Summing up health costs of the last bushfire season

Australian researchers have found that the 2019–2020 bushfire season racked up smoke-related health costs of around $1.95 billion, with an estimated 429 smoke-related premature deaths, 3230 hospital admissions for heart and breathing disorders and 1523 emergency department visits for asthma.

Examining the last 20 fire seasons, the research team discovered that the cost of the most recent season is well above the next highest cost estimate of $566 million in the 2002–03 season, and more than nine times the average annual bushfire-associated costs for the previous 10 years at $211 million.

The researchers added that with a changing climate, these impacts will only continue and may become more dramatic. The findings are published in Nature Sustainability.

Professor Brian Oliver leads the Respiratory Molecular Pathogenesis Group at the University of Technology Sydney and the Woolcock Institute. He described the study as a very sophisticated estimation of the actual cost of the 2019–2020 bushfires.

“The costs are based on actual healthcare costs and an estimated 429 premature deaths. The actual costs will be much higher as the future health events, which are not known, were not included in this study.

“As a country, what this means for us is that if we have more bushfire events of the magnitude which was experienced in 2019/2020, the health and economic costs will affect everyone in Australia, through either higher taxes or direct health effects.”

Dr Paul Read is Senior Research Fellow at the Monash Sustainable Development Institute at Monash University and a Co-Director of the National Centre for Research in Bushfire and Arson. He explained that separate to the direct impact of fires on life, property and emergency services, Australian colleagues in nature sustainability have estimated the flow-on health costs.

“These included premature deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, which we knew from past work increased by about 25% when smoke-related and other factors come into play,” Dr Read said.

“This paper compares Black Summer on these measures to the past 20 years of fire seasons and says Black Summer costs were more than nine times the average of the past 10 years, or, put another way, almost equalled the cost of the past 10 years combined. That’s a big increase.

“This paper is a critical step in clarifying an important issue with wide-ranging implications, for example, how much of a disaster levy we should apply on dirty industries contributing to climate change, climate change being responsible for about 30% of the destruction according to the worldwide attribution study. But it’s not the full story and I dare say hardly the full cost,” he continued.

“They count 429 smoke-related premature deaths, 3230 hospital admissions for heart and breathing disorders and 1523 emergency department visits for asthma. Let’s take the deaths alone as an example of how these costs are an underestimate. Add the direct deaths from fire and Black Summer’s ‘murder rate’ sits at 450. Using the last Royal Commission figures as a baseline, every one of these lives were previously costed at $3.7 million (in 2009 dollars). That comes to $1.7 billion (2009 dollars) for Black Summer. Now apply the ABS inflator from 2009 to 2020 of 25.18% and the cost comes to $2.12 billion. That’s for deaths alone, not all the other factors counted.

“Now add the costs of clean-up and adaptation and royal commissions on top of an estimated 3 billion animals killed and the fact that more than 25 times the size was burned.

“Whilst I don’t disagree with the methods used in this article, I think it’s very important for the public to understand how different approaches to disaster costing can produce dramatically different results — not because they’re wrong or trying to obfuscate the findings but simply because the costs and assumptions change for different purposes. For example, insurance costs change depending on the legal definitions, which change according to jurisdictions, whereas the long-term social costs might not even be included.

“Past studies suggest you can roughly double the amount of tangible costs to include social and economic multipliers, but even these don’t take into account the long-term costs to families and children as governments borrow against their future to clean up, and borrow against their future to avoid tackling climate change.

“Once these are included, plus species extinctions, the true costs are immeasurable. Add COVID-19 and all the other geopolitical issues swirling around us and our continued neglect of our young and their future is nothing short of criminal.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Akhararat W