Winter Storm Fern swept across a huge swath of the United States in January 2026, revealing both vulnerabilities and progress on the climate resilience and adaptation front.
Twenty-three billion-dollar disasters, $115 billion in damage, and not one hurricane: 2025 was a masterclass in how climate risk in the U.S. has changed.
Twenty-three billion-dollar weather and climate disasters struck the United States in 2025, revealing important takeaways for decision-makers in the real estate, public infrastructure, and insurance sectors.
Property insurance markets across the U.S. are under strain as premiums rise and insurers pull back from high-risk regions. In response, a growing number of states are leaning on public and quasi-public reinsurance backstops.
States are making a mistake by using public reinsurance mechanisms to address rising insurance costs. Legislators should invest in climate resilience and risk reduction rather than transfer risk to taxpayers and ignore the underlying drivers of catastrophic insurance losses.
Extreme weather events and a changing climate are reshaping long-term housing affordability across America. The result is a migration pattern that would have shocked demographers a decade ago: people are leaving the Sun Belt and heading to the Rust Belt.
Over the last 15 years, Rhode Island has seen cataclysmic inland flooding, tornadoes, and rapidly rising sea levels wearing away at its coast. But the state plans to be a safer, more stable place to live in 50 years.
Nine months after the Eaton and Palisades fires, the Department of Angels released a large, community-level survey in October offering a detailed look at how homeowners perceive their recovery experience.
Two trends are colliding in state finance offices: Emergency, or “rainy day,” funds are shrinking at the exact moment climate-related revenue losses are mounting.
States are seeing their emergency reserves shrink for the first time since the Great Recession. The path forward is a new, two-pronged pro-growth, pro-resilience model that expands the state’s economic base while simultaneously modernizing the financial tools used to protect it.
An adaptation-minded property insurance system means safer, healthier, more resilient communities and economies that can both prepare for and recover from climate disasters in an affordable, sustainable, equitable way.
Each time the federal government closes, it reinforces a simple truth: the center can no longer hold. The work of building resilient infrastructure and communities must now happen locally.
From stormwater systems to flood mitigation projects, we must redefine community-level investments in resilience not as a municipal cost, but rather as a direct investment in preserving property values and stabilizing the private cost of homeownership.
