined ASPI. Now head of the institute’s Climate and Security Policy Centre, he’s a former assistant UN secretary-general and was the UN secretary-general’s special representative for disaster risk reduction.

In Preparing for the era of disasters, Glasser wrote: ‘As the world warms beyond 2°C, as now seems increasingly likely, an era of disasters will be upon us with profound implications for how we organise ourselves to protect Australian lives, property and economic interests and our way of life.’

This emerging era would stretch emergency services, undermine community resilience and escalate economic costs and deaths. Federal, state and local governments had to prepare for the unprecedented scale of these challenges. Glasser recommended:

  • scaling up Australia’s efforts to prevent the effects from natural hazards, such as from extreme weather, from becoming disasters through greater investment in disaster risk reduction
  • planning for financial support to states for economic recovery following disasters, with ‘fodder banks’ and ‘land banks’ for communities in chronic crisis and the permanently displaced
  • strengthening disaster response capacity and planning at all levels, including in the military, which will ‘play an increasingly important role in transporting firefighters and equipment, fodder drops from helicopters and the provision of shelters’
  • embedding climate change effects in flood and bushfire risk maps, building codes, planning schemes, infrastructure delivery and laws.

Such thinking was amplified by the bushfire royal commission’s 2020 report on the dire consequences of climate change—increasingly intense natural disasters, catastrophic fire conditions, more violent cyclones and continued sea-level rise.

The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, chaired by a former chief of the Australian Defence Force, Mark Binskin, was established to investigate the devastating Black Summer bushfires of 2019–20.

The Binskin report said that natural disasters had changed, ‘and it has become clear to us that the nation’s disaster management arrangements must also change’.

Extreme weather had ‘already become more frequent and intense because of climate change; further global warming over the next 20 to 30 years is inevitable’.

Australia had warmed by approximately 1.4°C since 1910. Globally, temperatures would continue to rise, and Australia would have more hot days and fewer cool days. Floods and bushfires would become more frequent and more intense.

The commission said that the 2019–20 fires started in Australia’s hottest and driest year on record. Much of the country that burned had already suffered drought. The fire danger index was the highest since national records began. Catastrophic fire conditions could render traditional bushfire prediction models and firefighting techniques less effective:

Tragically, 33 people died and extensive smoke coverage across much of eastern Australia may have caused many more deaths. Over 3,000 homes were destroyed. Estimates of the national financial impacts are over $10 billion. Nearly three billion animals were killed or displaced and many threatened species and other ecological communities were extensively harmed.

The commission cited the Bureau of Meteorology’s conclusion that further ‘warming over the next two decades is inevitable’ and noted that, over the next 20 to 30 years, ‘the global climate system is going to continue to warm in response to greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere’.

Looking beyond Australia in The rapidly emerging crisis on our doorstep, Glasser pointed to the exceptional hazards affecting maritime Southeast Asia (MSEA). Hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying coastal areas would experience more severe extremes and more frequent swings from extreme heat and drought to severe floods. The diminishing time for recovery between events would have major consequences for food security, population displacements and resilience, Glasser wrote:

MSEA faces a dangerous constellation of simultaneous climate hazards. Sea-level there is rising four times faster than the global average, driven by climate change and other factors, such as groundwater extraction. MSEA has the world’s highest average sea-level rise per kilometre of coastline and the largest coastal population affected by it. Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country, and 60% of its population (165 million people) is in coastal areas. The same is true for over half of the Philippines’ municipalities and 10 of its largest cities.

Glasser said that scientists have determined that, by 2040, at 2°C of warming, Southeast Asia’s per capita crop production may decline by one-third. Amplifying the food insecurity risks is the region’s reliance on fisheries. Indonesia obtains more than half of its animal protein from fish, while in the Philippines the figure is about 40%. Fish species are moving out of the region to escape warming waters, and the region’s coral reefs, the ‘nursery’ for roughly 10% of the world’s fish supply, are degrading rapidly.

The emerging regional impacts could overstretch Australia’s operational capacities—creating demands on the ADF to simultaneously support disaster relief within Australia and respond to regional security challenges, Glasser wrote:

The posture, training and capabilities of the ADF will need to change so that it can be part of Australia’s response to more frequent, higher impact regional natural disasters. Its capability set will also need to evolve to equip it to operate at greater scale and in places affected by large natural disasters.

