Northern Australia Dealing With Its Fifth Declared Disaster In A Single Wet Season - This Is What Climate Collapse Does

[hatrack]

Links at original.

The Northern Territory has always prided itself on being tough. We’re known for facing down extreme heat, isolation and crocs. However, there is a point at which resilience stops being a virtue. And this wet season, we’ve felt invisible to the rest of Australia.

Four separate national disaster declarations in a single wet season. And now a fifth disaster, Tropical Cyclone Narelle, is barrelling towards us. The 2025–26 wet season has been unlike anything the Northern Territory has ever experienced.It began with Tropical Cyclone Fina hitting the Cobourg Peninsula and Darwin in November 2025, the earliest cyclone to make landfall on the NT coast since records began, and the most intense cyclone to hit Darwin since Cyclone Tracy. Then came the floods. A tropical low settled over central Australia in late February, with flooding affecting approximately 85% of roads across the Barkly region.

This month, Katherine has experienced its highest flood level since 1998. The hospital was evacuated. Schools were closed. More than 1,000 residents were moved to safety. While this made national headlines for a day or two, the ongoing flooding and stranding of multiple First Nations communities right across the Top End has barely rated a mention. And now, many of the same communities still reeling from the latest floods are preparing for Tropical Cyclone Narelle to make landfall and barrel across our flood-ravaged landscapes again, dumping hundreds of millimetres of rain.Darwin has not been immune. Unbelievably for a capital city, Darwin’s main water supply was almost cut off entirely when unprecedented flooding struck our water supply, and nearby residents of Darwin River lost everything.

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Darwin is now Australia’s most expensive city for home insurance, ahead of Sydney and Brisbane – with average home insurance premiums of $4,015 per year. The combination of escalating climate disasters and rising construction costs has made insuring a home in the Territory a luxury many cannot afford. The National Climate Risk Assessment paints an even starker picture of what lies ahead. It forecasts a 423% increase in heat-related deaths in Darwin. Close to 70% of the Northern Territory’s entire population will live in high or very high-risk areas. These are not projections from some distant, hypothetical scenario. They describe our current reality – the one we are accelerating with every fracking project approved, every climate target abandoned by the NT government.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/20/disasters-climate-crisis-northern-territory-australia

[Timeflyer]

1. Florida GOP covers its ears and sings 'la-la-la' to news of climate crisis effects.