The heavy-hearted announcement was made on Thursday last week, about a month out from the festival: Lost Paradise, running four days across New Years, would be cancelled due to the bushfire threat.

Organisers have been quick to reassure ticket-holders they'll get a full refund and the show will be back in 2020, but the decision raises serious questions for the industry about the future of certain summer camping festivals.

With ever-worse conditions forecast for the coming decades, will these festivals just become too expensive to insure?

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According to climate risk experts: quite possibly.

"If I was being completely candid, I think we've got all the components to see festivals being shut down, unfortunately," says Dr Karl Mallon from the research group Climate Risk.

"And just no-one being able to prepare to take the risks to put them on, or them being in very controlled environments."

That change may have already begun. The organisers of Lost Paradise - an end-of-year staple since it started in 2014 - have told Hack they may consider changing the date to reduce the fire risk and avoid losing another year's work.

"I think when the dust settles, everybody will sit down and have a very logical look at it," says Haydn Johnston of Architects of Entertainment - the contracted event manager for Lost Paradise and responsible for organising everything at the festival from erecting stages to designing water misting systems.

"The date might be something that's discussed."

The horror scenario: An evacuation at midnight

Lost Paradise is held in Glenworth Valley, about an hour's drive north of Sydney.

For the last few weeks, fires too big to be controlled by fire crews have been burning to the west at Gospers Mountain and Mangrove Mountain, the embers raining down up to 16 kilometres ahead of the fire front.

The valley of the festival lies between these fires and the sea.

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Whatsapp Australia has grappled with an early and intense bushfire season this summer.

As he and others watched the fires build and debated whether to cancel, Haydn imagined a horror scenario playing out on New Years Eve: flames licking the top of the ridge as wasted punters partied below.

"If you have to have a 24-hour evacuation process, could we confidently say that we would get 24 hours notice from the fire?" Haydn says.

"It's not going to tell us what it's doing. It could just rip through there.

"What do you do if it jumps the containment line at 10 o'clock at night and everybody is shaking their ass to The Hilltop Hoods?"

Festival organising is about imagining what could go wrong and mitigating the risk, and over the years Architects of Entertainment have safely hosted big festivals like Splendour in the Grass through rigorous attention to detail.

Bushfire donations: here's how you can help If you're looking on in horror at the unfolding crisis, there's plenty of ways to lend a hand.

For Lost Paradise, it had recruited a private force of 12 professional fire-fighters along with vehicles and a 10,000 litre water tanker.

But this season's fires have proved too ferocious to handle - organisers knew that however many precautions they took, if the Gospers Mountain mega-blaze happened to come their way, they would be powerless to halt it.

"We don't treat anything lightly," Haydn says.

"We think to ourselves, okay, we know the environment we're in and we have planned out for that."

"But we can't plan out for if there's a fire up on the top of the ridge."

"It got to a point where morally putting the show on was was looking more and more irresponsible."

Insurance premiums may have already gone up

Haydn says the cost of insuring Lost Paradise had already gone up before the recent cancellation, though would not say by how much.

Insurance premiums are set by many variables, and how much of this increase could be down to bushfires is hard to know.

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According to climate risk analyst Dr Karl Mallon, it's likely that at least some proactive insurers are already upping their premiums.

"We've seen numbers where we think, probably, risks have increased by 20-25 per cent due to climate change," he says.

"We see quite a number of places around Australia where things are on track to double or triple in probability."

"That doesn't mean that the whole premium is going to double or triple."

Festivals are not only insured against the relatively small risk of a bushfire destroying property; they also have to be insured against the likelihood of a fire simply coming close enough that the event cannot be held.

This, plus the rising cost of meeting new health and safety regulations, including paying more for police and paramedics, could be significant.

"The medical in New South Wales is probably 150 per cent more for shows this year," Haydn says.

"User-pays policing and band fees and all that sort of stuff ... everything goes up except for the ticket price for the general public."

Another factor: heat stress

Then there's the growing concern over the impact of heat stress: a coronial inquest recently heard MDMA coupled with hot weather were factors in the death of Joshua Tam at Lost Paradise last year. On hot days MDMA is particularly dangerous, as the drug raises a user's body temperature. The day of the 22-year-old's death was described as "scorching hot".

"In the Black Saturday Victorian bushfires, more people died because of the heatwave the week before the fires than actually died in the fires," Karl says.

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"Heat stress is something that we think will be on the rise and the acute nature of festivals may exacerbate that.

"Now, is that the responsibility of the festival? That's very hard to attribute that. But could that result in insurance claims against the festival? Maybe: You didn't cancel the festival when you knew it was going to be hot.

"Even if the festival has not done anything wrong, and obviously festivals are not responsible for climate change, you could start to see insurers going, 'We don't want the grief: we don't want to have to pay for the legal cost of defending an action where some poor family is suing the festival for compensation'."

Summer festivals ain't the same in autumn

Not all summer festivals would be equally affected. The NSW leg of Falls Festival at North Byron Parklands would probably be safe, since it's close to a highway and has excellent permanent facilities.

The Victorian leg of Falls, however, might be in more danger. In 2015 it came close to being called off, with the nearby town of Lorne evacuated days out from the first act, and organisers making a last-minute call. The festival grounds is located deep in national parklands and accessible by only one road.

This year, punters at Wild Horses festival located on the edge of national park in Victoria were told to evacuate due to a serious bushfire risk, though questions have been raised about this being a false alarm.

Festival punters say they were stopped in a police drug bust after being told to evacuate Festival attendees claim they were evacuated from a dance music event, only to be drug tested by police as they left.

The Port Macquarie Beer and Cider festival was postponed to February, with organisers telling Hack their main concern was air quality.

Climate risk analyst Andrew Gissing, at Risk Frontiers, expects some festivals will consider moving out of summer.

"The summer season, no matter if it's now or in the future, is the riskiest time in terms of natural hazards to be running festivals," Andrew says.

"You are likely to get more disasters over the summer season so that's something perhaps these organisers do need to consider in their planning."

But, of course, a summer music festival ain't the same in spring or autumn.

"Lost Paradise is a three-slash-four-day camping festival between Christmas and New Year when people are looking for things to do," Haydn says.

"You can't just naturally move something without changing the scope."

The weather is 'massively changing'

Haydn and others who help put on Lost Paradise are understandably reluctant to change the date, but then they also can't afford to lose another year.

"Moving [the location] of the show is not something we're considering," he says.

"If you look at that space, there's been 15 years of successful events, so that space itself is not the issue."

"The current activity is the issue. And next year it could be a completely different scenario - we wouldn't be at the back end of a hefty drought, maybe.

"It's not the ground and it's not the show, it's just the current state of what's going on."

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Whatsapp The cracked earth of a drought-affected area in Queensland.

Amid all this uncertainty, however, he's sure of one thing: the weather is changing and it's making his job much, much harder.

"We know the change better than anybody else because we stand in a paddock and build the festival every year."

Haydn raises the death of Joshua Tam at last year's festival: heat stress may have been a contributing factor, but in the days leading up to that fatal day, the main issue was rain. A week before there had been a hail storm.

'I'm a 52-year-old man with two kids, and I understand the dynamic of what I do because I've been doing it for 25 years; it is different.

"It is massively different, and we can only lay claim to the fact that we have to be further on our games."