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Facing a call for climate reparations, wealthy nations propose an insurance scheme

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Monday, November 14, 2022

Tensions at the United Nations climate change conference known as COP27 have been running high, largely over the issue of what’s called “loss and damage” — shorthand for the disproportionate suffering that the developing world is already experiencing at the hands of climate change. In the most concrete response yet to the issue, on Monday a group of countries led by Germany announced their commitment to developing “a Global Shield against Climate Risks” to help people in the least developed countries better prepare for climate-fueled disasters.  The Global Shield is a joint initiative by the G7, a political forum consisting of the world’s most industrialized countries, and the V20, which is represented by the finance ministers of 58 of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. The German government has committed roughly $175 million to the effort, which intends to address loss and damage through insurance programs and social security schemes. Denmark, Ireland, Canada, and France have also contributed about $42 million to the initiative. The least-industrialized countries in the world have argued that they’ve done little to cause climate change but are the most affected by climate-fueled disasters, like the recent floods in Pakistan that left a third of the country underwater. (The V20’s website points out that it represents nearly 20 percent of the global population but only 5 percent of global emissions.) For this reason, developing countries have called on wealthy nations to set up a fund to pay for the loss and damage climate change has already caused and will cause in the future — in effect, for a form of climate reparations. The success of COP27 could rest on whether wealthy nations, whose early industrialization is disproportionately responsible for the climate change that has occurred so far, answer the call. “The Global Shield is long overdue,” Ken Ofori-Atta, Ghana’s finance minister, said at the press conference announcing the Global Shield’s launch at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. “It has never been a question of who pays for loss and damage, because we in the V20 are already paying for it.” Given the lack of momentum on direct funding to address loss and damage, the Global Shield is the first systematic and substantive effort by wealthy nations that responds to the call for climate reparations. While proposals for a separate, formal U.N. mechanism that would provide direct loss and damage funding are still under negotiation, some countries such as Ireland, Austria, and New Zealand have made symbolic pledges of a few million dollars to show their support for the cause. The United States, which has historically refused to acknowledge the issue, has staunchly opposed a separate fund for loss and damage. On Saturday, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said that a financing mechanism for loss and damage is “just not happening.” However, the U.S. is a member of the G7 and hence a part of the Global Shield consortium. While there are few details yet on exactly how the Global Shield will work, German federal development minister Svenja Schulze said the program will include insurance programs, social security schemes, early warning systems, and other financial assistance arranged in advance before disaster strikes. Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Fiji, Ghana, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Senegal will be the first recipients of “Global Shield packages,” according to a press release. Advocates for loss and damage warned that insurance schemes like those promised by Global Shield are an insufficient solution to loss and damage, and they worried that such programs will distract from the demand for separate direct funding. The Global Shield is an expansion of the InsuResilience Global Partnership, a program spearheaded in 2015 by the German government that primarily provides insurance schemes to countries in the Global South.  InsuResilience and other insurance programs that have been championed by wealthy nations have been inadequate to meet the scale of loss and damage that people in climate-vulnerable countries are facing, advocates told Grist. Asking people in the developing world to pay for insurance when they’ve done little to cause the climate crisis is fundamentally unfair, they said.  “If you’re a rich country who is on the hook for paying for this, it very cleverly redirects the responsibility for dealing with climate loss and damage onto vulnerable people,” said Julie-Anne Richards, an independent consultant and expert with the Loss and Damage Collaboration, an advocacy group. “Rich countries can turn around and go, ‘Well, the problem is you didn’t prepare well enough. You don’t have insurance.’” Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at the Climate Action Network, an international coalition of more than 1,800 environmental groups, said that in past years wealthy nations have used insurance programs to distract from the demand for direct loss and damage funding. He is wary of the announcement, given the lack of more concrete detail about how the Global Shield, which was earlier floated in June at the G7 leaders summit, will deliver financial support to those in need. “The phrase is very fancy: ‘Global Shield,’” he said. “But what’s inside is unclear to many.” Schulze was quick to address such concerns at the press conference on Monday. “It is not a kind of tactic to avoid formal negotiations on loss and damage,” she said. “The Global Shield also isn’t the one and only solution for loss and damage — certainly not. We need a broad range of solutions and respective funding for tackling loss and damage.” The international community has been kicking around the idea of an insurance scheme to help countries vulnerable to climate change since at least the early 1990s, when island nations proposed an insurance pool to protect low-lying countries from sea level rise. Over the years, the World Bank, United Nations, and various countries have created risk pooling programs such as the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, the African Risk Capacity, and the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative. These programs are subsidized by wealthy nations and other donors and allow countries in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific to secure coverage for disasters such as drought, flooding, and hurricanes.  These sorts of insurance can be purchased by governments to protect their people against disasters, and by individuals to protect their property. Premiums are typically subsidized to make them affordable. There are two main types of climate disaster insurance: indemnity insurance and parametric insurance. The former involves purchasing policies that cover specific perils over specific periods of time and are paid out depending on the scale of losses when a disaster strikes. These are similar to the insurance policies purchased by U.S. homeowners. In the case of parametric insurance, on the other hand, insurers identify specific climatic conditions that trigger payouts to policyholders. When specific predetermined thresholds describing the level of flooding or drought or other disasters are met, insurers disburse funds no matter the scale of the damage on the ground. The upshot of this is that the long and cumbersome process of filing a claim and verifying the damage is avoided, resulting in quicker payouts. But in countries in the Global South, where historical climatic and environmental data isn’t as readily available, insurers have struggled to define the best parameters — such as wind speed, rainfall, or days without rain — that trigger payouts. As a result, even when an expensive climate-driven disaster strikes, insurers sometimes don’t pay because the parametric thresholds weren’t met. For example, the government of Malawi paid $4.7 million for drought insurance through the African Risk Capacity for the 2015-2016 agricultural season. But when erratic rains resulted in a prolonged drought and more than $350 million in damages, the insurance program found that the thresholds for the number of people affected by the drought were not met, and that it didn’t trigger a payout. After sustained media coverage and outrage over the decision, the African Risk Capacity eventually reassessed its modeling and provided $8.1 million in payouts — a small fraction of the need. Similarly, after Hurricanes Irma and Maria made landfall on Antigua and Barbuda in 2017 and caused $136 million in economic damage, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility paid out $6.8 million — 5 percent of the damages.  One research paper that studied the African, Caribbean, and Pacific insurance programs concluded that while “to some extent it is possible to address the weaknesses of parametric risk pooling schemes, it seems equally clear that it is impossible to fully remedy them.”  According to InsuResilience’s annual report, it has “enabled access to financial protection for over 350 million people in vulnerable countries,” but it’s unclear how the program is counting those who are protected and whether payouts after disasters have met their needs. Singh, the advocate with the Climate Action Network, said the program counts an entire family as protected if one member has insurance for even one of a slew of climate perils. “The starting point has to be whether people who are being affected are getting adequate support or not,” said Singh. “If they’re not getting it, then whatever we have is inadequate.” In an emailed statement in response to questions about InsuResilience’s effectiveness, a spokesperson for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development confirmed that the number of policyholders is multiplied by the average household number to calculate beneficiaries. The spokesperson defended the estimate saying that InsuResilience “sets strong qualitative standards” and that the program “ensure[s] that products are indeed fit for purpose to provide effective protection for an entire household.” Even those working with InsuResilience have been quick to acknowledge its shortcomings. Colin McQuistan, the head of climate resilience at Practical Action, a charity in the U.K., has been helping develop a pilot program in Nepal to insure farmers against flooding in partnership with InsuResilience. The program only protects paddy farmers during the monsoon season, even though rice is just one of multiple crops that farmers in the region cultivate. “Attempting to suggest that the insurance product is protecting those farmers is ridiculous, because it’s pretty clear it’s only protecting that one crop to that one hazard,” said McQuistan.   Currently, just 10 percent of the program’s budget can be used to subsidize the insurance premium, but McQuistan hopes that in future years additional government subsidies will lower the cost further. Securing useful climate data for the region has also been a challenge, McQuistan added. The group used rainfall and river flow data for the Karnali River to develop the product, but recently some of the farmers were affected by floods from another nearby river. “There’s still a lot of work needed to develop the thresholds and triggers for a parametric insurance product in rivers where we don’t have sufficient historical data,” he said.  Aside from overcoming such technical challenges, the Global Shield’s success will depend on the amount of money that it is able to raise from wealthy nations and other donors. At the press conference, Schulze said the $175 million pledged by Germany was “just a start, a sort of seed money” and that the initiative will “need substantial additional funding over time.” At a separate press conference, Rachel Cleetus, a policy director at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, said that the scale of funding for the Global Shield “is completely off.” “Countries are putting money in the millions and the needs, they have admitted, are rising into the billions and trillions,” she said. “[The Global Shield] is not a substitute for a loss and damage finance facility.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Facing a call for climate reparations, wealthy nations propose an insurance scheme on Nov 14, 2022.

