SYDNEY (BLOOMBERG) - As many as a billion animals may have been killed in Australia's wildfires since September, a scientist said, doubling his earlier estimateas the unprecedented scale of the crisis in the world's driest inhabited continent continued to emerge.

New figures released on Wednesday (Jan 8) by the University of Sydney's Chris Dickman indicatemore than 800 million animals have been killedin the state of New South Wales alone, while one billion had died nationally. That includes mammals, birds and reptiles directly killed by the fires or indirectly through loss of habitat.