JENNA Lightburn knows all too well the devastation a bushfire can wreak - the Long Gully resident lost her home in the Black Saturday bushfires nearly eight years ago.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
“My husband (Arron) and I were left homeless with a four-year-old and a nine-month-old,” she said.
While the family picked themselves up, rebuilt their home and began moving on with life soon after, Mrs Lightburn said they continued to deal with the financial impacts of the natural disaster several years down the track.
Unfortunately for Victorians, a report released today by the Climate Council suggests the Lightburns’ experience is only going to become more common.
Victoria is already the worst-affected state in Australia when it comes to bushfires and the report from the independent climate change body says climate change will see it face increasingly dangerous blazes in the coming decades.
“Climate change is making hot days hotter and heatwaves more intense, which, when coupled with dry conditions, drives up the odds of high fire danger weather,” chief councillor Professor Tim Flannery said.
“Seven out of ten of the hottest years in Victoria on record have occurred since 2000 and recent severe fires in Victoria were exacerbated by record hot, dry conditions driven by climate change.”
The fire season is starting earlier and lasting longer, the report found, which not only means a larger window in which fires will occur, but fewer opportunities to conduct fuel reduction activities.
The report says the state can expect to see the annual economic cost of bushfires increase more than twofold to $378 million by 2050.
But it explains this projection does not take increased incidence and severity from climate change into account, so this figure could become much higher.
There has already been an increase in extreme weather since the 1970s, as well as a longer fire season in Victoria.
Last year another study, partly authored by a researcher from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre, found strong evidence to link the increasing frequency of major bushfires to climate-driven changes.
The report says greenhouse gases from human activity have driven climate change over the past 50 years, so the trend of increasing global emissions must be halted and trending downwards by 2020, to minimise the risks of climate change.