A group of countries led by Germany announced a climate insurance scheme called the Global Shield at COP27 on Monday.

Tensions at the United Nations climate change conference known as COP27 have been running high, largely over the issue of what’s called “loss and damage” — shorthand for the disproportionate suffering that the developing world is already experiencing at the hands of climate change. In the most concrete response yet to the issue, on Monday a group of countries led by Germany announced their commitment to developing “a Global Shield against Climate Risks” to help people in the least developed countries better prepare for climate-fueled disasters. 

The Global Shield is a joint initiative by the G7, a political forum consisting of the world’s most industrialized countries, and the V20, which is represented by the finance ministers of 58 of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. The German government has committed roughly $175 million to the effort, which intends to address loss and damage through insurance programs and social security schemes. Denmark, Ireland, Canada, and France have also contributed about $42 million to the initiative.

The least-industrialized countries in the world have argued that they’ve done little to cause climate change but are the most affected by climate-fueled disasters, like the recent floods in Pakistan that left a third of the country underwater. (The V20’s website points out that it represents nearly 20 percent of the global population but only 5 percent of global emissions.) For this reason, developing countries have called on wealthy nations to set up a fund to pay for the loss and damage climate change has already caused and will cause in the future — in effect, for a form of climate reparations. The success of COP27 could rest on whether wealthy nations, whose early industrialization is disproportionately responsible for the climate change that has occurred so far, answer the call.

“The Global Shield is long overdue,” Ken Ofori-Atta, Ghana’s finance minister, said at the press conference announcing the Global Shield’s launch at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. “It has never been a question of who pays for loss and damage, because we in the V20 are already paying for it.”

Given the lack of momentum on direct funding to address loss and damage, the Global Shield is the first systematic and substantive effort by wealthy nations that responds to the call for climate reparations. While proposals for a separate, formal U.N. mechanism that would provide direct loss and damage funding are still under negotiation, some countries such as Ireland, Austria, and New Zealand have made symbolic pledges of a few million dollars to show their support for the cause. The United States, which has historically refused to acknowledge the issue, has staunchly opposed a separate fund for loss and damage. On Saturday, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said that a financing mechanism for loss and damage is “just not happening.” However, the U.S. is a member of the G7 and hence a part of the Global Shield consortium.

While there are few details yet on exactly how the Global Shield will work, German federal development minister Svenja Schulze said the program will include insurance programs, social security schemes, early warning systems, and other financial assistance arranged in advance before disaster strikes. Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Fiji, Ghana, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Senegal will be the first recipients of “Global Shield packages,” according to a press release.

Advocates for loss and damage warned that insurance schemes like those promised by Global Shield are an insufficient solution to loss and damage, and they worried that such programs will distract from the demand for separate direct funding. The Global Shield is an expansion of the InsuResilience Global Partnership, a program spearheaded in 2015 by the German government that primarily provides insurance schemes to countries in the Global South. 

InsuResilience and other insurance programs that have been championed by wealthy nations have been inadequate to meet the scale of loss and damage that people in climate-vulnerable countries are facing, advocates told Grist. Asking people in the developing world to pay for insurance when they’ve done little to cause the climate crisis is fundamentally unfair, they said. 

“If you’re a rich country who is on the hook for paying for this, it very cleverly redirects the responsibility for dealing with climate loss and damage onto vulnerable people,” said Julie-Anne Richards, an independent consultant and expert with the Loss and Damage Collaboration, an advocacy group. “Rich countries can turn around and go, ‘Well, the problem is you didn’t prepare well enough. You don’t have insurance.’”

Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at the Climate Action Network, an international coalition of more than 1,800 environmental groups, said that in past years wealthy nations have used insurance programs to distract from the demand for direct loss and damage funding. He is wary of the announcement, given the lack of more concrete detail about how the Global Shield, which was earlier floated in June at the G7 leaders summit, will deliver financial support to those in need.

“The phrase is very fancy: ‘Global Shield,’” he said. “But what’s inside is unclear to many.”

Schulze was quick to address such concerns at the press conference on Monday. “It is not a kind of tactic to avoid formal negotiations on loss and damage,” she said. “The Global Shield also isn’t the one and only solution for loss and damage — certainly not. We need a broad range of solutions and respective funding for tackling loss and damage.”

The international community has been kicking around the idea of an insurance scheme to help countries vulnerable to climate change since at least the early 1990s, when island nations proposed an insurance pool to protect low-lying countries from sea level rise. Over the years, the World Bank, United Nations, and various countries have created risk pooling programs such as the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, the African Risk Capacity, and the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative. These programs are subsidized by wealthy nations and other donors and allow countries in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific to secure coverage for disasters such as drought, flooding, and hurricanes. 

These sorts of insurance can be purchased by governments to protect their people against disasters, and by individuals to protect their property. Premiums are typically subsidized to make them affordable. There are two main types of climate disaster insurance: indemnity insurance and parametric insurance. The former involves purchasing policies that cover specific perils over specific periods of time and are paid out depending on the scale of losses when a disaster strikes. These are similar to the insurance policies purchased by U.S. homeowners.

