The Weekly: The Epicenter’s Three-Part Series on How Home Catalogs Can Drive Resilience

One year after wildfires devastated Los Angeles, a new approach to rebuilding post-disaster is gaining momentum, offering a potential blueprint for other communities to follow. Stakeholders and builders are developing pre-approved home plans to shorten rebuilding timelines, reduce costs, and embed resiliency across burn areas. 

The Epicenter’s three-part home catalogs series from Alexis M. Pelosi and Robin Keegan describes how we arrived at the current moment and explores what it means for the future of housing after disasters and in communities facing disinvestment, outdated zoning, or housing supply constraints.

Part 1: The Evolution of Home Rebuilding Catalogs

The lack of standard home rebuilding playbooks, combined with the uneven delivery of federal disaster recovery funding, has led to fragmented post-disaster rebuilding efforts in the past. However, disaster recovery has evolved to more systematic approaches using pre-approved home plan catalogs.

Read more here. 

Part 2: How Los Angeles Is Reinventing Post-Disaster Rebuilding

On paper, Los Angeles faces a unique rebuilding challenge after the 2025 wildfires: 12,000 structures scattered across irregular parcels and complex topography. Yet on the ground, a different model is emerging, one that combines cross-sector collaboration, AI-powered coordination technology, and pre-approved wildfire-resilient home catalogs.

Read more here. 

Part 3: Home Catalogs as a National Housing Solution

The innovations driving LA's recovery could address housing challenges outside of the disaster-recovery context. Pre-approved home catalogs can help reverse decades of disinvestment, expose outdated zoning barriers, and make housing nationwide more climate resilient. 

Read more here. 

What We’re Reading From the Resiliency Ecosystem

Insurance

• The Insurance Crisis Is About to Get Even Worse | Bloomberg | Climate denial collides with market realities as the Trump administration declares that greenhouse gases don't endanger Americans' well-being. Bloomberg explores how insurance companies operate in a different world where climate risks are heating the atmosphere, intensifying disasters, and driving up costs. 
• New Bill Asks California to Craft Standard for Cleaning Wildfire Smoke-Tainted Homes | San Francisco Chronicle | The Smoke Damage Recovery Act would be a first-of-its-kind legislation establishing enforceable public health and insurance standards for testing, cleaning, and restoring smoke-contaminated homes after wildfires. 

Read more about insurance on The Epicenter here.

Public Infrastructure

• Municipalities Invited to Apply for Fully Funded Pilots | Smart Cities World | Municipalities worldwide are applying for fully funded, no-cost innovation projects through Leading Cities' AcceliGOV program, which enables cities to launch proven climate and infrastructure solutions in approximately 90 days. Ready-to-deploy solutions include flood risk and shoreline erosion analysis.
• How Airports Can Build Operational Resilience to Weather Climate Disruption | World Economic Forum | Climate disruption threatens aviation with financial impacts expected to reach as high as $500 billion by 2050 from flight cancellations, infrastructure damage, and cargo disruptions. A new simulation tool allows airports to identify vulnerabilities and find the highest return-on-investment options to increase resilience.

Read more about resilient public infrastructure and government solutions on The Epicenter here.

Real Estate & Construction

• Choosing the Right Home Is Tough. Climate Change Is Making It Harder | Inside Climate News | With catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, and sea-level rise worsening, Inside Climate News collects tools that can help prospective homebuyers take regional climate risks into account before settling down somewhere with a 30-year mortgage.
• Wildfire Debris Removal Finally Underway at Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Estates | Los Angeles Times | Debris removal has started more than a year after wildfire destroyed the 170-unit rent-controlled park, and only after the city declared it a public nuisance. The delay—tied to disputes over responsibility, federal eligibility gaps, and hesitant property owners—is a case study in how recoveries can stall. 

Read more about resilient real estate on The Epicenter here.

Private Investment

• 'How to' Guide for Adaptation Finance Vehicles, America's Disaster Aid Bottleneck, Wildfire Tech Collab | ClimateProof | Climate Proof editor Louie Woodall draws an analogy between New York grocery shopping and the rapidly evolving climate risk intelligence market. As climate risk management matures, Woodall argues, success may hinge less on sheer data scale and more on the “taste and discernment” that specialist firms bring to defined customer segments.
• Hong Kong Scientists Launch AI Model to Better Predict Extreme Weather | Reuters | Hong Kong scientists developed an AI weather-forecasting system that predicts thunderstorms and heavy downpours up to four hours ahead, compared with the current range of 20 minutes to two hours, to help governments and emergency services respond more effectively to increasingly frequent climate-driven extreme weather.

Read more about private investment on The Epicenter here.

The Epicenter Posts You Might Have Missed:

• The Perfect Storm: Why Disasters Are So Expensive | The Epicenter Editors | By rebuilding the same way we’ve done in the past, we’re ensuring the trend will continue: a costly and frequent cycle of destruction and reconstruction that can threaten existing assets and multiply financial losses across every sector.
• Resilience as Local Infrastructure: How Small Businesses Anchor Climate-Ready Economies | Joyce Coffee | When extreme weather disrupts communities, small businesses often wind up being the first responders and first casualties. Investing in small business resilience can translate into fewer closures, less unemployment, faster recovery, and stronger local spending after disasters strike.
• Can Home Hardening Discounts Ease the Insurability Crisis? | The Epicenter Editors | The California FAIR plan is proposing a huge rate hike, alongside incentives to reduce wildfire risk. The success of the effort hinges on cultivating a robust, affordable industry around fire-resilient construction.

The Statistic of the Week 

75%

About 75% of FEMA’s flood risk maps are outdated due to a lack of funding. 

Source: NBC.

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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.