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The fires in Los Angeles are estimated to be the most expensive disaster in US history at US$250–275 billion, or 24 to 26 percent of Australia’s annual GDP. That loss has accrued in just over a week and is rising.

This was not a natural disaster. That would imply a lack of human responsibility. Rather, this is what happens when a human-warmed climate catches us off-guard—even in a city that knows fire.

Australia has done significant work since the 2019–20 Black Summer fires, and the floods that followed, to appreciate climate risks and prepare for them. However, much of that work, including the National Climate Risk Assessment and the National Adaptation Plan, is yet to be released. As the federal election nears, all parties should remind themselves to not treat climate as a political football—a priority only when disasters strike or when it’s convenient.

These events will continue to surprise if we fail to understand and address the locked-in disaster risks, and they will occur at greater frequency and cause greater loss if we continue warming the atmosphere.

While climate change isn’t the only factor in play in LA, it’s a big part of why officials were taken by surprise. Compound climate-amplified disasters build quietly but strike swiftly. In this case climate appears to have primed the intensity of the fires.

California is no stranger to whiplashing climate conditions. It experienced a three-year drought from 2020 to 2022, followed by two years of significant rainfall—recording LA’s seventh-wettest year in 2022–23. That rainfall drove vegetation growth, then a sustained drought and higher than average temperatures at the start of the current winter dried much of that new vegetation.

The Santa Ana winds that fanned the flames with hot, dry air are typical for the area in winter but were particularly strong with gusts at nearly 160km/h last week—at times grounding firefighting aircraft when they were needed most, pushing fires faster down hillsides where they’d normally slow, and spewing embers far beyond firelines. The winds may have been strengthened by warmer than average ocean temperatures and a meandering North American jet stream, which has been increasingly disrupted by climate change in recent years and may have also contributed to the atmospheric rivers dumping rain over LA in the years before the fires.

Yet those factors alone don’t explain why the fires started, why they’ve been hard to control, or why they’ve caused such damage.

Clear answers on the origins of the fires will come once investigations conclude. Speculating now doesn’t help. Misinformation abounds online, as it increasingly does after disasters, with harmful effects on responders, confusing the response and muddying the analysis needed for future preparation. For example, conspiracy theories hold that the US government used weather control to intensify Hurricane Helene—which struck the southeast United States in September last year—to cause widespread damage. That led to Federal Emergency Management Agency responders facing armed threats.

The Eaton fire, the second-largest in LA, may have been sparked by damaged electrical infrastructure from powerful Santa Ana winds, as has happened in the past. If that’s the case, it adds more pressure to California’s ongoing efforts to prepare its infrastructure for intensifying natural disasters.

Preparation has been underway for some time, but risks remain—in part because there are no cheap solutions. By California’s own estimates, burying all distribution and transmission lines in the state could cost US$763 billion—roughly 70 percent of Australia’s 2024 GDP—and would take years. Nonetheless, the economics of such climate adaptation has become clearer since just a single week of fire has reached a third of that cost.

Urban development has also played a role. Malibu and the surrounding area are traditional fire country—the chaparral vegetation evolved to undergo periods of fire. But there are now eight million people living in fire-prone areas in southern California. Fire-resilient building designs as well as fuel reduction and landscaping around houses might have slowed the growth of the fires in urban environments, protecting more homes. There is no easy way to get around the consequences of building and living in high risk areas; all we can do is try to avoid it in future.

Even though many affected communities are aware of climate and fire risk, they clearly didn’t believe they were vulnerable. Rebuilding with fire resilience in mind will be necessary, especially as fire insurance will become unaffordable for many.

While much focus has been on insufficient water supplies to fight the fires, most reservoirs were full—contradicting misinformation that California’s environmental planning restricted access to upstream sources.

A more plausible explanation for California’s underpreparedness is that urban water infrastructure simply isn’t designed for wildfire.

The Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, where many celebrities lost their homes, is at the end of the local water line, so receives less water pressure. As hydrants were tapped for water, the pressure dropped, draining emergency tanks in the neighbourhood.

An investigation will assess the reasons for, and effect of, the ongoing closure of the Santa Ynez reservoir in the Palisades area—hopefully including why it wasn’t rapidly brought back online late in 2024 as climate conditions worsened.

That brings us to the funding, staffing and preparation of LA’s fire authorities. Attention focused on the mayor’s budget reductions, but they were only a 2 percent cut from last year. While that may have had an effect, clearly the scale of the need was far beyond a few percentage points.

Inadequate staffing was a pressure early on, even with 9000 firefighters in LA County alone.

That isn’t a cheap solve, either. If LA needs greater capacity on hand at any time, its budget would have to grow significantly. That demand would have to compete with resources needed to prepare for and reduce the risk of future fires, including potential private firefighting capacities. Again, early investment in preparedness will reduce the complications in and need for future reactive responses. But building out future response capacity will take time.

The bottom line is that LA’s various failures in preparation means it was caught off-guard, but this disaster wouldn’t have been so extreme without climate disruption priming such an intense and unexpected set of fires.

The same dynamic has occurred in Australia, and it will continue if we don’t take climate risks seriously. These events are no longer surprising; they’re sad, they’re painful, but also entirely predictable.

Mike Copage is head of the Climate and Security Policy Centre at ASPI.

This article was originally published on ASPI.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.