In the case of parametric insurance, on the other hand, insurers identify specific climatic conditions that trigger payouts to policyholders. When specific predetermined thresholds describing the level of flooding or drought or other disasters are met, insurers disburse funds no matter the scale of the damage on the ground. The upshot of this is that the long and cumbersome process of filing a claim and verifying the damage is avoided, resulting in quicker payouts. But in countries in the Global South, where historical climatic and environmental data isn’t as readily available, insurers have struggled to define the best parameters — such as wind speed, rainfall, or days without rain — that trigger payouts. As a result, even when an expensive climate-driven disaster strikes, insurers sometimes don’t pay because the parametric thresholds weren’t met.

For example, the government of Malawi paid $4.7 million for drought insurance through the African Risk Capacity for the 2015-2016 agricultural season. But when erratic rains resulted in a prolonged drought and more than $350 million in damages, the insurance program found that the thresholds for the number of people affected by the drought were not met, and that it didn’t trigger a payout. After sustained media coverage and outrage over the decision, the African Risk Capacity eventually reassessed its modeling and provided $8.1 million in payouts — a small fraction of the need. Similarly, after Hurricanes Irma and Maria made landfall on Antigua and Barbuda in 2017 and caused $136 million in economic damage, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility paid out $6.8 million — 5 percent of the damages. 

One research paper that studied the African, Caribbean, and Pacific insurance programs concluded that while “to some extent it is possible to address the weaknesses of parametric risk pooling schemes, it seems equally clear that it is impossible to fully remedy them.” 

According to InsuResilience’s annual report, it has “enabled access to financial protection for over 350 million people in vulnerable countries,” but it’s unclear how the program is counting those who are protected and whether payouts after disasters have met their needs. Singh, the advocate with the Climate Action Network, said the program counts an entire family as protected if one member has insurance for even one of a slew of climate perils.

“The starting point has to be whether people who are being affected are getting adequate support or not,” said Singh. “If they’re not getting it, then whatever we have is inadequate.”

In an emailed statement in response to questions about InsuResilience’s effectiveness, a spokesperson for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development confirmed that the number of policyholders is multiplied by the average household number to calculate beneficiaries. The spokesperson defended the estimate saying that InsuResilience “sets strong qualitative standards” and that the program “ensure[s] that products are indeed fit for purpose to provide effective protection for an entire household.”

Even those working with InsuResilience have been quick to acknowledge its shortcomings. Colin McQuistan, the head of climate resilience at Practical Action, a charity in the U.K., has been helping develop a pilot program in Nepal to insure farmers against flooding in partnership with InsuResilience. The program only protects paddy farmers during the monsoon season, even though rice is just one of multiple crops that farmers in the region cultivate.

“Attempting to suggest that the insurance product is protecting those farmers is ridiculous, because it’s pretty clear it’s only protecting that one crop to that one hazard,” said McQuistan.  

Currently, just 10 percent of the program’s budget can be used to subsidize the insurance premium, but McQuistan hopes that in future years additional government subsidies will lower the cost further. Securing useful climate data for the region has also been a challenge, McQuistan added. The group used rainfall and river flow data for the Karnali River to develop the product, but recently some of the farmers were affected by floods from another nearby river.

“There’s still a lot of work needed to develop the thresholds and triggers for a parametric insurance product in rivers where we don’t have sufficient historical data,” he said. 

Aside from overcoming such technical challenges, the Global Shield’s success will depend on the amount of money that it is able to raise from wealthy nations and other donors. At the press conference, Schulze said the $175 million pledged by Germany was “just a start, a sort of seed money” and that the initiative will “need substantial additional funding over time.”

At a separate press conference, Rachel Cleetus, a policy director at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, said that the scale of funding for the Global Shield “is completely off.”

“Countries are putting money in the millions and the needs, they have admitted, are rising into the billions and trillions,” she said. “[The Global Shield] is not a substitute for a loss and damage finance facility.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Facing a call for climate reparations, wealthy nations propose an insurance scheme on Nov 14, 2022.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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What’s the best way to expand the US electricity grid?

A study by MIT researchers illuminates choices about reliability, cost, and emissions.

Growing energy demand means the U.S. will almost certainly have to expand its electricity grid in coming years. What’s the best way to do this? A new study by MIT researchers examines legislation introduced in Congress and identifies relative tradeoffs involving reliability, cost, and emissions, depending on the proposed approach.The researchers evaluated two policy approaches to expanding the U.S. electricity grid: One would concentrate on regions with more renewable energy sources, and the other would create more interconnections across the country. For instance, some of the best untapped wind-power resources in the U.S. lie in the center of the country, so one type of grid expansion would situate relatively more grid infrastructure in those regions. Alternatively, the other scenario involves building more infrastructure everywhere in roughly equal measure, which the researchers call the “prescriptive” approach. How does each pencil out?After extensive modeling, the researchers found that a grid expansion could make improvements on all fronts, with each approach offering different advantages. A more geographically unbalanced grid buildout would be 1.13 percent less expensive, and would reduce carbon emissions by 3.65 percent compared to the prescriptive approach. And yet, the prescriptive approach, with more national interconnection, would significantly reduce power outages due to extreme weather, among other things.“There’s a tradeoff between the two things that are most on policymakers’ minds: cost and reliability,” says Christopher Knittel, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who helped direct the research. “This study makes it more clear that the more prescriptive approach ends up being better in the face of extreme weather and outages.”The paper, “Implications of Policy-Driven Transmission Expansion on Costs, Emissions and Reliability in the United States,” is published today in Nature Energy.The authors are Juan Ramon L. Senga, a postdoc in the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; Audun Botterud, a principal research scientist in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems; John E. Parson, the deputy director for research at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; Drew Story, the managing director at MIT’s Policy Lab; and Knittel, who is the George P. Schultz Professor at MIT Sloan, and associate dean for climate and sustainability at MIT.The new study is a product of the MIT Climate Policy Center, housed within MIT Sloan and committed to bipartisan research on energy issues. The center is also part of the Climate Project at MIT, founded in 2024 as a high-level Institute effort to develop practical climate solutions.In this case, the project was developed from work the researchers did with federal lawmakers who have introduced legislation aimed at bolstering and expanding the U.S. electric grid. One of these bills, the BIG WIRES Act, co-sponsored by Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Rep. Scott Peters of California, would require each transmission region in the U.S. to be able to send at least 30 percent of its peak load to other regions by 2035.That would represent a substantial change for a national transmission scenario where grids have largely been developed regionally, without an enormous amount of national oversight.“The U.S. grid is aging and it needs an upgrade,” Senga says. “Implementing these kinds of policies is an important step for us to get to that future where we improve the grid, lower costs, lower emissions, and improve reliability. Some progress is better than none, and in this case, it would be important.”To conduct the study, the researchers looked at how policies like the BIG WIRES Act would affect energy distribution. The scholars used a model of energy generation developed at the MIT Energy Initiative — the model is called “Gen X” — and examined the changes proposed by the legislation.With a 30 percent level of interregional connectivity, the study estimates, the number of outages due to extreme cold would drop by 39 percent, for instance, a substantial increase in reliability. That would help avoid scenarios such as the one Texas experienced in 2021, when winter storms damaged distribution capacity.“Reliability is what we find to be most salient to policymakers,” Senga says.On the other hand, as the paper details, a future grid that is “optimized” with more transmission capacity near geographic spots of new energy generation would be less expensive.“On the cost side, this kind of optimized system looks better,” Senga says.A more geographically imbalanced grid would also have a greater impact on reducing emissions. Globally, the levelized cost of wind and solar dropped by 89 percent and 69 percent, respectively, from 2010 to 2022, meaning that incorporating less-expensive renewables into the grid would help with both cost and emissions.“On the emissions side, a priori it’s not clear the optimized system would do better, but it does,” Knittel says. “That’s probably tied to cost, in the sense that it’s building more transmission links to where the good, cheap renewable resources are, because they’re cheap. Emissions fall when you let the optimizing action take place.”To be sure, these two differing approaches to grid expansion are not the only paths forward. The study also examines a hybrid approach, which involves both national interconnectivity requirements and local buildouts based around new power sources on top of that. Still, the model does show that there may be some tradeoffs lawmakers will want to consider when developing and considering future grid legislation.“You can find a balance between these factors, where you’re still going to still have an increase in reliability while also getting the cost and emission reductions,” Senga observes.For his part, Knittel emphasizes that working with legislation as the basis for academic studies, while not generally common, can be productive for everyone involved. Scholars get to apply their research tools and models to real-world scenarios, and policymakers get a sophisticated evaluation of how their proposals would work.“Compared to the typical academic path to publication, this is different, but at the Climate Policy Center, we’re already doing this kind of research,” Knittel says. 

