Wildfire-prone communities across the West are no longer waiting for federal dollars to mitigate wildfire risk. As FEMA funding stalls and detection technology gets cheaper, local districts are investing in wildfire-detection sensors, drones, and AI-monitored cameras.
With fire seasons now roughly two months longer than they were in the 1970s, 2026 could reset the ceiling on wildfire losses again.
Climate change and federal policies are making wildfires more frequent and intense. Migration patterns are increasing the exposure of assets to wildfire threats. And assets that are more vulnerable to wildfires translate into higher costs.
Cool roofs, permeable paving, green stormwater infrastructure, and strategic tree planting have all proven to reduce heat and flooding.
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City leaders across the U.S. know they need more resilient infrastructure to guard against worsening climate events. Investments like cool roofs and cool pavements, permeable paving, green stormwater infrastructure, and strategic tree planting have all proven to reduce heat and flooding. Yet cities tend to build the same way they have for decades—exposing them to greater risk at a time of accelerating climate hazards.
Bill Updike, Director of U.S. Policy and Programs at the Smart Surfaces Coalition (SSC), has a three-part diagnosis for why: “Inertia, staff capacity, and misperceptions of the economics of resilience.” To overcome these issues, cities need clear economic evidence about their potential returns on investment. They also need purpose-built data and benefit-cost analysis tools that make it easy to take action.
The Epicenter spoke with Updike about how SSC provides solutions to help cities move from isolated infrastructure projects to system-wide resilience policy.
Economic Evidence Is What Moves Cities From Pilot to Policy
"We need to move away from ‘death by pilot’ and get to comprehensive transformation and decision-making," says Updike. SSC addresses this by providing high-resolution micrometeorological modeling to simulate extreme heat and flooding issues. It also forecasts the potential impact of solutions with the goal of predicting how resilience investments would perform locally. With this information, the SSC team develops benefit-cost analyses that city leaders can use to build a case for new policies or investments.
In Baltimore, that modeling showed that for every $1 invested in smart surfaces strategies, the city would see $10 in benefits, alongside a projected temperature reduction of more than four degrees during peak summer in the hottest parts of the city.
Those numbers were compelling enough for a Baltimore City Council member to introduce five key pieces of legislation in recent years: a cool roof ordinance, a study to establish a Climate Resilience Authority, multiple tree protection bills, and research into an urban meadows program.
Overstretched City Staff Need Tools That Are Fast And Accurate
"I used to be a city policymaker in Washington, D.C.,” says Updike. “Time was a real constraint.” City staffers are frequently over capacity, working under tight budgets, and pressed to move quickly. For those reasons, SSC intentionally built their data tools to be “high resolution, high quality, but also very quick and easy to run.” A full benefit-cost analysis can be completed in under five minutes.
For cities ready to act, SSC also maintains a searchable database of more than 2,000 smart surface policies from across the country, alongside model ordinances and draft policy justification memos that city staff can adapt without starting from scratch.
In Atlanta, those tools quickly changed the legislative math. The city used SSC's model cool roof ordinance as its template. When a council member raised skepticism about the proposal, noting that Atlanta is known for its tree canopy, SSC cited its data showing that 74% of the single-family residential roof area in the city is actually unshaded by trees. The bill passed unanimously.
Resilience Is a Shared Priority Across Party Lines
SSC is deliberate about using clear ROI data to keep the economic evidence non-ideological. Their partner cities include mayors from both parties. "We can really just focus on the resilience story, the health story, the cost-effectiveness story,” says Updike. “No one likes extreme heat, nobody likes flooding, and everybody wants resilience."
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1.2 million
An estimated 1.2 million property owners have been dropped by their insurance companies in the last five years.
Source: Smart Cities Dive
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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.
Incrementalism is often dismissed as not scalable enough to translate into population-level outcomes. But a series of incremental changes, conducted by various stakeholders in concert, can translate into new norms, higher standards, and more resilient cities.
Incrementalism is often dismissed as not scalable enough to translate into population-level outcomes. But a series of incremental changes, conducted by various stakeholders in concert, can translate into new norms, higher standards, and more resilient cities.
Maryland is pioneering a cross-state conservation finance model to fund pollution reduction outside its borders while still meeting environmental obligations.
Treating wood as a public utility, rather than a waste product, could reduce fire risk, support insurer re-entry, and unlock economic value that currently goes up in smoke.
