First published 22 Oct 2026, 12:00am
A report from the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action group has warned against underestimating the risks of LA-style fires occurring in Australia. Picture: Brandon Bell/Getty Images North America.
Bushfires are set to cost Australia a massive $181bn across the next three decades unless drastic action is taken to protect homes and cut fire risks such as climate pollution, a group led by former emergency service chiefs warn.
Emergency Leaders for Climate Action (ELFCA) is calling on state and federal governments to fund a national fire-ready plan to help save lives and billions of dollars, while cutting climate pollution, in a report released on Thursday.
A key report recommendation is to fund to help homeowners retrofit at-risk dwellings to meet national bushfire standards.
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The Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, a group of former emergency service chiefs from across Australia, was founded by the former NSW fire chief Greg Mullins. Picture: Richard Dobson.
Bushfires near Marysville, in Victoria, during the 2009 bushfires. Picture: Supplied/Stephen Henderson.
This would cost on average an estimated $39,466 per residence and focus on lower income households, including senior citizens and people with limited mobility.
Modelling for the study, completed by advisory firm ConnellGriffin, found major fires would likely strike the nation every three to four years in the future.
The report warned the risk of serious urban fire events in Australia, such as when 16,000 structures were destroyed in the Los Angeles area in 2025, should not be underestimated.
Australia’s average annual $6bn bushfire bill would equate to an estimated $181bn total by 2055-56, including lost homes, damaged businesses and public buildings, harm to health and wellbeing and lost production of goods and lost work, though the report advised costs were likely to be higher as the modelling excluded matters such as loss of wildlife.
The town of Marysville, following the Black Saturday bushfires.
Co-author and the Climate Council’s Janice Lee says the report is a timely prompt for governments and communities to think through the wider impacts of more frequent and severe bushfires.
ELFCA founder and the former Commissioner of Fire and Rescue NSW, Greg Mullins, said the report was “a wake up call for state and federal governments to say, firstly, that we’re in a new era of bushfire threats”.
“Costs are going up, but the good news is that if we invest in resilience and prevention, we can vastly reduce those costs and the misery imposed on households,” Mr Mullins said.
Retrofitting homes to bring them up to the national bushfire standard would involve closing roof gaps where sparks can enter, double-glazing windows facing the direction fires would typically approach from, using steel rather than timber construction materials and not having decks which extend above bushland, he said.
The report stated upgrading at-risk homes would reduce insurance costs, deaths and financial losses, as well as impacts on communities and governments through housing people made homeless and rebuilding.
Fire damage around the town of Dalveen, in Queensland, in 2023. Picture: NCA Newswire/John Gass.
The document also stated the El Nino weather pattern now underway was tracking to become the strongest on record, setting the scene for record heat, flash droughts and the possibility of worsening bushfires in coming summers.
Mr Mullins said most of Australia’s capital cities, including Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart, were similar to Los Angeles in respect of having a lot of homes close to bushland.
A similar fire to LA’s January 2025 fires would be devastating in Australia, he added.
“All you need is similarly extreme winds, they didn’t even have high temperatures (in LA), and you could get a situation where there’s what we call an urban conflagration,” he said.
“So it’s house-to-house fire spread driven by the wind.”
The Emergency Leaders for Climate Action are calling on the federal government to halt approvals for new and expanded coal and gas projects, which fuel worsening climate disasters.
Report co-author and Climate Council councillor Janice Lee said as Australia’s population grew, more people were living in bushfire-prone areas.
“There will be more houses and more infrastructure in the path of fires, we know that there will be higher recovery and disruption costs, and that will have an impact, because there will be more people and more assets in harm’s way,” Ms Lee said.
The trend of increasing property losses associated with worsening fire risks became evident in the 2003 Canberra fires, Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday fires, the nationwide Black Summer bushfires and January 2026 Victorian bushfires, the report noted.
A combined 15,690 structures and hundreds of lives were lost in these tragedies.
And worsening bushfires are also affecting states where they were once considered as a lesser risk, such as Queensland.
Last year, the Productivity Commission found that speeding up the rollout of a national household resilience program covering all disasters, from 15 years to five years, could avoid up to $38bn in damage to homes between 2026 and 2100.
Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action co-founder and co-chair Jan Harris, who lost her home during the 2018 Tathra bushfires, in NSW. Picture: Supplied.
Jan Harris says she never again wants to experience losing her home in a fire.
Her family’s residence burned down in the 2018 bushfires in Tathra, a seaside town in NSW.
Along with her husband John and their son, they evacuated ahead of a blaze which destroyed more than 60 homes in the Bega Valley.
The experience lead to Ms Harris co-founding the Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action group, of which she is now co-chair.
After the bushfires, it took Ms Harris and her family more than two years and “quite a bit of money” to rebuild their house to the highest-possible fire safety standards including installing a water tank and a firefighting pump on their property, and removing vegetation near their 500m-long driveway.
The report states that firefighters face facing greater challenges, compounded by growing numbers of people living in areas facing bushfire risk. Picture: NCA Newswire/John Gass.
Ms Harris said that anything residents living in a fire-prone area could do to minimise the risk to their home was a great idea, including retrofitting a house to be more fire-resistant.
Apart from rebuilding their own place since the bushfire, she and John still have trouble sleeping and generally feel more anxious than before their home was destroyed.
Ms Harris said they were also worried about the approaching summer months.
“The area I live in is in the red zone for being at risk of another bushfire so although we’ve done everything we can, I would still just walk away if we lost our home again,” she said.
“I don’t think I could ever come back a second time.”
Fire and rescue personnel at a bushfire near homes on the outskirts of Bilpin, in the Blue Mountains. Picture: David Gray/Getty Images.
She’s keen for the Anthony Albanese-led government to stop approving new coal oil and gas projects, due to their impact on the climate, and to continue rolling out of renewable energy.
“We have a ‘big polluters’ campaign where we’re are asking for a climate compensation fund for communities, that’s paid by a levy on coal and gas exports, and for them to prioritise climate adaptation and disaster preparedness,” Ms Harris said.
“At the end of the day, I really want my government to lead me and my children and my grandchildren to a safe future, and currently they’re not.”
A survey conducted just before the 2026 Victorian fire season found that half of residents in bushfire-prone areas didn’t consider bushfires as a threat, and 40 per cent weren’t concerned enough to engage directly with the Country Fire Authority.
In addition, she would welcome federal leaders doing more to help educate and prepare households for bushfire seasons, much like volunteer and local fire brigades do.
And Ms Harris said she would like to see Australia’s politicians do more to support the Pacific nations and Torres Strait’s populations as they grapple with climate change.
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