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Australia just endured the worst flooding it has seen in 60 years, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes in Sydney, New South Wales, and up the North Coast. For many, the experience was painfully familiar; these were the same communities impacted by Australia’s “Black Summer” wildfires of 2019 and 2020, which burned through 13.6 million acres, killed billions of animals, and released more carbon into the atmosphere than the continent does in a year.
If the two events seem like inverse phenomena, they were in fact brought on by the same stressors: misguided environmental policies and a dramatically changing climate. As temperatures rise, weather patterns can shift between intense dryness, sparking bushfires, and torrential rain, prompting floods. That it’s happening almost back-to-back is only more concerning; as New South Wales’s premier Gladys Berejiklian told Reuters: “I don’t know any time in state history where we have had these extreme weather conditions in such quick succession in the middle of a pandemic.” To make matters worse, the “burn scars” of the fires are extra vulnerable to rain and runoff, increasing the risk of landslides. (The cascading effects continue long after these “weather events” are covered on the news.)