Union of Concerned Scientists Global Warming

Over the past few weeks, many large wildfires have broken out across the Western United States and Canada, forcing thousands of people to evacuate. Hotter, drier conditions driven by climate change are a significant underlying factor in this trend toward larger wildfires and longer, more intense wildfire seasons in the West. And with more people and property located in close proximity to wildfire-prone terrain, the risks and costs are mounting as the erratic and extreme behavior of these fires has grown much more difficult to fight.

Wildfires raging across the West

The largest wildfire in the U.S. right now—the Durkee Fire—is raging in Oregon, while the Park Fire, California’s largest so far this year, is spreading quickly. A large fire in Jasper National Park in Canada has burnt down half the town of Jasper. The map of wildfires today shows an alarmingly active wildfire season underway. The national preparedness level for wildfires is now at the highest level of 5. Current maps also show that smoke from these wildfires is being carried hundreds of miles away to the East Coast.

Source: https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/maps

And that map is matched by sobering statistics for the wildfire season to date.  

The wildfire outlook for August and September looks grim too.

Climate change is fueling a dangerous new wildfire regime

Wildfires have always been an essential feature of the Western landscape and ecosystems. But with climate change, we are in a new regime of catastrophic large wildfires. In addition, decades of aggressive fire suppression and a large swath of trees dead or damaged due to drought and bark beetle infestations has created a tinderbox of ignitable fuel. Alternating cycles of heavy rainfall, which cause grasses to grow, followed by intense hot, dry periods when that vegetation dries up, add to the combustible mix.

This year, even though parts of the West experienced heavy rainfall earlier in the year, they entered the summer in varying degrees of drought and rainfall deficit. And then last month’s intense heatwaves triggered a rapid loss of moisture and drying of vegetation, a phenomenon sometimes called ‘flash drought.’ In particular, the heatwaves have resulted in an increase in vapor pressure deficit (or VPD), which scientists have shown tends to correlate with wildfire burned area on long time scales.

With these background conditions, when human causes or lightning ignite fires, they have an incredible amount of fuel to feed off and grow quickly, as we are seeing in California, Oregon, and Washington. Conditions in Oregon are so extreme that the fires are causing their own weather systems.

And as if wildfires aren’t damaging enough, New Mexico has experienced yet another terrible danger: landscapes denuded by past wildfires experienced heavy rainfall this year, triggering devastating flash floods. The small town of Ruidoso and the Mescalero Apache Reservation have been particularly harshly affected.  

None of this is normal. And it is projected to worsen as our climate warms further. We cannot lose sight of the fact that the extreme conditions we see today are a direct result of burning fossil fuels. Decades of deliberate deception and obstruction of climate action by fossil fuel companies, coupled with insufficient action by policymakers, are to blame for the continued expansion of fossil fuels, still rising heat-trapping emissions, and mounting damages to people, ecosystems and the economy.

People, homes, and critical infrastructure in harm’s way

Development patterns—including sprawl, the high cost of housing in urban areas, and the desirability of living in proximity to forests—are pushing more people and property into harm’s way. Those living near wildfire-prone areas are experiencing firsthand the dangers and costs of changing wildfire patterns. This season’s wildfires have already burned hundreds of homes and structures, forced thousands to flee, forced road closures, damaged critical infrastructure like drinking water systems, and forced power safety shutdowns.

In many places, people are also finding it harder to insure their homes as insurers drop policies, raise rates, or exit markets entirely.

Wildland firefighters are also facing the punishing task of trying to put out large wildfires across lengthy, active fire seasons. Fighting fires in populated areas with many homes can be even more dangerous as there is less space to maneuver safely, and the stakes for protecting lives are high. Year after year, the physical and mental toll is immense and fire fighters are not getting paid fairly for this daunting work, raising the urgency of the passage of a bipartisan bill to help fix this situation.

And it’s not just people right near the fires who are affected—smoke from wildfires is carried hundreds of miles away, and the worsening air quality is a serious public health threat. This image from NASA shows how far east the smoke from the western wildfires has reached already, which mirrors trends from last year.

Source: NASA Earth Observatory Need for action now

The extent of wildfires burning across the West right now is terrifying. The impacts on people and ecosystems are sobering and heartbreaking to contemplate.

The immediate imperative is of course to make sure that people can quickly evacuate out of the path of dangerous wildfires. Immediately heeding the warnings of local emergency authorities is crucial. Better tools and data for prediction, detection and early warning systems—provided for free and made widely available—can all help make this process more effective and safer. California’s Wildfire Smoke and Health Outcomes Data Act is an important example of this type of effort.

Other protective actions—such as building homes with more fire-safe materials; keeping open, vegetation-free defensible space around homes and communities; ensuring proximity to emergency evacuation routes and water supplies; and ensuring a system of checking on neighbors who may be mobility-impaired—are important ways to keep people safe.