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Nature

UK farmers lose £800m after heat and drought cause one of worst harvests on record

Many now concerned about ability to make living in fast-changing climate after one of worst grain harvests recordedRecord heat and drought cost Britain’s arable farmers more than £800m in lost production in 2025 in one of the worst harvests recorded, analysis has estimated.Three of the five worst harvests on record have now occurred since 2020, leaving some farmers asking whether the growing impacts of the climate crisis are making it too financially risky to sow their crops. Farmers are already facing heavy financial pressure as the costs of fertilisers and other inputs have risen faster than prices. Continue reading...

Record heat and drought cost Britain’s arable farmers more than £800m in lost production in 2025 in one of the worst harvests recorded, analysis has estimated.Three of the five worst harvests on record have now occurred since 2020, leaving some farmers asking whether the growing impacts of the climate crisis are making it too financially risky to sow their crops. Farmers are already facing heavy financial pressure as the costs of fertilisers and other inputs have risen faster than prices.This year Britain had the hottest and driest spring on record, and the hottest summer, with drought conditions widespread. As a result, the production of the five staple arable crops – wheat, oats, spring and winter barley, and oilseed rape – fell by 20% compared with the 10-year average, according to the analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU). The harvest in England was the second-worst in records going back to 1984.Supercharged by global heating, extreme rainfall in the winters of 2019-20 and 2023-24 also led to very poor harvests, as farmers were unable to access waterlogged and flooded fields to drill their crops.“This has been another torrid year for many farmers in the UK, with the pendulum swinging from too wet to too hot and dry,” said Tom Lancaster at the ECIU. “British farmers have once again been left counting the costs of climate change, with four-fifths now concerned about their ability to make a living due to the fast-changing climate.”He added: “There is an urgent need to ensure farmers are better supported to adapt to these climate shocks and build their resilience as the bedrock of our food security. In this context, the delays [by ministers] to the relaunch of vital green farming schemes are the last thing the industry needs.” The sustainable farming incentive was closed in March.Many farmers are struggling to break even and some blame environmental policies, but Lancaster said: “The evidence suggests that climate impacts are what’s actually driving issues of profitability, certainly in the arable sector, as opposed to policy change. Without reaching net zero emission there is no way to limit the impacts making food production in the UK ever more difficult.”David Lord, an arable farmer from Essex, said: “As a farmer, I’m used to taking the rough with the smooth, but recent years have seen near constant extreme rainfall, heat and drought. It’s getting to the point with climate change where I can’t take the risk of investing in a new crop of wheat or barley because the return on that investment is just so uncertain.“Green farming schemes are a vital lifeline for me, helping build my resilience to these shocks whilst providing cashflow to help buffer me financially.”Green farming approaches include planting winter cover crops. These increase resilience by boosting the organic content of soil, meaning it can retain water better during droughts. Cover crops can also help break up compacted soil, allowing it to drain better during wet periods.The ECIU analysis used production data for England published in October and current grain prices and then extrapolated it to the UK as a whole, a method shown to be reliable in previous years. Since 2020, which was the worst harvest on record, lost revenue associated with the impact of extreme weather is now more than £2bn for UK arable farmers. Grain prices are set globally, so low harvests in the UK do not translate in the market to higher prices.The link between worsening extreme weather and global heating is increasingly clear. The Met Office said the UK summer of 2025 was the hottest in more than a century of records and was made 70 times more probable because of the climate crisis. Global heating also made the severe rainfall in the winter storms of 2023-24 about 20% heavier.“This year’s harvest was extremely challenging,” said Jamie Burrows, the chair of the National Farmers’ Union combinable crops board. “Growing crops in the UK isn’t easy due to the unpredictable weather we are seeing more of. Funding is needed for climate adaptation and resilient crop varieties to safeguard our ability to feed the nation.”The price of some foods hit by extreme weather are rising more than four times faster than others in the average shop, the ECIU reported in October. It found the price of butter, beef, milk, coffee and chocolate had risen by an average of 15.6% over the year, compared with 2.8% for other food and drink.Drought in the UK led to poor grass growth, hitting butter and beef production, while extreme heat and rain in west Africa pushed up cocoa prices and droughts in Brazil and Vietnam led to a surge in coffee prices.A spokesperson for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said farmers were stewards of the nation’s food security. “We know there are challenges in the sector and weather extremes have affected harvests,” she said. “We are backing our farmers in the face of a changing climate with the largest nature-friendly farming budget in history to grow their businesses and get more British food on our plates.”

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Realtors just forced Zillow to hide a key piece of information about buying a home. Here’s why

