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- Feature: Disasters Open A Window To Rebuild with Resilience. Policymakers Can Use It To Fix The System. - From the archive: AI Is Closing the Data Gaps That Have Limited Disaster Prediction for Decades. - In the news: Is Your City Prepared for Climate Disaster?
Upcoming Webinar: Six States’ Approaches to Financing Resilient Homes
The Resiliency Company and the Nicholas Institute are co-hosting a webinar with the publication's authors on October 2nd, at 12pm ET, to go deeper into the case studies and design features across all six states. Register here.
Disasters Open A Window To Rebuild with Resilience. Policymakers Can Use It To Fix The System.
Every disaster opens a window to rebuild with resilience. What happens next determines whether it’s the start of systemic change.
This week on The Epicenter, we explored this dynamic in two articles that made complementary points about the mechanisms and windows of time necessary to actually get resilient homes built.
Attention: The collective attention on resilience is highest immediately after a disaster. As Wish explains, it’s hard to manufacture such attention during normal times, and it’s hard to maintain it. The research on flood insurance bears this out: More people buy policies the year after a hurricane, and the effect fades over the years that follow.
People are willing: Wish has found that the willingness to consider more resilient rebuilds is highest for homeowners after a disaster. “A family that has lost the same house to the same flood twice will consider an elevation, a buyout, a stricter code, or a move. Pitch any of that while the risk is theoretical, and it is a much harder conversation,” he wrote.
Wish’s argument is rooted in pragmatism. Of course, the best time to build to resilient standards is before people lose everything, but doing so requires complex coordination and proactive planning.
Pelosi, a strategic advisor to The Resiliency Company and Former Senior Advisor for Climate at HUD, explained how building in the right places, with the right mix of housing, to the right standards, can have a multiplier effect—not just on housing supply, but on resilience.
Pelosi defines this as “the resilience multiplier.” It has three pillars:
Where we build: Where we build determines more than whether a home is safe from the next disaster. For example, siting homes in lower-hazard, already-established neighborhoods improves the odds in insurance risk pools.
What we build: What we build, meaning the type of housing we allow, determines where that housing can go and how much land we need for it. Expanding what we allow to be built lets existing neighborhoods absorb more housing, unlocking infill development often on the lowest-hazard already-developed land, building the durable, lower-risk housing stock we need to address the housing shortage.
How we build: How we build determines whether we are simply shifting the risk or reducing it through resilient building codes, which reduce the risk by hardening homes against extreme weather.
Colorado shows how states can move on all three pillars at once. It passed reforms expanding what can be built, increasing density, and opening land in lower-hazard areas for development. Then it adopted new Wildfire Resiliency Codes, pairing those new codes with insurance reform.
These changes are projected to reduce high-wildfire risk development by seven percentage points. In fast-growing areas, modeling showed these changes would drop the share of new development in Colorado Springs’ high wildfire risk areas from 49% to 22%, keeping an estimated 30,000 households out of harm’s way.
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Policymakers, homeowners, developers, and other decision-makers don’t have to choose when the best time is to build with resilience. They can use the opening in the window after a disaster to rebuild to higher standards, and then use that momentum to advance the where-what-how resilience multiplier to systematically reduce risk at a population level.
Climate Risk Group CEO on Combating ‘Climate Risk Washing’ | Climate Proof | Should climate risk modeling belong to the public sector? University of Exeter academics argue private firms face incentives to soften bad news for paying clients. Climate Risk Group CEO and XDI founder Karl Mallon pushes back, arguing the deeper problem is weak disclosure rules and a lack of independent scrutiny.
Who Warns You When Disaster Strikes? | Convective Field Notes | When official alerts fail, a network of volunteer radio monitors is giving millions of people another way to hear that a disaster is coming. The “Watch Duty” app offers a case study in an important piece of resilience infrastructure: fast, verified information can give people a better chance to respond to incoming hazards.
Is Your City Prepared for Climate Disaster? | The New York Times | A new analysis ranks 72 of the world’s largest cities by their resilience to climate hazards, weighing exposure to threats like flooding, heat, and wildfire on one hand and investments in adaptation on the other. Chicago ranked highest, the only U.S. city in the top ten.
Read more about resilient public infrastructure and government solutions on The Epicenter here.
Real Estate & Construction
A Super El Niño Is Building. Florida’s Most Vulnerable Homes Aren’t Ready | Inside Climate News | A strong El Niño could exacerbate severe weather risk in Florida, and manufactured homes face particular danger: Residents are far more at risk from tornadoes, and many older homes predate stronger federal wind standards.
Pricing Climate Risk: Hurricane Models and Home Insurance Over the Last Two Decades | Brookings | Florida's homeowners insurance costs have risen much faster than modeled hurricane losses. Researchers found that expected losses for a representative home increased roughly 50% from 2006 to 2023, while hurricane insurance premiums climbed more than 200%. The study points to a driver of rising premiums: the cost of financing catastrophic risk through reserves and reinsurance.
Putting a Price on Climate Risk | Yale School of Management | Todd Cort discusses unpriced climate risk, including the fact that higher insurance premiums can themselves become a signal to prospective buyers that a property is risky. As insurance becomes harder to afford or obtain, demand and property values can fall, shrinking the property-tax base municipalities depend on to fund resilience.
Read more about resilient real estate on The Epicenter here.
The Statistic of the Week
94%
According to a survey of senior business leaders across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, 94% say that climate-related disruption has caused financial losses for their company over the past two years.
Have thoughts to share or want to add your voice to the conversation? Reach out!
The Epicenter helps decision-makers understand climate risks and discover viable resilience solutions. The Epicenter is an affiliated publication of The Resiliency Company, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to inspiring and empowering humanity to adapt to the accelerating challenges of the next 100+ years.
A new set of case studies and a policy brief lay out how states are financing property-level resilience improvements that reduce disaster losses, improve housing affordability, and stabilize stressed insurance markets.