In places affected by wildfire smoke, paying attention to air quality alerts and staying indoors and investing in air purifiers can help. Those who are especially susceptible to the ill effects of wildfire smoke, including young children, elderly people, and those with preexisting breathing or heart ailments, need to take special care. UCS also supports two additional California bills that can help mitigate the public health impacts of wildfires.

Outdoor workers, including those who work on farms and in construction, must be protected by their employers from smoke inhalation. Unfortunately, there is still no federal wildfire smoke safety standard, leaving workers dependent on an insufficient patchwork of state-level measures (such as Oregon’s and California’s). FEMA must also move to clarify that wildfire smoke (and extreme heat) do qualify for disaster declarations, as already allowed under law.

Proactive measures to limit the risks and costs of wildfires—such as healthy forest management practices, including controlled burns done with strong safety and ecological standards; changes to land use development and zoning; and robust investments in technology, equipment and resources to keep firefighters safe—must all be part of the solution set that policymakers act on. Adopting the suite of recommendations of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission would be a huge step forward.

After disastrous wildfires, people need help to get back on their feet. Past fire seasons have shown how difficult that can be. When homes and essential infrastructure are destroyed, when places are repeatedly burnt by wildfires, residents may not be able to return to their communities for extended periods. Some may never be able to return.

Policymakers must ensure that disaster aid flows fast to those who need it most, including by quickly appropriating emergency funding, as needed, and by permanently authorizing HUD’s community development block grant disaster relief (CDBG-DR) program to ensure equitable access to resources to rebuild. Over the longer term, investments in receiving communities—including in jobs, schools, affordable housing, and other infrastructure—can ensure people who are displaced can find welcoming places to begin to rebuild their lives. Access to mental health services, both for affected communities and for firefighters, is also very important.

Finally, deep cuts in heat-trapping emissions are essential to limit future climate change, one of the biggest contributors to the dangerous new wildfire regime we are in already. Holding fossil fuel companies accountable for their role in causing these harms must be part of how we start to address them. Right now, people on the frontlines of wildfires, firefighters, and taxpayers are bearing the health costs and footing the bill for harms that are directly attributable to these companies.

As another ‘Danger Season’ reaches its midpoint, the steep toll of wildfires and other climate impacts is another urgent reminder that policymakers must act boldly and decisively now to limit the worst impacts of climate change, and help ensure that communities around the nation are better prepared for the crisis that is already here.

The Summer Olympics are upon us, and I for one can’t wait to watch all the action as athletes from around the world descend on Paris to chase gold for their countries. The Olympics have been one of my favorite sporting events for as long as I can remember, and a younger version of myself dreamed of making the Olympics track and field team.

In my small hometown in Kansas, I was once the fastest kid in my class…of 45 people. Nowadays, I’m relegated to running around the woods where I live in East Tennessee, in my highlighter yellow swim cap, chasing glory in the local Swim-Run. I did pretty well a few weeks ago, but damn, was it hot! So hot that I had to stop running a few times to catch my breath, asking, “was it this hot the last time I did this?”

Well, turns out it wasn’t and, given the pace at which our planet is warming, it’s not likely to get much cooler any time soon.

Brady Watson running in a Swim-Run race, June 2024. Source: Chris Gerard.

Now, you’re probably asking yourself what in the world all this has to do with the Olympics? Well, I may not be an Olympic athlete, but I can certainly attest to how nice it is to go into an air-conditioned room after a hot day outside. Unfortunately, for some Olympians at this year’s Summer Olympics, they will not have that option.

While Paris officials aren’t providing air conditioning, some countries are bringing their own for their athletes. As you may have guessed, it’s the wealthy ones, including the US, Canada, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Greece, Denmark, and Australia. So, while the athletes of these wealthy nations will be able to cool off after a workout, as they are accustomed to, athletes from other countries who aren’t able to afford their own air conditioning will be forced to sweat it out, creating a potentially unfair advantage for the haves vs the have-nots.

It’s hard to fault the Paris organizers for their intentions. “I want the Paris Games to be exemplary from an environmental point of view,” said Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo in the leadup to the games. A part of the organizing committee’s goal is to cut emissions at this Olympics and make Paris the most sustainable games to date. Instead of air conditioning, the organizers have installed a system of water pipes that will run cooled water throughout the Athlete’s Village and should keep the rooms cool, between 73 and 79 degrees Fahrenheit with fans. That doesn’t sound too bad, but it will differ from the training conditions of many of the competitors, and it promises to create inequities that may unequally impact the performance of the athletes—not to mention the health risks that come from the heat of summer. In fact, last year, more than 5,000 people died in France as a result of the extreme heat wave that gripped the continent.

Of course, this also raises questions about the energy consumption from the additional air conditioning units. If wealthy countries just bring their own units to plug into individual athlete’s rooms, the added energy pulled from the grid threatens to negate at least some of the emissions reductions that Paris organizers were hoping to achieve in the first place.