Until recently, when you looked at a house for sale on Zillow, you could see property-specific scores for the risk of flooding, wildfires, wind from storms and hurricanes, extreme heat, and air quality. The numbers came from First Street, a nonprofit that uses peer-reviewed methodologies to calculate “climate risk.” But Zillow recently removed those scores after pressure from CRMLS, one of the large real-estate listing services that supplies its data. “The reality is these models have been around for over five years,” says Matthew Eby, CEO of First Street, which also provides its data to sites like Realtor.com and Redfin. (Zillow started displaying the information in 2024, but Realtor.com incorporated First Street’s “Flood Scores” in 2020.) “And what’s happened is the market’s gotten very tight. And now they’re looking for ways to try and make it easier to sell homes at the expense of homebuyers.” The California Regional MLS, like others across the country, controls the database that feeds real estate listings to sites like Zillow. The organization said in a statement to the New York Times that it was “suspicious” after seeing predictions of high flood risk in areas that hadn’t flooded in the past. When Fast Company asked for an example of a location, they pointed to a neighborhood in Huntington Beach—but that area actually just flooded last week. In a statement, First Street said that it stands behind the accuracy of its scores. “Our models are built on transparent, peer-reviewed science and are continuously validated against real-world outcomes. In the CRMLS coverage area, during the Los Angeles wildfires, our maps identified over 90% of the homes that ultimately burned as being at severe or extreme risk—our highest risk rating—and 100% as having some level of risk, significantly outperforming CalFire’s official state hazard maps. So when claims are made that our models are inaccurate, we ask for evidence. To date, all the empirical validation shows our science is working as designed and providing better risk insight than the tools the industry has relied on historically.” Zillow’s trust in the data has not changed, and that data is important to consumers: In one survey, it saw that more than 80% of buyers considered the data when shopping for a house. But the company said in a statement that it updated its “climate risk product experience to adhere to varying MLS requirements.” It’s not clear exactly what happened: In response to questions for this story, CRMLS now says it only asked Zillow to remove “predictive numbers” and flood map layers on listings, while Zillow says the MLS board voted to demand they block all of the data. It’s also not clear what would have happened if Zillow hadn’t made any changes, though in theory, the MLS could have stopped giving the site access to its listings. Images of Zillow’s climate risk tools from a 2024 press release [Image: Zillow] Zillow still links to First Street’s website in each listing, so homebuyers can access the information, but it’s less easy to find. The site also still includes a map that consumers can use to view overall neighborhood risk, if they take the extra step to click on checkboxes for flooding, fire, or other hazards. But the main scores are gone. Obviously, seeing that a particular house has a high flood risk or fire risk can hurt sales. Nevertheless, after First Street first launched, the National Association of Realtors put out guidance saying that the information was useful—and that since realtors aren’t experts in things like flood risk, they shouldn’t try to tell buyers themselves that a particular house is safe, even if it hasn’t flooded in the past. First Street’s flood data goes further than that of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which uses outdated flood maps. It also incorporates more climate predictions, along with the risk of flooding from heavy rainfall and surface runoff, not just flooding from rivers or the coast. And it includes predictions of small amounts of flooding (for example, whether an inch of water is likely to reach the property). Buyers can dig deeper to figure out how much that amount of flooding might affect a particular house. It’s not surprising that some high risk scores have upset home sellers who haven’t experienced flooding or other problems in the past. But as the climate changes, past experiences don’t guarantee what a property will be like for the next 30 years. Take the example of North Carolina, where some residents hadn’t ever experienced flooding until Hurricane Helene dumped unprecedented rainfall on their neighborhoods. Redfin, another site that uses the data, plans to continue providing it, though sellers have the option to ask for it to be removed from a particular home if they believe it’s inaccurate. (First Street also allows homeowners to ask for their data to be revised if there’s a problem, and then reviews the accuracy.) “Redfin will continue to provide the best-possible estimates of the risks of fires, floods, and storms,” Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather said in a statement. “Homebuyers want to know, because losing a home in a catastrophe is heartbreaking, and insuring against these risks is getting more and more expensive.” Realtor.com is working with CRMLS and data providers to look into the issues raised by the MLS over the scores. “We aim to balance transparency about the evolving environmental risks to what is often a family’s biggest investment, with an understanding that the available data can sometimes be limited,” the company said in a statement. “For this reason we always encourage consumers to consult a local real estate professional for guidance or to learn more. When issues are raised, we work with our data partners to review them and make updates when appropriate.” If more real estate sites take down the scores, it’s likely that some buyers won’t see the information at all. First Street says that while it’s good that Zillow still includes a link to its site, the impact is real. “Whenever you add friction into something, it just is used less,” Eby says. “And so not having that information at the tip of your fingers is definitely going to have an impact on the millions of people that go to Zillow every day to see it.”

Until recently, when you looked at a house for sale on Zillow, you could see property-specific scores for the risk of flooding, wildfires, wind from storms and hurricanes, extreme heat, and air quality. The numbers came from First Street, a nonprofit that uses peer-reviewed methodologies to calculate “climate risk.” But Zillow recently removed those scores after pressure from CRMLS, one of the large real-estate listing services that supplies its data. “The reality is these models have been around for over five years,” says Matthew Eby, CEO of First Street, which also provides its data to sites like Realtor.com and Redfin. (Zillow started displaying the information in 2024, but Realtor.com incorporated First Street’s “Flood Scores” in 2020.) “And what’s happened is the market’s gotten very tight. And now they’re looking for ways to try and make it easier to sell homes at the expense of homebuyers.” The California Regional MLS, like others across the country, controls the database that feeds real estate listings to sites like Zillow. The organization said in a statement to the New York Times that it was “suspicious” after seeing predictions of high flood risk in areas that hadn’t flooded in the past. When Fast Company asked for an example of a location, they pointed to a neighborhood in Huntington Beach—but that area actually just flooded last week. In a statement, First Street said that it stands behind the accuracy of its scores. “Our models are built on transparent, peer-reviewed science and are continuously validated against real-world outcomes. In the CRMLS coverage area, during the Los Angeles wildfires, our maps identified over 90% of the homes that ultimately burned as being at severe or extreme risk—our highest risk rating—and 100% as having some level of risk, significantly outperforming CalFire’s official state hazard maps. So when claims are made that our models are inaccurate, we ask for evidence. To date, all the empirical validation shows our science is working as designed and providing better risk insight than the tools the industry has relied on historically.” Zillow’s trust in the data has not changed, and that data is important to consumers: In one survey, it saw that more than 80% of buyers considered the data when shopping for a house. But the company said in a statement that it updated its “climate risk product experience to adhere to varying MLS requirements.” It’s not clear exactly what happened: In response to questions for this story, CRMLS now says it only asked Zillow to remove “predictive numbers” and flood map layers on listings, while Zillow says the MLS board voted to demand they block all of the data. It’s also not clear what would have happened if Zillow hadn’t made any changes, though in theory, the MLS could have stopped giving the site access to its listings. Images of Zillow’s climate risk tools from a 2024 press release [Image: Zillow] Zillow still links to First Street’s website in each listing, so homebuyers can access the information, but it’s less easy to find. The site also still includes a map that consumers can use to view overall neighborhood risk, if they take the extra step to click on checkboxes for flooding, fire, or other hazards. But the main scores are gone. Obviously, seeing that a particular house has a high flood risk or fire risk can hurt sales. Nevertheless, after First Street first launched, the National Association of Realtors put out guidance saying that the information was useful—and that since realtors aren’t experts in things like flood risk, they shouldn’t try to tell buyers themselves that a particular house is safe, even if it hasn’t flooded in the past. First Street’s flood data goes further than that of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which uses outdated flood maps. It also incorporates more climate predictions, along with the risk of flooding from heavy rainfall and surface runoff, not just flooding from rivers or the coast. And it includes predictions of small amounts of flooding (for example, whether an inch of water is likely to reach the property). Buyers can dig deeper to figure out how much that amount of flooding might affect a particular house. It’s not surprising that some high risk scores have upset home sellers who haven’t experienced flooding or other problems in the past. But as the climate changes, past experiences don’t guarantee what a property will be like for the next 30 years. Take the example of North Carolina, where some residents hadn’t ever experienced flooding until Hurricane Helene dumped unprecedented rainfall on their neighborhoods. Redfin, another site that uses the data, plans to continue providing it, though sellers have the option to ask for it to be removed from a particular home if they believe it’s inaccurate. (First Street also allows homeowners to ask for their data to be revised if there’s a problem, and then reviews the accuracy.) “Redfin will continue to provide the best-possible estimates of the risks of fires, floods, and storms,” Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather said in a statement. “Homebuyers want to know, because losing a home in a catastrophe is heartbreaking, and insuring against these risks is getting more and more expensive.” Realtor.com is working with CRMLS and data providers to look into the issues raised by the MLS over the scores. “We aim to balance transparency about the evolving environmental risks to what is often a family’s biggest investment, with an understanding that the available data can sometimes be limited,” the company said in a statement. “For this reason we always encourage consumers to consult a local real estate professional for guidance or to learn more. When issues are raised, we work with our data partners to review them and make updates when appropriate.” If more real estate sites take down the scores, it’s likely that some buyers won’t see the information at all. First Street says that while it’s good that Zillow still includes a link to its site, the impact is real. “Whenever you add friction into something, it just is used less,” Eby says. “And so not having that information at the tip of your fingers is definitely going to have an impact on the millions of people that go to Zillow every day to see it.”

