Climate law: Climate disaster law: Does it hold the key to dealing with bushfires?

Australia has been seriously affected by bushfires in the 2019-2020 season. Recent estimates of the economic costs of the fires stand at around $230 billion (Paul Read and Richard Denniss, 'The Conversation', 17 January 2020). This includes tangible and intangible costs. Tangible costs include the human lives, homes, schools, businesses, infrastructure (electricity and telecommunications, for example), vehicles, crops, fodder, and farm animals (100,000 sheep alone on Kangaroo Island and 25,000 animals on the mainland) that have been lost and destroyed. This is without counting the cost of the one billion native animals and one hundred billion insects which are estimated to have died, or the lost ecosystems. As for the intangible social costs, in 2016 the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities found that for the Queensland Floods the social impacts outweighed the direct financial impacts ($3.9 billion: $3.1 billion) and for the 2009 Victorian bushfires ($7.8 billion: $6.7 billion). So the social costs of the fires are likely to be greater than $230 billion. So far, no estimate has been provided of the environmental costs. Since this disaster has been influenced and exacerbated by climate change, the area of Climate Disaster Law comes to the fore.