Their report, Neighbourhood Issue: Climate Costs and Risks to Councils, was published on Wednesday September 22.

It found that as councils are one of Australia's most significant infrastructure owners, they are hit hardest by the mounting damage to council-owned assets, rising insurance premiums, and increasing liability risks.

The areas located within the Bega Valley Shire saw 58% of its land mass burnt and the estimated costs of restoring the damage from bushfires was $20.5 million.

The report said that a further bill of $8 million was also worn by the Council resulting from the flooding events in February, July, and August of 2020.

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Councillor Jo Dodds agreed with the findings, "councils are the ones that are being hit the hardest with the costs of infrastructure rebuilding," she said.

"Councils also end up having to manage a lot of the community recovery process and that's the mental health stuff and family, as well as the built environment.

"Between those two things it's the local government because closest to the communities who end up doing a lot of the coordination and the actual on the ground work often with other support services."

Despite funding often coming from state or federal government, Cr Dodds said there were often significant delays in accessing the money.

"What we've found is that state government doesn't pay their bills in a timely matter so it could be 13 weeks, it could be 26 weeks before the council gets reimbursed.

"That has a huge impact on councils that have got really tight budgets and are dealing with multiple costs at the same time and rolling compounding disasters hitting their communities.":

Cr Dodds mentioned the council were still waiting on funds to be cleared for the bushfire rebuilds.

"We are certainly waiting on a lot of repayment for the road works, and then we're having to rebuild things like halls, and then there's funding and staffing the ongoing recovery services."

Another issue raised in the report was around the rising costs of insurance for climate related coverage.

"The cost of insuring everything goes up and the insurance companies have to cover the increased risk to the assets and there's a lot of things that council is responsible for that can't be insured," said Cr Dodds.

"Basically we have more assets which are exposed to risk and we can't always protect all those assets even via insurance if it's available or affordable."

Cr Dodds mentioned two issues currently faced by Council in relation to the financial restraints of rebuilding and improving fire resilience.

The first was that Council remains unable to financially manage the forests of South East NSW to be "healthy and fireproof."

There second was there are insufficient resources, both in finance and materials, to adequately rebuild.

She also said there remained difficult decisions for councils to make during bushfire recovery and resilience and gave the example of Cuttagee Bridge.

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"You've got a beautiful historic wooden bridge that everybody loves, and I love it.

"But you've also got a fire risk to the structure itself and you've got the risk of communities trying to evacuate and emergency services trying to get to an area, so what happens is that councillors and staff have to try and balance those things."

Cr Dodds felt what would have been priorities for council resourcing the community two years ago, were no longer their main focus.

"We're having to divert attention and resources towards emergency management that could have been used in other areas, there's not endless resources, so if we lift it from one area, we've got to take from another.

"There's these other things we've got to do now that are about meeting the impacts of climate change.

"I think council is going to have to face that money is going to get tighter and tighter as more money gets spent simply patching up what got wrecked in the last climate catastrophe.

"The best investment any of us can be making now is to mitigate the future increases in temperature which are only going to exacerbate what we're already dealing with," she said.