Urban Bushfire Risk Rising as Climate Changes, Cities Expand

Despite breaking out in the middle of the northern winter, the January 2025 Pacific Palisades fires were a textbook example of the destructive capacity of a wildfire that spreads to a city. The Los Angeles inferno began in the Santa Monica mountains and ended with 31 lives lost and 16,000 structures destroyed in one of the most developed cities in the world. During the past quarter-of-a-century, the number of people in Australian capitals living within 700m of bushland has grown from just over four million to almost seven million, according to a recent Climate Council report. Growth areas of cities, such as Canberra’s north and west , are particularly exposed to bushfire-urban interactions. Meanwhile, the Insurance Council of Australia has reported that 2025 resulted in $3.5 billion in insured losses from extreme weather events. Climate Councillor and independent economist Nicki Hutley said that meant “Australians paid up to $700 more for home and contents insurance premiums than in 2024”. University of Tasmania professor of pyrogeography David Bowman told The Urban Developer that, when it comes to the science of built environment and bushfires, there’s much still to be learnt. “What you’ve got to understand is that it’s like we’ve just invented an airplane, and we’re still learning how to fly and still designing airplanes,” Bowman said. “We’re still figuring out ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to have an airport and a control tower?’ It’s that level of frontier stuff, what we’re doing with fire design in the built environment.” Bowman has been working with Munich Re, using the global insurer’s data for scientific research, on international comparisons of “wildland urban interface fires”, or bushfires which spread into cities. His team is considering the physical environment of cities, their built environment materials and practices, and their relationship to one another. “And then the last bit of the equation is the effect of the fire management paradigm. So how do people fight fire?” Bowman said. ▲ A Black Saturday fire approached Melbourne's north, but a wind change turned it toward Kinglake, where it resulted in 120 deaths and 1200 homes destroyed. Photo by Alex Coppel. “And that is really different, too, because in the United States and Canada the management paradigm is to evacuate. And here it has been, traditionally, people save houses, and houses save people. But now, because of the 2009 fires, we’re moving into an evacuation mode”. “If [firefighting] fails, and it does fail under strong wind conditions, then you’re left with mass fires, potentially catastrophic urban conflagrations, because no one said ‘I’ll stamp on the spark’. “Once you get enough houses burning down, you get a chain reaction of some sort, some changed behavior, which we don’t completely understand.” The danger of eucalypts to cities While Australia has not yet experienced an urban bushfire on the scale of the LA disaster, there are lessons that can be learnt from international experiences. Eucalypts were not a major factor in the Pacific Palisades fire. But the pyrophilic Australian tree is widespread in California, and has been blamed for accelerating, among others, the 1991 Oakland Firestorm that killed 25 and destroyed more than 3000 homes. Eucalypts have also been cited as a contributing element to the 2017 Pedrógão Grande fires in Portugal that killed 66 as well as other fires across Greece, Spain, Chile, and elsewhere. Clearing gum tree debris has also become a key focus for Pacific Gas &amp; Electric, the Californian utility and infrastructure company that filed for insolvency in 2019 over $43 billion (US$30 billion) in wildfire liabilities. “It’s not just eucalypts. It’s a whole category of shrubs which are adapted to infertile environments or seasonally dry environments, which we would call the Mediterranean climate,” Bowman said. Tasmanian blue gum as well as other eucalypt species have spread globally, to be used as a fast-growing and tough plantation crop for pulp and other wood products. ▲ The rapidly-growing Addis Ababa is one of many global cities fringed by eucalyptus forests. In the Entoto hills to the north of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for example, the forests are steeped in the smell of eucalyptus oil. When Emperor Menelik II made Addis the capital of the nation in 1886, he encouraged the planting of gum trees for fuel and timber. An economic and demographic boom has reshaped the city since the fall of the Mengistu dictatorship in 1991, including the first light rail system in sub-Saharan Africa, and dozens of new skyscrapers. The Chinese Belt and Road program has also poured funding into infrastructure projects in the country, including the 5GW