After defending Australia, Defence planning sets the second strategic objective as the stability and security of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. ‘Realising that objective,’ Glasser judged, ‘is about to become much harder.’

Drawn from the book on the institute’s first 20 years: An informed and independent voice: ASPI, 2001–2021.

Bushfire royal commission warns of ‘alarming disaster outlook’

In its final report issued last week, the Royal Commission into Australia’s National Natural Disaster Arrangements warns of an unprecedented, increasing and unavoidable threat to Australia from climate change, requiring a ‘fundamental shift in strategic thinking about national natural disaster risk management’.

In terms similar to those expressed in recent ASPI analysis, the commission notes:

We are likely to see more compounding disasters on a national scale with far-reaching consequences. Compound disasters may be caused by multiple disasters happening simultaneously, or one after another. Some may involve multiple hazards—fires, floods and storms. Some have cascading effects—threatening not only lives and homes, but also the nation’s economy, critical infrastructure and essential services, such as our electricity, telecommunications and water supply, and our roads, railways and airports.

The commission highlights the risk of ‘a catastrophic impact’ across Australia from these events, including at the community level. With cascading disasters, each subsequent hazard increases the scale of the damage caused by the previous hazard.

Last summer’s devastating bushfires may be evidence that we are already entering this new era of disasters. As the commission notes, communities in Queensland had already ‘experienced successive conditions of drought, heatwaves, bushfires, hailstorms and flooding, compounding the destructive impact’. Indeed, in the past three years, 53 of Queensland’s 73 local governments have experienced three or more major disasters.

Most of the recommendations in the final report, while important and practical, don’t fundamentally shift national strategic thinking about disaster risk. They propose many tactical improvements in our emergency preparations and response capability, such as purchasing additional firefighting aircraft, conducting better evacuation planning, harmonising emergency warning systems across the states and territories, strengthening the interoperability of equipment and systems, and creating a national register of emergency services personnel.

It would have been useful if the commissioners had proposed a national communications campaign to help prepare the public for this emerging era of disasters. Instead the report somewhat anaemically recommends that governments ‘continue to deliver, evaluate and improve’ programs ‘aimed at promoting disaster resilience for individuals and communities’.

Some of the recommendations, if implemented effectively, will contribute to the fundamental shift in disaster risk management the commission has called for. The commission’s proposed actions include requiring consideration of climate and disaster risk in land-use planning; establishing a national mechanism to communicate these risks to households (and prospective purchasers); protecting critical infrastructure; and creating the legislative mandate for the federal government to declare a national emergency.

Underpinning each of these recommendations is the need for more accurate information on the climate and disaster risk affecting communities. The commission has recognised this in highlighting the need to invest in improving climate change models and a specific recommendation that governments develop ‘downscaled’ climate projections.

Arguably the single most transformational recommendation in the report is for the federal government to establish a national entity dedicated to championing resilience across the nation:

Its remit should be to think broadly about all of the measures necessary to make the country resilient to natural disasters, and plan and respond accordingly. It should focus on reducing long-term disaster risk and … planning and cooperation across multiple government departments and agencies at all levels of government, including local government, and extensive engagement with the private sector, non-government organisations and Australian communities.

Four elements need to be in place to enable this new entity to achieve its full potential. First, it should be separated bureaucratically from Emergency Management Australia, the agency responsible for coordinating Australia’s national response to disasters. My previous international experience suggests that if resilience is placed with emergency response, the latter will always trump the former.

Second, and related to the above, the new entity should report to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, rather than to a line agency. This will make it somewhat easier to convene the necessary cross-departmental discussions and to overcome bureaucratic resistance to the changes that will be required. There would also be some advantage in the entity having additional reporting obligations to the Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management, given the need for it to be engaged with the broader disaster management community.

Third, the new entity should be allocated a significant budget. Its reporting line to PM&C will give it significant gravitas to convene the key players both within and outside of government, but government funding can be useful to leverage significant private-sector investment in initiatives that are in the public interest.

