Update Dec. 26: A Christmas day bushfire has destroyed 116 properties worth at least $38 million in the Great Ocean Road area.

The state of Victoria in southeast Australia is currently dealing with a devastating array of bushfires that have destroyed over a dozen homes and incinerated 13,000 hectares (50 square miles) of land. Extremely hot and dry weather helped the fires to grow over the weekend, and a total of 300 separate fires were raging across the state.

Residents were told to immediately evacuate several towns under direct threat from the blazes, including Yackandandah, Wooragee, and Leneva. Many more towns were issued a “Watch-and-Act” alert, advising to beware of nearby fires and be prepared to evacuate if necessary.

The Country Fire Authority dispatched over 50 fire trucks and three airplanes to fight the blazes. Authorities were also assisted on Monday by slightly cooler temperatures and substantial rainfall in some areas, allowing them to contain several of the blazes.

“[The fire] closed the Hume Freeway for hours, saw hundreds of cars backed up on the Hume Freeway, in 40 degree temperatures, not a nice place to be,” said Craig Lapsley, Victorian Emergency Management Commissioner. “[We had] multiple fires across the state but our fire crews did a fantastic job to pull up, we had the potential to have this morning many, many fires.”

However, he cautioned that the situation can still get worse later in the week.

“The winds will be up a little bit this afternoon, the key issue is that it will progressively get hotter over the next few days and build to Friday, Friday will be the hottest day, also a windy day … and that’s Christmas Day,” Lapsley warned. “So we are focusing now towards Christmas Day being the hottest day of the week and, between now and then, we want to make sure any fire, any lightning strike that is hitting the bush, we get on top of.”

Climate Change a Factor in Bushfires

Australian bushfires are not a new occurrence, as the country has historically experienced various fires each year during the dry season. However, researchers have found that climate change is worsening the effects by making temperatures even hotter and extending the dry season by several extra weeks.

A recent report by the Australian Climate Council found that the length of the global fire season increased by 19 percent between 1979 and 2013, consequently reducing the opportunities for controlled burns and increasing pressure on firefighting resources. In particular, certain areas of eastern Australia have seen upwards of 40 percent increases in the fire season since 1996.

“South-east Australia is experiencing a long-term drying trend,” explained Lesley Hughes, ecologist at Macquarie University and member of the council. “This is consistent with the IPCC special report on extreme weather, which projects an increase in the number of consecutive dry days in south-east Australia. When you have more frequent hot days and less rain, it increases the likelihood of extreme fire weather. The fires in [New South Wales] are being influenced by these conditions.”

The worst and deadliest fires in Australian history occurred on February 7, 2009, during what is known as Black Saturday. Record temperatures above 43 °C (109 °F), extremely low humidity below 10 percent, and wind speeds above 100 km/h (62 mph) all contributed to the extreme conditions that week. Around 400 individual fires caused a total of 173 human fatalities and 414 injuries, as well as the death of one million animals.

As a result of that disaster, Australian communities instituted a number of new measures to better prepare for future waves of bushfires. These included a revamped scale of measuring the relative hazard of fires, new guidelines and standards for buildings in fire-prone areas, and outright bans of housing in the highest risk areas. Multiple investigations also looked into possible negligence by electrical companies, as well as suspected acts of arson by some individuals.

However, none of those measures address the underlying conditions that allow bushfires to occur more frequently and with greater intensity. Anthropogenic climate change, caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is contributing to more extreme heat waves in places like Australia. Regardless of revamped hazard scales and improved building codes, the root of the problem is hotter and hotter summers thanks to global warming.

“We can’t consider severe fires as one-offs that happen every few decades,” wrote Roger Jones, professorial research fellow at Victoria University. “If they’re becoming a systemic part of our environment we have to consider this really seriously. There will be a financial cost and a human cost, and we will see it repeated, if we don’t plan ahead.”