Australian insurers and brokers enter the 2026-27 summer with a research body’s projection of 260 additional heat-related deaths on the table – and a growing body of evidence that the financial exposure behind those deaths is larger than current data reflects.
The Climate Impact Lab released findings in September, forecasting that the “super” El Niño will push temperatures 1.2 degrees Celsius above normal and generate 44% more extremely hot days than in a typical year. Globally, the lab projects 451,000 excess deaths between June 2026 and February 2027, according to Nine.
In Australia, the projected toll breaks down by state: New South Wales (120), Western Australia (72), Queensland (61), Victoria (13), and South Australia (12).
NSW and WA together account for more than 70% of Australia’s projected heat deaths. Both states carry high concentrations of workers in mining, construction, agriculture, and transport – industries with significant outdoor and physically demanding exposure.
Safe Work Australia’s Key Work Health and Safety Statistics 2025 report, published in October 2025, recorded 146,700 serious workers’ compensation claims in 2023-24, equivalent to more than 400 per day. Of the 188 worker fatalities in 2024, 80% occurred across just six industries: agriculture, forestry, and fishing; public administration and safety; transport, postal, and warehousing; manufacturing; health care and social assistance; and construction.
Several of those industries operate in the same geographic and climatic conditions the Climate Impact Lab identifies as highest risk.
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Separate research raises questions about whether current data captures the full extent of occupational heat risk. Analysis presented at the 2026 UNSW Workshop on Risk and Actuarial Frontiers by Taylor Fry actuary Dr. Xi Lin – drawing on a national workers’ compensation dataset of two to three million claims – found heat-related workplace injuries in Australia are understated in official records by a factor of 20. Of all claims reviewed, just over 1,000 were explicitly coded as heat stress, heat stroke, or environmental heat exposure: 0.05% of the total.
“So if we just rely on official coding and only rely on it, we can only identify maybe 5 out of 10,000 claims. Surely this is not true, given the heat we are feeling,” Lin said, as reported by UNSW BusinessThink.
The research identified East Pilbara in WA as the highest-risk location in Australia, with 205 days per year exceeding a wet bulb globe temperature of 28 degrees. That is the same state the Climate Impact Lab projects will record the second-highest share of El Niño heat deaths in Australia.
If heat’s true contribution to workplace injury is 20 times what is coded, reserving assumptions across workers’ compensation portfolios may be understated heading into what researchers describe as the most thermally extreme season in decades.
As of February 2026, Australia has no national workplace heat standard. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) noted in a formal statement that month that state and territory workplace health and safety laws do not clearly define employer obligations to manage the risks of working in heat.
The ACTU also cited Safe Work Australia data showing workers bear 74% of the financial burden of heat-related injuries and illnesses, while employers carry just 5%.
For brokers advising clients in heat-exposed industries, that distribution has direct implications for how duty-of-care obligations are framed – and whether current policy structures adequately address the gap.
The summer ahead follows a year that tested Australian insurers’ capacity to absorb back-to-back large events. The Insurance Council of Australia’s (ICA) April 2026 update put total 2025 insured losses from declared extreme weather events at $4.8 billion across 294,000 claims – a 727% increase on 2024. Average costs per claim rose 39% to $16,471.
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s (APRA) March 2026 Insurance Climate Vulnerability Assessment (CVA), a stress test conducted with five of Australia’s largest general insurers – Allianz, Hollard, IAG, QBE, and Suncorp, collectively representing around 80% of the home insurance market – found annual weather losses could rise from approximately $7 billion in 2024 to more than $16 billion by 2050 under a higher physical risk scenario.
The same assessment estimated one in seven Australian homes is currently uninsured, with that figure potentially reaching one in four by 2050. Rural protection gaps could exceed 40% under both modelled scenarios.
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The Climate Impact Lab’s authors described current El Niño conditions as a preview of temperatures forecast to become normal within two decades. “The anomalously warm temperatures that most of the globe will see during this El Niño event are a ‘postcard from the future’; while they feel anomalous now, they will become normal just a few decades into the future,” they wrote, as reported by Nine.
“Mortality projections for the near term provide a signal of where we are headed if new adaptation investments do not materialise,” they added.
Lab co-founder Michael Greenstone, an economist at the University of Chicago, framed the findings as a prompt for near-term action. “This report allows decision makers to see exactly where emergency actions can be taken now to save tens of thousands of lives in the coming months,” he said, as reported by Nine.
Researcher Emily Grover-Kopec pointed to income as a key variable in mortality outcomes. “Our research has shown significant disparity in the relationship between mortality and temperature across income levels. Regions with similar climate will often have quite different mortality outcomes due to their ability to adapt and mitigate heat-related deaths,” she told Nine.
For brokers with clients in construction, mining, agriculture, and logistics – particularly in NSW and WA – the practical question is whether the coverage those clients hold was designed for a risk environment that no longer exists.
