Australia should train North American-style “smoke jumpers” who parachute into remote fire grounds as part of a strategic shift to deal with longer and more ferocious bushfire seasons fuelled by climate change, a former fire chief and senior military officer says.
As Australia heads into summer with one of the strongest El Ninos on record under way, and a severe decline in firefighting capacity since the 2019-20 Black Summer fires, a national study warns that bushfires will cost the economy an average of $6 billion a year over the next 30 years, nearly triple previous estimates.
The group Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, in a report called Prepare or pay: Counting the cost of climate-fuelled bushfires published on Thursday, says that in 2023-24 there were 10,336 fewer people volunteering with Australian firefighting agencies compared with four years earlier, while paid personnel increased by just 433 full-time equivalent positions.
This comes as climate pollution has made bushfires “more ferocious, damaging and costly”, the report says, with longer fire seasons limiting hazard reduction burning, more extreme fire danger days, and more remote fires started by dry lightning.
Major General Peter Dunn, a former ACT Emergency Services Authority commissioner and now with Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, said Australia should embrace early detection of remote fires through satellite imagery, drone surveillance, infrared sensing and artificial intelligence. This would need to be backed up by crack teams who could extinguish them early, which could include so-called smoke jumpers.
“The climate has changed so significantly that we’re dealing with these extreme weather events driving fiercer, longer fires,” Dunn said. “We’ve got to get our head around a completely different approach. Early detection [of fires] becomes absolutely critical, and then we need to be able to attack them immediately.
“You’re looking at every means of getting qualified firefighters in on the ground when a fire is extremely small, and at times the only way you can get them in is to parachute them in. The Americans use smoke jumpers very extensively; they use them in Europe as well.”
Australia has not used parachutes to get firefighters to a location, though during Black Summer, a specialist crew rappelled out of helicopters to save a grove of rare Wollemi pines in the Great Dividing Range in NSW. The US has used smoke jumpers since 1939 and maintains 450 permanent staff trained to do the work, according to the US National Interagency Fire Centre, while British Columbia in Canada employs about 80 “para-attack wildfire fighters” a year.
Dunn, a former senior officer in the Australian Army with experience as a paratroop leader, said such a role could also help with recruitment.
“As an aside, from my military experience … you can use that to attract fit young people into your fire services,” he said. “It’s a reality that people are attracted to those adventurous-type activities.”
Dunn called for Australia to buy at least 12 aircraft tankers to improve sovereign firefighting capacity because fire seasons were now overlapping with North America, which meant we could no longer rely on borrowing air tankers. Australia owns just one, in NSW, he said.
He also backed empowering local communities to undertake bushfire risk reduction work with proper direction.
South-east Australia now experiences 14 more days a year of extreme fire weather than before 1998, and fire seasons are 20 per cent longer than in 1979, the report says.
Victoria’s worst fires used to hit once in a generation, or about 40 years apart. Three have struck in the past 18 years – 2009 Black Saturday, 2019-20 Black Summer, and January 2026.
Recorded extreme fire-generated storms rose sixfold, from 20 in 1983-2003 to 121 in 2004-2024, the report says. Forests in south-east Australia recorded 50 per cent more dry lightning strikes in 2000-2016 than in the previous two decades, sparking more remote fires.
The economic modelling quantifies in today’s dollars the cost of lost and damaged homes, businesses and public buildings, harm to health and wellbeing, lost production of goods and lost work due to expected bushfires.
The analysis assumes a disastrous Black Summer-scale event costs an estimated $27.7 billion in current dollar terms and recurs roughly once every 30 years. Major fire events, which are estimated to cost $16.1 billion on average, are assumed to occur every four years until 2040 and every three years after that – or eight times in 30 years. “Other damaging fires”, which cost $1.2 billion each year on average, are modelled to occur every year that does not have more extreme fires.
The cumulative total cost would be $181.7 billion in today’s dollars from 2025-26 to 2055-56, which averages to $6.04 billion a year. The study excludes hard-to-measure costs such as destruction or damage to wildlife, ecosystems or cultural heritage.
Janice Lee, an infrastructure expert with the Climate Council, said well-accepted estimates previously put the national cost of bushfires at $2.2 billion a year. The report used the same methodology, but updated assumptions about the frequency and severity of bushfires, she said.
Historically, half of insured losses were in Victoria and more than a fifth in Tasmania, but the risk was shifting north. NSW accounted for 81 per cent of insured losses arising from Black Summer, and bushfires now sit alongside cyclones and floods as a major hazard in Queensland.
The report calls for steeper cuts to greenhouse emissions, as well as climate adaptation measures such as limiting development and funding resilient housing upgrades in bushfire-prone zones.
Peter Holding, 71, a third-generation farmer who lives near Harden in south-western NSW, said there used to be 48 volunteers in his Rural Fire Service brigade, but now there are only 12 and the demographic is older.
Despite better equipment, Holding said stronger fires and fewer firefighters meant less capacity to attack a fire directly without back-up from aircraft.
“The fires are winning that game. They all go out eventually – it’s just a matter of how much damage is done,” he said.
“The volunteers become fatigued because the fire season goes on for a long time, and they’re called out more regularly. It’s also more dangerous because we’re getting more extreme catastrophic fire days.”
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