Fourth, one of its key tasks should be to begin facilitating the development of model legislation, standards, codes and the like that can deliver major improvements in national resilience. The political will at various jurisdictional levels may not yet exist to implement many of the initiatives, but this can change rapidly in the wake of a major disaster. One of the main advantages of the new organisation will be to have thought through the issues, consulted widely and designed sensible solutions that are ready to be progressed when the opportunities arise.

Given the commission’s deep concern about the impact of climate change on Australia, it’s surprising that the final report says nothing about the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally. The terms of reference provided the latitude for it to do so (‘We direct you to make any recommendations arising out of your inquiry that you consider appropriate’) and the government has frequently acknowledged that Australia needs to do its part to reduce emissions. This is the most urgent global risk-reduction measure and the most glaring gap in the commission’s otherwise fine report.

Bushfire royal commission warns of catastrophic consequences of climate change

The bushfire royal commission has warned bluntly that Australia must prepare for the dire consequences of climate change with increasingly intense natural disasters, catastrophic fire conditions, more violent cyclones and continued sea-level rise.

Formally titled the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements and chaired by former Australian Defence Force head Mark Binskin, the investigation into the handling and impact of the devastating Christmas fires makes 80 recommendations to improve Australia’s national natural disaster arrangements and make the nation safer.

The commission says that natural disasters have changed, ‘and it has become clear to us that the nation’s disaster management arrangements must also change’.

‘Extreme weather has already become more frequent and intense because of climate change; further global warming over the next 20 to 30 years is inevitable.’

Australia has warmed by approximately 1.4°C since 1910.

Globally, temperatures will continue to rise, and Australia will have more hot days and fewer cool days. Floods and bushfires are expected to become more frequent and more intense.

The commission says that the 2019–20 fires started in Australia’s hottest and driest year on record. Much of the country that burned had already been impacted by drought and the forest fire danger index was the highest since national records began. It warns that catastrophic fire conditions may render traditional bushfire prediction models and firefighting techniques less effective.

‘Tragically, 33 people died and extensive smoke coverage across much of eastern Australia may have caused many more deaths. Over 3,000 homes were destroyed. Estimates of the national financial impacts are over $10 billion. Nearly three billion animals were killed or displaced and many threatened species and other ecological communities were extensively harmed.’

The commission says it was told by the Bureau of Meteorology that further ‘warming over the next two decades is inevitable’ and that over the next 20 to 30 years, ‘the global climate system is going to continue to warm in response to greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere’.

The CSIRO told the commission that some further climate change is locked in ‘because of emissions we’ve already had’.

‘We heard from CSIRO that even under the low emissions scenario, which goes to net negative emissions, the climate does not return to a preindustrial or recent baseline type climate immediately’, the commission says. ‘It takes a very long time for that to occur, and would require CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere.’

The CSIRO told the commission it was ‘more a matter of stabilising rather than returning’ and Australia ‘need[s] to adapt to further changes in the climate no matter what happens with emissions and we will have inevitable changes in the climate coming through for decades to come, no matter what pathway we take forward’.

The commission says strong adaptation measures are necessary to respond to the impacts of climate change, and warming beyond the next 20 to 30 years is largely dependent on the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate models project a decrease in the total number of tropical cyclones, but an increase in their intensity. ‘However, large natural variability and data limitations make it difficult to be entirely confident about long-term trends in tropical cyclones’, the commission says.

‘Despite this, coastal impacts from tropical cyclones are likely to become worse, due to rising sea levels and increases in cyclone-related extreme rain and wind events.’

In Australia, the latitude at which tropical cyclones reach their maximum lifetime intensity may be shifting southwards. This could have serious consequences for southeastern Queensland and northeastern New South Wales, which are reasonably densely populated areas.

Extreme rainfall events are projected to increase in intensity, potentially resulting in an increase in flood risks. Already, there is evidence that the proportion of total annual rainfall coming from heavy rain days has increased.

By 2090, the Australian sea level is projected to rise by between 26 and 82 centimetres depending on the level of emissions and how relevant systems respond. A greater sea-level rise is possible if ice sheets melt faster than projected.

