Do we have to take climate risks into our own hands now?

In 2023, my husband and I bought our house in southwest Colorado, in part, because it backed up to open space. That was the dream: trails just past the fence, a scrubby network of oak and sage stretching out into the hills beyond. But a little over a year into homeownership, I was questioning the wisdom of living so close to a burnable landscape. This past winter’s spate of wildfires across Los Angeles made that fear of living alongside such a combustible landscape all the more real — fear that was only intensified by the weather. In my town, winter and its all important snow never really showed up. By spring, our snowpack was well below normal, winds were whipping, and I was becoming more paranoid about my wildfire risk. It’s not just people like me — living on the edge of fire-prone terrain — who may be sharing that paranoia. More than 100 million people across 20 states and Washington, DC, live in the path of the increasingly fierce hurricanes. Most of the eastern half of the country is now at risk for tornadoes, and floods have increased in frequency and intensity in both coastal areas and river valleys. Over the July Fourth weekend, extreme flooding in central Texas was among the most deadly of the past century. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information found that 2024 held the second-most billion-dollar natural disasters ever for the US — right behind 2023. This year, with its already higher-than-average fire activity and predicted busy Atlantic hurricane season, is already shaping up to be significant, too. At the same time, government cuts have undermined every critical juncture for disaster preparation. Federal programs for wildfire mitigation, proactive work like thinning forests and conducting prescribed burns, which help prevent large-scale fires, have been halted due to staffing cutbacks and a lack of funds. Cutbacks to the National Weather Service, through reduction in force at NOAA, have already led to gaps in forecasting, which makes it harder for the public to plan for extreme weather events like the Texas Hill Country floods this month or the deadly May tornadoes, which killed at least 27 people as they swept across Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia. And the agency explicitly tasked with disaster relief is shrinking. FEMA, has cut funding for its bipartisanly popular Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, a major tool for building flood-resistant infrastructure, among other resiliency projects. They’ve lost some of their ability to help us recover, too. FEMA, already understaffed in 2024, has lost a third of its workforce since the beginning of the year. It has scaled back training and stands to lose $646 million in funding if the current federal budget proposal passes. As if that’s not enough, President Donald Trump has said he plans to phase out FEMA as a whole after the 2025 hurricane season In the face of all that, I wanted to find out what all of us could do to limit our risk. The first step was pretty basic: Instead of just spiraling about hypotheticals, figure out the specific risks in your area. For now, FEMA’s National Risk Index, where you can identify the threats to your community, remains a good source. By looking through the index, I learned my county is high in wildfire risks — which I already knew — but also that the area is prone to landslides, drought, and severe lightning storms. Once I knew the risks, I looked at how I could prepare. But the answers weren’t obvious. I reached out to both my regional FEMA office, whose contact was easy to find online, and the national headquarters, because I wanted to know what sort of concrete things I could do to protect my home — and what kind of support I might expect if the worst-case scenario happened to hit my community. I got a short email back saying that I should contact local authorities. And so I started the real journey there, by looking at my local resources. How to harden your home The most meaningful thing you can do on your own is harden your own home against relevant disasters. I found online that my local fire department provides free wildfire assessments because they think reducing your own vulnerability is one that can also reduce community risk. “The less time I have to spend at your house,” Scott Nielsen, my local wildfire battalion chief, told me, the more he can spend fighting other parts of the fire. Nielsen says that when it comes to mitigating fire, we can’t change things like topography or weather, but we can change the fuel — and often that fuel includes our homes. When Loren Russell, who works for the wildfire division of my regional fire district, came over to assess my risks, what he said surprised me: Instead of the overgrown hill behind the house, which had scared me, he was worried about nooks in the eaves or corners of the deck where embers could get caught. He also worried about the oily junipers in the yard, which could become ladder fuels that might allow fire to leap to the tree canopies, and about the ways those canopies connected, spreading sparks across the landscape. Russell says it’s always the same few things that create risk. Looking at the splintering boards of my neighbor’s fence, he noted that he’d seen fires blow across whole subdivisions through fences. “Once embers are in a fence, it’s like a wick,” he says. There are strategies for personal protection too — and not just for fire. FEMA says that if you live in a hurricane-prone area, you can install impact-resistant doors (particularly garage doors), storm shingles, and reinforced roof bracing, all of which help your house withstand storms. If you’re in a floodplain, you can seal cracks in your foundation, move your electrical boxes higher, or build berms and drains into your landscaping so water runs away from your home. There can be a range of costs for those projects, from your own sweat equity for