CANBERRA: Australia’s climate council has warned that the island continent is facing a disastrous summer of extreme weather events.

In a report on Monday, the council and the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action (ELCA) identified floods, cyclones and outbreaks of the virus borne by the Japanese encephalitis mosquito as major risks that Australians would face throughout the summer.

Climate change has rendered Australia’s disaster planning not fit for purpose, they said, calling for a boost in resilience funding and a national disaster strategy.

“There is nothing natural about these disasters. They are being unleashed on Australians by decades of reliance on fossil fuels,” Lesley Hughes, a leading climate scientist and author of the report, told the Australian Associated Press (AAP).

“These same companies are enjoying billions in public subsidies. It’s high time we end fossil fuel subsidies and use the savings to create a climate disaster fund so we can help communities deal with the fallout of compounding and worsening disasters,” she added.

Most of Australia has received higher-than-average rainfall in 2022 due to the La Niña weather phenomenon while the country is not expecting a severe bushfire season.

La Niña is the large-scale cooling of surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, normally occurring every two to seven years.

The effect has widespread impacts on weather around the world — typically the opposite impact of the El Niño phenomenon, which has a warming influence on global temperatures.

La Niña is usually associated with wetter conditions in some parts of the world and drier conditions in others.

Wet weather in the country has created ideal breeding conditions for mosquitoes and has not allowed the east coast to recover from catastrophic flooding through the winter and spring.

The report found that weatherrelated disasters cost Australia AU$35 billion ($25.5 billion) in the 2010s, more than the previous two decades combined.

Disasters have cost the state of Queensland in north-east Australia more than AU$30 billion ($20.1 billion) since 1970, significantly more than any other state or territory.