‘The consequences of sea level rise for Australia will include the flooding of low lying coastal and tidal areas with increased regularity. It is also likely to result in coastal erosion, loss of beaches and higher storm surges that will affect coastal communities, infrastructure, industries and the environment.’

In his forward to the report, Air Chief Marshal Binskin says that achieving an effective national approach to natural disasters requires a clear, robust and accountable system capable of both providing a comprehensive understanding of and responding to the aggregated risks associated with mitigation, preparation for, response to and recovery from natural disasters.

Such a system must have unbroken linkages in place from the highest levels of government to individuals in the community; provide decision-makers with timely, consistent and accurate information; be structured for decisions to be made at the most appropriate level; allow decision-makers to understand and mitigate all risks so far as reasonably practicable; enable stakeholders to understand the residual risk and inform others so that they may take appropriate actions; and must be resourced to fulfil these functions.

‘We were pleased that many stakeholders, including the Australian, state and territory governments, supported, at least in principle, improvements to national natural disaster arrangements.

‘Of course, support is one thing—action is another. The national natural disaster arrangements Australians deserve require unity, not just of commitment or purpose, but of action. Only then can Australians have confidence that the arrangements are the best they can be. The time to act to improve arrangements is now. Unprecedented is not a reason to be unprepared. We need to be prepared for the future.’

Unprecedented crises create a unique opportunity

Not since World War II has Australia experienced such an extended period of national crisis. It’s now been more than 10 months since the onset of the Black Summer bushfires, the worst on record in terms of the area burnt and the number of properties destroyed. Only a few weeks separated the end of that crisis, which directly affected almost 60% of Australians, from the outbreak of the pandemic that has profoundly affected us all.

Many more months of national crisis lie ahead, not only due to the ongoing health risks, as the current spikes in infections in Melbourne suggest, but also because the economic impacts of the pandemic will linger far longer than its health impacts.

Crises can also be great opportunities to fundamentally reduce the risk of future calamities. The disruptions they cause tend to unite the public in supporting (or demanding) bold policy action from their governments. The extraordinary global reduction in loss of life from disasters over recent decades was achieved in this way: the destruction caused by earthquakes, cyclones and other catastrophes triggered public demand for action that led to major new disaster legislation, changes to building codes, and investments in early warning systems, evacuation planning and other risk-reduction measures.

We also saw this dynamic in the aftermath of the bushfires. Under heavy public criticism for his response to the catastrophe, Prime Minister Scott Morrison proposed exceptional steps to strengthen Australia’s resilience to future disasters, including expanding the role of the defence force in disaster relief and using the authority of the federal government to declare a national emergency in response to widespread and severe natural disasters. He also announced a royal commission into the bushfires, which will deliver recommendations in October that will include measures to build our resilience to climate change.

The government has also taken extraordinary measures to slow the spread of Covid-19 and cushion Australians from the economic impacts. Many more measures are likely in the months ahead to stimulate the economy and build Australia’s resilience to future pandemics in areas such as disease surveillance, vaccine development and securing critical supply chains.

These unfolding responses to the bushfires and Covid-19 are an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen Australia’s resilience to future disasters. But to capitalise on the opportunity, Canberra needs to overcome three main challenges. The first is the tendency of governments to focus heavily on initiatives that strengthen our emergency response capacity, while neglecting measures that reduce the likelihood of future emergencies. Canberra’s funding for mitigating disaster risk amounts to only about 3% of what the federal government spends on post-disaster responses.

In building a more resilient Australia, we need to strike a better balance between investments in disaster response capacity, such as acquiring additional fire-fighting equipment, and investments in disaster mitigation, such as disaster-risk-sensitive land-use planning. Over the longer term, the latter will save more lives and property than the former.

This investment imbalance has also been a feature of international funding for responses to health emergencies. During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, for example, the money flowed freely to build the emergency response capacity, but not for sustained measures to reduce the risk of future outbreaks. With Covid-19 we are now living with the consequences of this deficiency.

The second challenge to overcome is the tendency to compartmentalise various hazards and resilience planning in bureaucratic silos rather than treat them as a whole-of-government endeavour. Disasters do not fit neatly into bureaucratic silos. The Black Summer demonstrated how rapidly a bushfire emergency can become an air-quality health emergency, a threat to our tourism industry and a biodiversity crisis. The pandemic’s knock-on effects across many sectors of society may ultimately be greater than the immediate health impacts.

