Australia must brace for clusters of natural disasters, not just isolated fires and floods

Extreme weather events in Australia are increasingly coming in waves, giving communities just days or hours to recover before the next disaster hits. This phenomenon, known as 'disaster clustering' or 'compounding events,' represents a fundamental shift from the historical pattern of isolated, discrete incidents. Recent examples include the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires followed immediately by record-breaking floods. The research suggests that as the climate warms, the atmospheric conditions that drive these events are becoming more volatile, leading to sequences of heatwaves, fires, storms, and floods that exhaust emergency resources and prevent physical and economic reconstruction. Experts argue that current disaster management frameworks, which often treat events as independent variables, must be overhauled to account for these cumulative impacts.