Updating the costs of disasters in Australia

The Bureau of Transport Economics (BTE) 2001 report, Economic Costs of Natural Disasters in Australia (BTE 2001), has been the only comprehensive, national assessment of the economic impacts of disasters in Australia. Statistics and economic impact assessment methodology presented in the report have been widely used for research and policy analysis, particularly for assessing the costs and benefits of disaster risk reduction and mitigation. This is the case even though the data and analysis are over one and a half decades old. It has needed updating in terms of the approach to analysis and the dataset to include the many relevant disasters triggered by natural phenomena from 1999 to 2013. This paper sets out the approach used to update the 2001 report through a National Emergency Management Projects grant, documents the major issues faced, including the need for a new dataset and presents some results. The main differences between the BTE 2001 report and the update concern increased losses from bushfires, the inclusion of heatwaves, with heatwaves responsible for half of all deaths, and changes in the pattern of loss at the state level.