There are clearly important links between disasters triggered by drought, floods and bushfires. We’ve seen recently how persistent drought can erode a community’s resilience to these other hazards, and all three are influenced by climate change. Yet, because there are numerous government agencies and departments involved in addressing these hazards, responses need to be coordinated to avoid inefficiencies.

For example, droughts were excluded from the 2018 National disaster risk reduction framework, at least partly because bureaucratic responsibility for ‘drought’ sat with the Department of Agriculture and ‘disaster risk reduction’ sat with Emergency Management Australia within the Department of Home Affairs.

Bringing our resilience planning together at the whole-of-government level would also make it easier to ensure that our responses to one threat don’t inadvertently increase our exposure to others. For example, the government is currently considering investments in infrastructure to stimulate employment in the wake of the pandemic. New infrastructure should not be funded in places or designed in ways that are vulnerable to flooding and other disaster risks that climate change is intensifying.

To overcome the bureaucratic silos and facilitate a multi-hazard, whole-of-government approach, national resilience planning should be coordinated at the highest level of government, not by any one ‘sectoral’ agency or department. A useful model for this is the digital technology taskforce that was recently established in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. It includes membership from across government departments, and involves the private sector and communities, all of which also have key roles to play in building a more climate change– and disaster-resilient Australia.

The third challenge the federal government needs to overcome is the tendency to assume that ambitious disaster resilience objectives can be achieved solely by establishing new, or topping up existing, ‘resilience’ funds.

Programs such as the Future Drought Fund and the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements are important resources for local communities, but Canberra is missing opportunities to leverage the far larger funding the Commonwealth and states and territories provide to support local governments in areas such as transport, education, manufacturing, energy and water supply, health, tourism, agriculture and fisheries. Incorporating provisions for resilience within the guidelines and specifications for these broader sectoral investments would have an enormous multiplier effect.

We have a unique opportunity in the wake of the unprecedented disruption caused by the Black Summer and Covid-19 crises to boost Australia’s disaster resilience. With the science of climate change suggesting that the risk of national-scale disasters is increasing, it’s essential that we seize this opportunity.

Urgent action needed to boost Australia’s preparedness for disasters

There’s a powerful moment in the recent Four Corners episode ‘Black summer’ in which a police car, driving through a Sunshine Coast town that is engulfed in flames, receives a call to rescue a 93-year-old man. The car is already full of evacuees, but from off camera one of them says to the driver, ‘Mate, you put him in, I’ll get out.’

Those simple words of self-sacrifice are deeply moving and I’m sure not unique in this summer of disasters that has wrought so much destruction and overwhelmed our capacity to respond. With climate change magnifying bushfires and other hazards, that lone patrol car—with its dedicated professionals, underequipped in overwhelming conditions, presented with a grim choice of who survives—increasingly looks like a metaphor for our future.

In his National Press Club address last month, Scott Morrison outlined his government’s plan to prevent this bleak prospect by strengthening Australia’s resilience to natural disasters. For the first time, the prime minister characterised the hazards arising from climate change as a national security challenge. He noted that meeting the challenge will require us to build ‘our ability to resist, absorb, accommodate, recover and transform’ from disasters, including ‘the effects of longer, hotter, drier summers’.

He is right to say we need to ‘transform’. We won’t keep pace with climate impacts by evolving or acting incrementally because they’re increasing non-linearly.

Extreme sea level events that have been historically rare (occurring once per century), in just a few decades are likely to occur annually in many places. Extreme heat events have increased 20-fold globally in the past three decades compared with the preceding three. The Queensland government is anticipating that the state will soon have to endure heatwaves for 15% of the year (up from 3% today), and that these events will be hotter and last on average 30 days, rather than the current four days.

The Australian Department of Agriculture estimates that changes in the climate since 2000 have already reduced average annual broadacre farm profits by over 20% ($18,600 per farm) and by 35% for cropping sector farms ($70,900 per farm). This equates to an average loss in revenue for the broadacre cropping industry of around $1.1 billion a year, during a period when the overall level of warming has been only about 1°C. We are on track for at least 3°C of warming.