Climate
Science
Water

Researchers Slightly Lower Study's Estimate of Drop in Global Income Due to Climate Change

Researchers who examined climate change’s potential effect on the global economy say data errors led them to slightly overstate an expected drop in income over the next 25 years

The authors of a study that examined climate change's potential effect on the global economy said Wednesday that data errors led them to slightly overstate an expected drop in income over the next 25 years.The researchers at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, writing in the journal Nature in 2024, had forecast a 19% drop in global income by 2050. Their revised analysis puts the figure at 17%.The authors also said in their original work that there was a 99% chance that, by midcentury, it would cost more to fix damage from climate change than it would cost to build resilience. Their new analysis, not yet peer-reviewed, lowered that figure to 91%.The Associated Press reported on the original study. Nature posted a retraction of it Wednesday.The researchers cited data inaccuracies in the first paper, particularly with underlying economic data for Uzbekistan between 1995 and 1999 that had a large influence on the results, and that their analysis had underestimated statistical uncertainty.Max Kotz, one of the study’s authors, told the AP that the heart of the study is unchanged: Climate change will be enormously damaging to the world economy if unchecked, and that the impact will hit hardest in the lowest-income areas that contribute the fewest emissions driving the planet's warming. Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School who wasn't involved with the research, said the thrust of the Potsdam Institute's work remains the same “no matter which part of the range the true figure will be.”“Climate change already hits home, quite literally. Home insurance premiums across the U.S. have already seen, in part, a doubling over the past decade alone,” Wagner said. “Rapidly accumulating climate risks will only make the numbers go up even more.”The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Nov. 2025

Climate
Business
Nature

Climate Change Is Killing the Myth of Los Angeles

I once lived in an apartment in Los Angeles that flooded every time it rained. Not just a polite drip, either. The ceiling sagged and dripped into long wet ribbons, and the wall beside my desk would bleed water like I was playing out Barton Fink in color. I wonder how that space looks now, as Southern California comes out of a long rain event where the hills above Altadena saw nearly nine inches at the site of January’s Eaton fire, between November 14 and November 21. People love to talk about tanned and toned Dallas Raines, the veteran KABC meteorologist who can summon high drama from a passing low-pressure system. Or the obligatory SUV hydroplaning down the 5 Freeway. In L.A., weather banter is its own civic dialect. We rarely admit how fragile the physical city really is, and how the very places that frame our daily lives—the courtyard where you catch the first blue of morning, the balcony where you watch the hills smolder at golden hour—can start to fail the moment the skies decide to turn. Everything here is built for one type of weather. And most of the time it works. But when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t work. L.A. has spent over a century advertising its perfect Mediterranean climate. Now increasingly frequent severe weather events are triggering citywide soul-searching about who deserves protection, what neighborhoods get resources, which elected officials are to blame, and whether the promise of this place still holds. Some parts of L.A. County picked up close to a foot of rain in 10 days in February 2023, leaving more than 80,000 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers without power, while unhoused residents faced flooded encampments, freezing nights, and packed shelters. Almost exactly a year later, emergency crews pulled a pregnant, unhoused woman from a storm drain above a raging river. The January 2025 fires in the Palisades and Altadena further exposed the gap between the city we imagine and the one we actually live in. What happens when a city built on the mythology of sublime weather has to finally face how to live with a climate that refuses to stay in line?The Los Angeles myth goes back more than a century: Between the 1880s and the 1920s, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce mailed millions of pamphlets eastward, selling Midwestern families on a kingdom of eternal spring. Sunkist built a national brand on winter oranges ripening while Chicago froze. Railroads sponsored booster fiction and postcards promising a life where weather was not an obstacle but an asset. In the dead of winter, “[you could] have a small, five-acre citrus farm and do really well and then hop on the streetcar and go to the beach for the day,” said professor Char Miller, a historian and environmental analysis scholar at Pomona College.Miller has spent decades tracing how this mythology ossified. While the pitch obscured who paid the price—Indigenous communities pushed off their land, Chinese and Japanese residents marginalized or excluded—the promise endured in part because the landscape helped carry it. But for all the valleys, deserts, and coastlines, there were also floods, fires, earthquakes, and landslides: hazards only mentioned in the fine print. There’s an old line Miller heard during his early days on the West Coast in the 1970s: “California is 90 percent paradise, 10 percent apocalypse.” It was something people once said with a kind of wry affection, the same sensibility baked into disaster films that love to see Los Angeles perpetually destroyed. It was the myth of a place that could always be rebuilt, where catastrophe was fleeting and bounty would always return. But that ratio, Miller says, is shifting, leaning more toward calamity. It was nearly midnight in New York when my phone lit up. A friend in Los Angeles was calling to ask if I wanted him to move anything out of my apartment, which had just fallen under an evacuation order while I was back East. Earlier that afternoon, on January 8, West Hollywood had been in the mid-70s—bone-dry, humidity in the 20s. The kind of day that feels ominous if you’ve lived here long enough to know what those numbers mean. By nightfall, another fire was creeping toward Runyon Canyon, the hiking trail so quintessentially L.A. it sometimes has a valet. In the weeks that followed the January fires, the political blame game was relentless. Some went after Mayor Bass, others after Governor Newsom. But the fury felt like a way to avoid the harder truth of a city playing dumb about its own new climate reality.Even while the January fires were still burning, city and state leaders promised to rebuild immediately, suspending regulations that might have slowed development in the very zones that were incinerated. “What that did was to take off the table any kind of transformation that might have slowed down the very things that that fire consumed, which is rapid growth up into fire zones,” Miller said. A recent CalMatters analysis found that nearly four million people in Southern California are living in such hazardous zones.Climate scientist Daniel Swain told me that despite all the finger-pointing after the January fires, the forecast wasn’t the problem. Meteorologists had issued “crystal clear warnings” days ahead of time. The real issue, he suggested, is that Los Angeles still treats climate disasters as if they can be willed away, as if better heroics in the moment could out-muscle physics. “We can’t expect to have a firefighting force that can magically overcome hurricane-force winds amid record dry conditions producing a blizzard of embers in the suburbs,” Swain said. “You just can’t fight that in the moment.”The deeper problem is structural. Southern California is one of the most fire-prone landscapes in the country, and millions now live in or immediately downwind of terrain primed to burn. Many neighborhoods haven’t seen major fire in decades, which feeds the illusion of safety. But growth has pushed suburbs further into the wildland-urban interface just as warming has lengthened fire season, increasing the chances that a Santa Ana wind event arrives when vegetation is crisp and unrecoverably dry. Most years won’t align as catastrophically as January did, Swain noted, but when they do the math is unforgiving.Work has to happen long before the flames arrive. Swain pointed to neighborhoods where community groups had already tackled vegetation management, replaced vulnerable vents, or cleared brush from wooden fences. Those blocks didn’t just fare slightly better, but some avoided becoming ignition points entirely. Fire resilience, he emphasized, is cumulative; every house that doesn’t burn is one less launching pad for embers to race downwind.The fixes aren’t always grand or expensive. Sometimes it’s a few hundred dollars for finer mesh vents that stop embers from blowing into attics. Sometimes it’s ripping out head-high brush along a property line. Sometimes it’s insisting that new construction in fire zones meet tougher standards or retrofitting homes that were built for a climate that no longer exists.Swain sees the January fires as a preview of what strong Santa Ana events will look like going forward. Historically, many of the strongest Santa Ana events came after at least some winter rain. Now that rain is arriving later, meaning more wind events strike when the hills are still crisped from autumn, as was the case in January. But the problem in Los Angeles isn’t just meteorological: It is political, infrastructural, and deeply cultural. Miller likes to point to other parts of the country that faced similar crossroads and chose differently. After catastrophic floods in 1998, San Antonio bought out homeowners in riparian zones rather than sending them back into danger. Houston did something similar after Hurricane Harvey. These weren’t mass seizures or punitive acts; they were buyouts at market rate, voluntary and forward-looking. “What if,” Miller wondered, “you went to people who were burned out in Altadena and the Palisades and said, ‘We’re going to pay you not to rebuild’?” It’s a planner’s maxim—build up, not out—but in Southern California, the political will rarely matches the topographic reality.And yet, amid the devastation, there were signs of another kind of civic instinct. In Altadena, neighbors organized mutual aid networks at local businesses like Octavia’s Bookshelf and Bike Oven, and community leaders helped residents navigate insurance, microloans, and temporary housing. New nonprofits sprang up to support people psychologically and financially. Miller is skeptical of rebuilding policy, but he’s quick to note the human creativity that emerged in the fire’s wake—a kind of grassroots adaptation that government hasn’t yet matched.In May, Miller remembers stepping off a plane at LAX behind someone wearing a leather jacket with two mottos curved across the back: “Never forget” on top, “Rebuild Altadena” on the bottom. “I think the bottom circle erases the top,” Miller said. “If you rebuild, you have already forgotten because you are not paying attention to what happened and why it happened.”

