- Australia’s 2019-20 bushfires burned with unprecedented intensity through a total of 24 million hectares (59 million acres), an area the size of the U.K.
- New research shows total costs incurred to the tourism industry from that single bushfire season may be 61% higher than previously calculated.
- Up to 1.5 billion wild animals may have perished in the fires, and new research is uncovering the cost to individual species as a result of the fires.
- One study published shows 15% of all known roost locations of the gray-headed flying fox, Australia’s largest bat species, may have been directly impacted by the fires.
Fresh research published in early 2024 continues to uncover the true cost on biodiversity, the economy and public health triggered by unprecedented wildfires that swept Australia in late 2019 and early 2020.
“These results are an illustration of what can be expected in the future not only in Australia, but in other nations that are vulnerable to climate-change driven disasters,” said Vivienne Reiner, the lead author of an economic study published in the journal Economics of Disasters and Climate Change.
On Jan. 31 Reiner and colleagues published the results of their input-output study, a standardized method of assessing changes to goods and services in an economy.
The researchers found that the catastrophic fires likely erased A$2.8 billion ($1.8 billion) from output in Australia’s tourism sector, an amount greater than the economy of Guinea-Bissau, according to World Bank calculations of the West African country of more than 2 million people.
The input-output study was the first occasion in which researchers have documented changes throughout Australia’s entire supply chain. As a result, the researchers’ A$2.8 billion conclusion represented a 61% increase on the direct damages previously identified to tourism as a result of the fires.
This total cost of the bushfires to tourism determined by Reiner and colleagues was higher than the amount Australia will spend over five years on increases to rent assistance for 1.1 million low-income households, according to Australia’s current national budget.
“I expect that the impact of the globally unprecedented 2019-20 bushfires in Australia could continue to be felt for years,” Reiner told Mongabay in an email. “One sector that suffered substantial destruction was forestry — this is not only a major employer in many rural areas but recovery is challenging — it takes about 25 years for a tree to grow for harvest. And of course the environmental impact (and on animals) was devastating.”
In addition, the researchers estimated more than 7,000 jobs went up in smoke amid cancellations to bookings.
Excess deaths
The first fires in the Australia’s 2019-20 bushfire season were reported in September 2019, but peak activity occurred through December and into the New Year.
As Reiner’s research illustrated the staggering cost wrought by the fires, a health impact assessment published in the journal Heliyon showed that over the last two decades one person died every five days in Australia as a consequence of air pollution across the country of 26.5 million.
“Sydney and Melbourne reported the highest number of deaths attributable to extreme air pollution events, with 541 and 438 deaths respectively, followed by Brisbane and Perth with 171 and 132 deaths,” said Lucas Hertzog at Curtin University’s World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Climate Change and Health Impact Assessment.
Then-prime minister Scott Morrison told parliament in February 2020 that the fires had killed 33 people, including nine firefighters. More than 3,000 homes were destroyed by wildfires.
Anecdotal testimony indicates lasting psychological harm among those exposed to fires, while clinicians say they expect some long-term health impacts among Australians exposed to smoke.
The fires devastated numerous nature reserves, including more than 80% of the Blue Mountains, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located west of Sydney in New South Wales state.
The 2019-20 fires burned with unprecedented intensity through a total of 24 million hectares (59 million acres), an area the size of the U.K., and killed or displaced up to 1.5 billion animals, according to research published in 2021.
A study published in the April 2024 edition of Global Ecology and Conservation shows that 15% of all known roosting locations of the gray-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus) may have been directly impacted by the 2019-20 fires, suggesting previous estimates of impacts on the bat have been underestimates.
The largest bat in Australia and native to the country’s east, the gray-headed flying fox is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List.
“Whilst it remains unknown how many flying-foxes died in the fires, the number and geographic span of roosts affected and the severities with which those roosts were burnt emphasise the importance of bushfires as an emerging threat for this vulnerable species,” the authors concluded.
Prior to the latest cluster of publication on Australia’s 2019-20 bushfire season, scientists had demonstrated that these fires likely had devastating global consequences.
A study published in 2023 in the journal Science Advances showed that biomass burned in the Australian bush circumnavigated the planet in around one month, brightened the clouds and caused a cooling effect over the Pacific Ocean.
The authors showed that this cooling effect likely tipped the planet into a La Niña climate pattern lasting almost three years, a phenomenon previously attributed only to major volcanic eruptions.
“We were quite surprised as, to our knowledge, this is the first study to document the triggering of an ENSO [El Niño-Southern Oscillation] event by wildfire emissions,” John Fasullo at the U.S.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), told Mongabay last year.
Banner image: Wildfire on Kangaroo Island, Australia, in January 2020. Image by robdownunder via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Australia bushfires may have caused global climate phenomenon La Niña: Study
Citations:
Reiner, V., Pathirana, N. L., Sun, Y.-Y., Lenzen, M., & Malik, A. (2024). Wish you were here? The economic impact of the tourism shutdown from Australia’s 2019-20 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires. Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, 8(1), 107-127. doi:10.1007/s41885-024-00142-8
Hertzog, L., Morgan, G. G., Yuen, C., Gopi, K., Pereira, G. F., Johnston, F. H., … Hanigan, I. C. (2024). Mortality burden attributable to exceptional PM2.5 air pollution events in Australian cities: A health impact assessment. Heliyon, 10(2), e24532. doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e24532
Mo, M., Meade, J., Roff, A., Timmiss, L. A., Gibson, R., & Welbergen, J. A. (2024). Impact assessment of the Australian 2019-20 megafires on roost sites of the vulnerable grey-headed flying-fox (Pteropus poliocephalus). Global Ecology and Conservation, 50, e02822. doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2024.e02822
Fasullo, J. T., Rosenbloom, N., & Buchholz, R. (2023). A multiyear tropical Pacific cooling response to recent Australian wildfires in CESM2. Science Advances, 9(19). doi:10.1126/sciadv.adg1213