But the real worry is that it’s beginning to appear as though the interactions between climate hazards and their cascading impacts are a far bigger threat than we realised. They may ultimately be more severe than the immediate impacts.

We’ve seen recent indications of that in this summer’s bushfires, where an unprecedented drought combined with record temperatures directly contributed to the destruction of more than 11 million hectares, with cascading impacts such as hazardous air quality affecting millions of Australians; a 75% increase in Australia’s annual emissions of greenhouse gases; at least a $4.5 billion blow to Australia’s tourism industry; and severe losses of wildlife and biodiversity. Things could have been worse. At one point, for example, fires threatened the area around Warragamba Dam, which supplies about 80% of Sydney’s water.

We witnessed these cascading impacts in Queensland beginning in late 2018. Bushfires, exacerbated by drought and record-setting extreme temperatures, destroyed a million hectares of bush and farmland—the largest expanse of Queensland affected by fire since recordkeeping began. This was followed by Tropical Cyclone Owen, which set an Australian record in dumping 681 millimetres of rain in just 24 hours—more than Melbourne usually receives in a year. It didn’t, however, diminish the drought gripping much of the state. A few weeks later, record-setting rains flooded more than 13 million hectares of northwest Queensland, killing hundreds of thousands of drought-stressed cattle.

And we saw it in Tasmania’s summer of 2015–16, in which multiple extreme climate events, including the driest season and warmest summer on record and an intense marine heatwave, contributed to severe bushfires, disrupted agriculture and hydropower generation, and caused disease outbreaks in the farmed shellfish industry. These and other related effects reduced Tasmania’s anticipated gross state product by almost 50%.

Our most hazard-prone state is Queensland. It’s a harbinger of what lies ahead for all Australia in a warming climate. Remarkably, since 2017 over half of the state’s 77 local government areas have experienced three or more disasters requiring emergency financial support from the federal and state levels. These local governments are now in the unsustainable situation of chronically recovering from disasters.

Nothing but a transformation in Australia’s disaster resilience will prepare us for the increasing scale and frequency of climate hazards and the wide-ranging impact they will have on society. This transformation should start with land-use planning, which is the most important mitigation measure for preventing future disaster losses in areas of new development. We need to increase our understanding of how climate change is expanding areas of extreme hazard and we need to take the politically difficult decision not to build in these areas.

Our existing housing and other infrastructure is already highly exposed. For example, over 10% of our GDP and 2.2 million Australians are in places with high and extreme risk of bushfire. Properties in these areas that are destroyed by fires or other hazards will need to be rebuilt in safer places or built back better to withstand future hazards.

These steps need to be matched with greater transparency of risk information across all levels of society. Generally, information about bushfire, flood or cyclone risk is not readily available to individuals purchasing homes or businesses making investment decisions. This is a market failure that will increasingly put Australian communities at risk. The disclosure of disaster risk information should be required upon the sale or lease of property and legislation should be enacted giving homeowners the right to know about their property’s exposure to hazards.

These measures should be incorporated in the prime minister’s proposal to establish an enhanced national accountability framework for disaster risk management with ‘targets, key actions, enhanced national standards and greater transparency’.

Incorporating them would also reinforce similar efforts by financial regulators to ensure that firms and financial institutions understand and transparently disclose their climate-related financial risks to investors, lenders, insurers and other stakeholders. This disclosure, which is currently voluntary, ultimately will become mandatory. As it does it will trigger enormous investments in assets that are resilient to climate and disaster risk.

If the climate warms beyond 2°C, as now seems increasingly likely, even the most ambitious transformation in Australia’s disaster resilience will be inadequate to meet the scale of the hazards and their cascading impacts. Reducing greenhouse gases globally as rapidly as possible is the single most important disaster risk treatment.

In this respect, it is encouraging that more than 80 countries have now committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. It was earlier reported that the Morrison government was considering signing up to the pledge, but this week the prime minister appeared to reject the possibility. The recent bushfire catastrophe suggests that all countries, including Australia, urgently need to lift their ambition to cut greenhouse gases.