Blue Nile Dam (equivalent to about 2.5 times the generation capacity of Snowy Hydro 2.0). But around a third of the capital’s household fuel is still collected from the eucalypts in the Entoto hills, usually by women working in the informal economy. By raking the forest floor for branches and leaves, these collectors potentially reduce the fuel load in case of bushfires. But the impacts of removing litter on soil nutrients, water absorption and other ecosystem services can be negative. While researchers can learn from international contexts, every urban environment has a specific pyrogeography, according to Bowman. “Hobart is a special case because 99 per cent of the time it’s totally not flammable. But every now and then it can actually exceed the danger on the mainland. It’s got a very unique pyrogeography,” he said. ▲ A scene from South Hobart during the 1967 fires—64 died and nearly 1300 homes were lost in one of the first wildland urban interface fires in Australia. “So you can have a very rare circumstance in Tasmania where you can have, potentially, a city-demolishing fire. And 1967 was a very close call.” Designing for fire prevention holistically A 2024 paper from Bowman (“Garden design can reduce wildfire risk and drive more sustainable co-existence with wildfire”) investigated the science and applied guidelines on defensible zones around houses internationally. That paper found “[e]ncouraging the use of the local native flora in gardens might have biodiversity benefits but could increase fire risk depending on the flammability of the chosen plant species”, particularly in the Australian context where exotic plants are generally less flammable than natives. Western Sydney University professor of urban management Sebastian Pfautsch is currently working on the Resilient Parks applied research project , investigating management and design techniques to produce cooler, flood-resistant and fire-resistant urban green spaces. “It’s documented that this expansion of our big cities comes with a risk of fire,” Pfautsch said. Canopy-ground level separation, crown cover and shading, infiltration and runoff characteristics, and many other factors need to be considered when designing green spaces. “You may find yourself in a bit of a pickle when, at the same time, you want to manage your landscape for fire. You just need to be aware of them, and then make conscious decisions. ▲ The damage from the Pacific Palisades fire may run in excess of $35.7 billion. “And that can relate to species selection when you plant, but that should also relate to the management of the land once the species are growing. “There’s lots of stuff that we should do supporting our native vegetation, but I’ve got my doubts if urban spaces are the right place for it, because of the way that we modify these landscapes anyway.” Designing for fire prevention will help in the new era of fire, when Indigenous and emergency services fire practices may not serve. “Tens of thousands of years of knowledge are there, but the boundary conditions are changing, and nobody has experienced these before.” But considering flammability in green spaces doesn’t mean rejecting them entirely, Pfautsch said. In Sydney’s Olympic Park, for example, some roadside grasses and sedges have been replaced with artificial turf, to reduce spot fires ignited from cigarettes discarded out of car windows. “Of course, from [an urban heat] perspective, that’s completely counterproductive. It’s a place that calls itself the urban sustainability heartland of Australia, the green lung of the city…but the reason is flammability.” Fires around Gospers Mountain and Hornsby in 2020, to the north of Melbourne in the Black Saturday fires, and many other examples in Australia show that it’s only been serendipitous weather changes that have prevented urban bushfires, Pfautsch says. ▲ Insurance premia in Sydney’s Northern Beaches have doubled since the 2019-20 bushfire season, according to the Climate Council. “We were very lucky that Hornsby didn’t go up in flames … if it had jumped over the Hawkesbury river, it would have just run into Hornsby Heights and Asquith.” Meanwhile, for Bowman at UTas, the how and why may be murky, but it’s clear that trouble is afoot. “It’s like we’re halfway through the most interesting whodunnit. In Australia, have we just got this unique combination that we have a resistance to a mass firestorm? “Or have we been extraordinarily lucky, and our luck’s about to run out, and we’re about to see an LA-type event? “We just don’t know, but we have every reason to be concerned.”

Urban Bushfire Risk Rising as Climate Changes, Cities Expand

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Urban Bushfire Risk Rising as Climate Changes, Cities Expand

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