I once lived in an apartment in Los Angeles that flooded every time it rained. Not just a polite drip, either. The ceiling sagged and dripped into long wet ribbons, and the wall beside my desk would bleed water like I was playing out Barton Fink in color. I wonder how that space looks now, as Southern California comes out of a long rain event where the hills above Altadena saw nearly nine inches at the site of January’s Eaton fire, between November 14 and November 21. People love to talk about tanned and toned Dallas Raines, the veteran KABC meteorologist who can summon high drama from a passing low-pressure system. Or the obligatory SUV hydroplaning down the 5 Freeway. In L.A., weather banter is its own civic dialect. We rarely admit how fragile the physical city really is, and how the very places that frame our daily lives—the courtyard where you catch the first blue of morning, the balcony where you watch the hills smolder at golden hour—can start to fail the moment the skies decide to turn. Everything here is built for one type of weather. And most of the time it works. But when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t work. L.A. has spent over a century advertising its perfect Mediterranean climate. Now increasingly frequent severe weather events are triggering citywide soul-searching about who deserves protection, what neighborhoods get resources, which elected officials are to blame, and whether the promise of this place still holds. Some parts of L.A. County picked up close to a foot of rain in 10 days in February 2023, leaving more than 80,000 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers without power, while unhoused residents faced flooded encampments, freezing nights, and packed shelters. Almost exactly a year later, emergency crews pulled a pregnant, unhoused woman from a storm drain above a raging river. The January 2025 fires in the Palisades and Altadena further exposed the gap between the city we imagine and the one we actually live in. What happens when a city built on the mythology of sublime weather has to finally face how to live with a climate that refuses to stay in line?The Los Angeles myth goes back more than a century: Between the 1880s and the 1920s, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce mailed millions of pamphlets eastward, selling Midwestern families on a kingdom of eternal spring. Sunkist built a national brand on winter oranges ripening while Chicago froze. Railroads sponsored booster fiction and postcards promising a life where weather was not an obstacle but an asset. In the dead of winter, “[you could] have a small, five-acre citrus farm and do really well and then hop on the streetcar and go to the beach for the day,” said professor Char Miller, a historian and environmental analysis scholar at Pomona College.Miller has spent decades tracing how this mythology ossified. While the pitch obscured who paid the price—Indigenous communities pushed off their land, Chinese and Japanese residents marginalized or excluded—the promise endured in part because the landscape helped carry it. But for all the valleys, deserts, and coastlines, there were also floods, fires, earthquakes, and landslides: hazards only mentioned in the fine print. There’s an old line Miller heard during his early days on the West Coast in the 1970s: “California is 90 percent paradise, 10 percent apocalypse.” It was something people once said with a kind of wry affection, the same sensibility baked into disaster films that love to see Los Angeles perpetually destroyed. It was the myth of a place that could always be rebuilt, where catastrophe was fleeting and bounty would always return. But that ratio, Miller says, is shifting, leaning more toward calamity. It was nearly midnight in New York when my phone lit up. A friend in Los Angeles was calling to ask if I wanted him to move anything out of my apartment, which had just fallen under an evacuation order while I was back East. Earlier that afternoon, on January 8, West Hollywood had been in the mid-70s—bone-dry, humidity in the 20s. The kind of day that feels ominous if you’ve lived here long enough to know what those numbers mean. By nightfall, another fire was creeping toward Runyon Canyon, the hiking trail so quintessentially L.A. it sometimes has a valet. In the weeks that followed the January fires, the political blame game was relentless. Some went after Mayor Bass, others after Governor Newsom. But the fury felt like a way to avoid the harder truth of a city playing dumb about its own new climate reality.Even while the January fires were still burning, city and state leaders promised to rebuild immediately, suspending regulations that might have slowed development in the very zones that were incinerated. “What that did was to take off the table any kind of transformation that might have slowed down the very things that that fire consumed, which is rapid growth up into fire zones,” Miller said. A recent CalMatters analysis found that nearly four million people in Southern California are living in such hazardous zones.Climate scientist Daniel Swain told me that despite all the finger-pointing after the January fires, the forecast wasn’t the problem. Meteorologists had issued “crystal clear warnings” days ahead of time. The real issue, he suggested, is that Los Angeles still treats climate disasters as if they can be willed away, as if better heroics in the moment could out-muscle physics. “We can’t expect to have a firefighting force that can magically overcome hurricane-force winds amid record dry conditions producing a blizzard of embers in the suburbs,” Swain said. “You just can’t fight that in the moment.”The deeper problem is structural. Southern California is one of the most fire-prone landscapes in the country, and millions now live in or immediately downwind of terrain primed to burn. Many neighborhoods haven’t seen major fire in decades, which feeds the illusion of safety. But growth has pushed suburbs further into the wildland-urban interface just as warming has lengthened fire season, increasing the chances that a Santa Ana wind event arrives when vegetation is crisp and unrecoverably dry. Most years won’t align as catastrophically as January did, Swain noted, but when they do the math is unforgiving.Work has to happen long before the flames arrive. Swain pointed to neighborhoods where community groups had already tackled vegetation management, replaced vulnerable vents, or cleared brush from wooden fences. Those blocks didn’t just fare slightly better, but some avoided becoming ignition points entirely. Fire resilience, he emphasized, is cumulative; every house that doesn’t burn is one less launching pad for embers to race downwind.The fixes aren’t always grand or expensive. Sometimes it’s a few hundred dollars for finer mesh vents that stop embers from blowing into attics. Sometimes it’s ripping out head-high brush along a property line. Sometimes it’s insisting that new construction in fire zones meet tougher standards or retrofitting homes that were built for a climate that no longer exists.Swain sees the January fires as a preview of what strong Santa Ana events will look like going forward. Historically, many of the strongest Santa Ana events came after at least some winter rain. Now that rain is arriving later, meaning more wind events strike when the hills are still crisped from autumn, as was the case in January. But the problem in Los Angeles isn’t just meteorological: It is political, infrastructural, and deeply cultural. Miller likes to point to other parts of the country that faced similar crossroads and chose differently. After catastrophic floods in 1998, San Antonio bought out homeowners in riparian zones rather than sending them back into danger. Houston did something similar after Hurricane Harvey. These weren’t mass seizures or punitive acts; they were buyouts at market rate, voluntary and forward-looking. “What if,” Miller wondered, “you went to people who were burned out in Altadena and the Palisades and said, ‘We’re going to pay you not to rebuild’?” It’s a planner’s maxim—build up, not out—but in Southern California, the political will rarely matches the topographic reality.And yet, amid the devastation, there were signs of another kind of civic instinct. In Altadena, neighbors organized mutual aid networks at local businesses like Octavia’s Bookshelf and Bike Oven, and community leaders helped residents navigate insurance, microloans, and temporary housing. New nonprofits sprang up to support people psychologically and financially. Miller is skeptical of rebuilding policy, but he’s quick to note the human creativity that emerged in the fire’s wake—a kind of grassroots adaptation that government hasn’t yet matched.In May, Miller remembers stepping off a plane at LAX behind someone wearing a leather jacket with two mottos curved across the back: “Never forget” on top, “Rebuild Altadena” on the bottom. “I think the bottom circle erases the top,” Miller said. “If you rebuild, you have already forgotten because you are not paying attention to what happened and why it happened.”