landscaping to tens of thousands of dollars for a new roof. But there can be grants and tools available to offset some of the cost, like Alabama’s program to help fund home strengthening, which is run through the state insurance office. Check your state resources, like the division of emergency management. There’s no perfect formula for what to do. Russell says mitigation makes a real difference, but that risk is personal, because it’s also tied up in tolerance, and in trying to predict the future. “You go out and you build a concrete bunker and surround it with gravel, but,” he says, “now you live in a concrete bunker surrounded by gravel.” Risk is personal — but what your neighbors do matters Turning your home into a bunker is expensive, unappealing, and it might not make a difference in your broader risk tolerance. And unfortunately, it doesn’t really change your insurance liability. At least not yet. My insurance agent told me that they don’t yet factor home hardening into their policies and pricing, even though simply being in a disaster-prone area can raise your premiums or make it harder to get insurance — and sometimes, insurance companies will simply dump policyholders in risk-prone areas. More than 100,000 Californians in fire-prone areas have lost their insurance in the past five years. Those drops don’t necessarily reflect what’s happening on the ground. “We had one insurance agency that was pretty happy to drop people. I looked at their reports and didn’t find them to be based in fire science,” Nielsen says, about our area of western Colorado. He says they’re based on zip codes, which can be relatively arbitrary, instead of on the kind of terrain and fuel supply that actually make a difference to fires. And they almost never reflect mitigation work. One of the only ways home hardening and mitigation make a difference for insurance is when it’s done on a neighborhood scale. For instance, in 10 states, communities that have been certified as firewise through the National Fire Protection Association are able to get insurance discounts. That is reflective of actual risk, “You really are impacted by your neighbor’s property,” says Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at the University of California Santa Barbara. He says that the LA wildfires showed just how much broader-scale hardening — or lack thereof — impacts risk. But regional tools, like consistent fire hazard mapping programs, or building code requirements for new construction can significantly reduce risk. That’s true of other natural disasters, too. Nielsen says that landscape-scale problems, like fire, need landscape-scale solutions. Home hardening is a piece we can control, but it’s networked into a bigger system of land management, risk tolerance, and policy. When a tornado or a hurricane comes, it doesn’t just hit one house. Every slice (of cheese — yes, cheese) is important Nielsen thinks about what’s commonly called the Swiss cheese model of risk assessment, where multiple layers of protection. This includes everything from personal scale, like hardening your roof to withstand high-force winds; to local and regional projects like floodplain mitigation or evacuation planning; to federal tools, like the National Weather Service, or FEMA, which apply to the whole country. You can visualize each layer as a Swiss cheese slice in a sandwich. They all have holes, ideally, the gaps overlap, and the layers support one another — and stop a threat from becoming catastrophic. That’s even more true for renters, or people who live in urban areas, who might not have as much control over their own homes, and who are even more impacted by the places around them. Hurricanes have wreaked havoc on major cities. If that’s you, ask your landlord what they’ve done to harden the property, ask about past damage, consider supplemental renters insurance and then get curious about municipal management like storm drains, which divert water away from housing, evacuation routes or fire mitigation, depending on your risks. Having a lot of layers of Swiss cheese is especially important now. It’s all connected. Preventative mitigation is networked into a broader system, but so is dealing with disasters when they come, whether they’re fires, floods, or storms. Marshalling national resources during and after large-scale disasters has been a federal responsibility since the 1970s. That kind of coordinated response is part of how we plan for natural disasters, but the current administration is planning to cut the budget and scope of FEMA and turn responsibility toward state and local governments, which aren’t always funded or prepared to manage large incidents. The scientists and field workers I spoke to for this story told me they were worried about the lack of federal investment. Moritz says that he’s concerned about disaster response, but he’s also worried about understanding future preparedness. “Some of the big questions that we don’t have answers for yet rely on big labs and national-level funding,” he says. “Research-wise, a lot of Forest Service colleagues who do really good work in federal labs have been let go, or lost staff. Those are serious losses that will take a long time to get back from.” He says that there are still big gaps in the research about exactly how home hardening fits into the puzzle of resilience, and what kind of choices are the most effective, but that in the face of that federal lack of support, the sort of things we can do individually or as a neighborhood collective become even more important. When there are several fires burning at once — like in Los Angeles earlier this year — responding agencies are spread thin, and every person might not be able to depend on their help, Mortiz told me. That makes education shared among neighbors even more important. “That’s the scale you can make a difference,” he said.

This moment demands more than headlines

Do we have to take climate risks into our own hands now?