Recent events in California highlighted the increasing risk wildfires pose to urban areas in a world where the impacts of climate change are becoming obvious. In many regions of Australia, the urban fringe is especially vulnerable to bushfire, given the proximity of human habitation to highly combustible vegetation. Figure 1 The 2025 wildfires in California serve are a tragic reminder of the threat bushfires pose to the urban fringe of large cities. With increased rainfall associated with the La Nina conditions of recent years, there has been significant vegetation growth across Australia’s eastern seaboard where over 80 percent of the population resides. In particular, these conditions have seen a dramatic increase in potential bushfire fuel loads in the peri urban areas. As such, there is an increasingly urgent need for action by local authorities to better identify and assess the potential threat to lives and property and to implement appropriate strategies to mitigate the risk in these urban fringe areas. LiDAR data has long been relied upon by local authorities as a key dataset for disaster mitigation. Most notably it is used as the fundamental data for modelling and assessing the flooding and storm surge risk of populated areas due the ability to derive accurate terrain data over large areas. It has also been utilised for assessing bushfire risk with its ability to not only model terrain but to provide detail of the vegetation of an area. The latest generation of LiDAR systems offer a significant improvement in both resolution and accuracy and advance the effectiveness of LiDAR as a tool that provided critical metrics for vegetation structure, biomass density and fuel loads compared to the older generation of broadacre LiDAR scanners. This think piece explores why the latest generation of aerial LiDAR, specifically the Riegl VUX-160 scanner operated by Bennett + Bennett, provides improved calculation of biomass and more reliable assessment of bushfire risk for Australia’s urban fringe areas. It will also highlight the unique capabilities of the VUX-160, demonstrating how it outperforms traditional broadacre LiDAR scanners in providing the best available data for use by professionals undertaking bushfire risk analysis. Biomass and Bushfire Risk Biomass, the total mass of living and dead organic material, plays a key role in bushfire dynamics. Vegetation density, height, and structure along with vegetation species, directly influence the behaviour of a fire. Dense, multi-layered vegetation provides more fuel, resulting in larger and more intense fires that spread rapidly. In the urban fringe, where residential areas abut fire-prone bushland, high biomass levels can mean the difference between a manageable fire and a catastrophic event.