Climate
Business
Indigenous

Suggested Viewing

Sounding the Alarm ~ America's Climate Crisis

"It's really hard being a fire family. Every day it's getting worse." -Brett, wife of Marin County Battalion Chief in California.Every day, Americans who live close to the land and sea face the dangers of climate change—from a firefighter in California, to a beekeeper in Arizona, to a climate refugee losing her home in Florida. The changing climate affects our food systems, water and way of life. These American families are in the trenches sacrificing everything while facing depression, PTSD, and suicide—collateral damage of a crisis unchecked. Award-winning filmmaker, Peter Goetz, captures America's faces and voices, shot in 2020 leading up to the presidential election. Goetz and the Biden campaign made history, producing the first national climate spot to run during a presidential election. But this film dives deeper into the American climate crisis to explore the lives of the people who are sounding the alarm, worried about their grandchildren’s future, asking, "If not us, then who?" This is a story of the resilience, perseverance, and ingenuity of the American people. Ever hopeful, they collectively take on a common enemy. As the young, Navajo solar visionary Brett Issac insists, "We've got to turn this train around before it's too late."

Climate
Crisis
Government

Reboot

Humans have exploited Earth to the point where it is no longer possible to live on it. Their only option is to relocate to Mars. When the last group of people has boarded the spaceship for the red planet, the Earth can finally breathe easy. Like an expressionist painting, Reboot depicts a world in which the absence of our species is the only chance nature has to recover its lushness and flourish once more.

Animation
Crisis
Cosmos

A Whale's Worth

The Canary Islands are a whale Paradise. Their waters hold more than a third of the world’s species, making it the most important enclave in the European Union, and one of the most relevant globally.Today, this paradise is being threatened by different human pressures, such as boat collisions, plastic consumption and climate change. This struggle aggravates their mortality each year and makes us face ourselves as the ones responsible for their survival, forcing us to rethink how much we value these animals currently.How much is a whale worth? Can you put a price on the life of such a majestic animal? How can we estimate that value? How has the value that human beings give to whales changed throughout history? What are whales used and needed for?To answer all these questions, Natacha Aguilar, an eminent Canarian scientist and whale expert, backed up by a group of scientists and non-profit organizations, will guide us in a spectacular journey through time and space to discover the never-told stories of the lives of these animals.

Animals
Culture
Climate

Voices of Transition

Voices of Transition is an enthusiastic documentary on farmer- and community-led responses to food insecurity in a scenario of climate change, peak oil, and economic crisis. Concrete examples from Cuba, France, and the United Kingdom tell of a future society where our monoculture deserts will be restored to living soil, where fields will be introduced into our cities, and where independence from oil will help us live a richer, more fulfilling life.

Agriculture
Food
Climate

Saving Jaguars and Ourselves

This feature film has already won 3 top awards: Best Environment and Climate Feature, Semi-Finalist, and Quarter-Finalist. Are you ready for an adventure out on the rivers of the Pantanal Wetland, south of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil? Here we spot wild jaguars like Medrosa and her cubs, giant river otters, and giant storks, while hearing harrowing memories from locals Elizeu, Eduarda, and zoologist Abbie about the climate change fires they have been fighting for 4 years due to severe climate droughts that threaten to destroy this exquisitely beautiful area and the Earth we live on. The Amazon Rainforest is struggling to survive. It affects the global climate. The Pantanal cannot survive without the Amazon and neither can we. We discover that saving jaguars is also saving ourselves and in the process, we discover real solutions and actions that will help save us all. The cinematography and wildlife in this film is described by professionals as stunning, amazing. The Pantanal is the only place in the world where wild jaguars live peacefully with people through ecotourism. These jaguars are known individually by name thanks to the work of Abbie Martin of the Jaguar Identification Project and citizen science efforts of the local community. They are identified by their individual rosette spot patterns. This film includes examples of human--jaguar interaction and communities safely living in close proximity with jaguars. The Pantanal has 5,000 species of wildlife, and is the world's largest wetland, bigger than Florida. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres describes the extreme urgency of addressing climate change. Al Gore explains that we have everything we need to solve climate change. What is lacking is political will. This film is includes many practical solutions that everyday people can do to address climate change!

Solutions
Animals
Climate

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