Nearly 3 billion animals were killed or displaced by the catastrophic bushfire season that scorched tens of millions of acres across Australia in 2019 and 2020, according to experts who hope the research will demonstrate the urgent need for action to prevent future disasters.

This finding, revealed Tuesday in an interim report commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature Australia, is nearly three times higher than an estimate in January. Its based on a fire impact area of 28.3 million acres and is broken down into a staggering 143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds and 51 million frogs.

Its hard to think of another event anywhere in the world in living memory that has killed or displaced that many animals, said WWF-Australia CEO Dermot OGorman in a media release. This ranks as one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history.

Ten scientists from Australian universities and wildlife groups contributed to the bulk of the work. This included Chris Dickman, an ecology professor at the University of Sydney, who, alongside WWF-Australia in January, produced an early estimate of 1.25 billion animals affected by the blazes.