What is happening at the Olympics resembles broader global trends: Wealthy countries and individuals are more likely to be able to afford things, like air conditioning, to keep cool during ever-increasing climate change-fueled extreme heat events, while poorer countries and individuals are often forced to bear the brunt of our warming world with fewer resources to keep cool.

The increase in air conditioning use also drives up energy consumption, which impacts emissions on a broader scale. More efficient heat pumps offer one solution, but we must also work to clean up the grid so that the power running them isn’t adding to our emissions problem. Fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their products were contributing to climate change, including in the power sector. Take action today to help hold them accountable.

As you tune into the Olympics, keep an eye on the air conditioners in Paris and which countries perform the best. Here at UCS we’ll keep an eye on the sustainability outcomes of the games to see if the organizers’ plans to cut emissions worked or came up short of the finish line.

And, if you’re out doing your own version of the Olympics like me, be sure to stay hydrated and don’t get too thirsty, my friends.

I didn’t walk into the movie theater last week, popcorn in hand, expecting Twisters, a summertime action movie about “taming” tornadoes, to be a movie about climate change. And to be clear, at no point did Twisters actually mention climate change. But beneath the cowboy hats, the quotable one-liners, and the impressive special effects, the film mirrors two climate change realities:

1. Communities are deeply unprepared for worsening extreme weather; and
2. There is a growing industry attempting to use data to profit from the risks and consequences those very communities face.

Sure, I left the theater having been entertained. But I also left feeling deeply unsettled. Here’s what Twisters has me thinking about.

The connections between climate change and tornadoes are complicated

Unlike other types of extreme weather, such as heat waves and hurricanes, the influence of climate change on tornado activity is unclear. That’s in part because there are a number of challenges to studying tornadoes. They’re small in scale relative to hurricanes, for example, which means they’re more difficult to detect in observational records. They’re more difficult to simulate in climate models because there are a number of different factors—such as high wind shear and the presence of warm, moist air—that have to come together for a tornado to form. And there is a lot of variability in the number of tornadoes from year to year.

But recent studies suggest that patterns of tornado activity—if not the annual average number of tornadoes—have changed over the last several decades. These changes, summarized by NOAA in the graphic below include:

• An increase in the number of tornado outbreaks with a high number of tornadoes
• An increase in the number of tornadoes in the fall and winter
• A decrease in the number of tornadoes in the summer
• A decrease in the number of tornado days per year
• An increase in the average number of tornadoes occurring on tornado days
• An eastward shift in the region in which tornadoes often occur

But climate change is also increasing the likelihood of conditions that are conducive to tornado formation. Perhaps most importantly, climate change increases the likelihood of high temperatures as well as the amount of moisture in the air.

So when, in Twisters, the protagonist’s mother says something to the effect of, “It seems we’re getting more and more of these storms and floods,” the writers could not have simply inserted a reply such as, “You’re right, Mom, and what you’ve witnessed is backed up by a Dodge Ram-sized trove of climate data.”

But they could have written any number of other replies, and it might have planted a little seed in moviegoer’s minds to grow into a post-viewing conversation.

Over the last several decades, patterns of tornado activity in the United States have been changing, but it is unclear how these changes are connected to climate change. Source: NOAA, 2023. A missed opportunity to get people talking about climate resilience

A movie about extreme weather that gets rolled out in thousands of theaters at the height of Danger Season but doesn’t mention climate change is a missed opportunity to get people thinking and talking about climate change. (But here you are reading this, so maybe a movie doesn’t have to explicitly mention climate change to get people engaged?)

Opinion polling shows that while nearly three-quarters of US adults think global warming is happening, only about one-third of adults discuss climate change at least occasionally or hear about it in the media on a weekly basis. Add to this the decades-long greenwashing campaigns companies like BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron have waged, and the result is that the public ranks dealing with climate change as one of the nation’s lowest policy priorities.

Fossil fuel industry deception and policymaker inaction have inhibited progress on climate change for decades, and until it becomes something people are regularly discussing and demanding action on, it’s difficult to see that changing. So every movie, every TV show, every book, magazine, and newspaper article about extreme weather should be an opportunity to get people talking.

“Taming” tornadoes is a fantasy; building resilience to them is not.

In Twisters, the protagonist’s main goal is to save lives, homes, and communities by “taming” tornadoes, which she thinks can be done by injecting individual storms with a sequence of chemicals that will essentially cause them to fall apart. There’s some reality to the suggestion that people can modify the weather through fairly widely used methods like cloud seeding.

But there have always been tornadoes. There have always been hurricanes. There have always been wildfires. These are some of the many ways the climate system releases and redistributes energy. We can’t prevent every extreme event, and we certainly can’t shut down extreme events as they’re unfolding, as the movie suggests. But we can be better prepared for them.

We can reduce heat-trapping emissions, which will limit the future worsening of extreme weather events. We can develop strong early-warning systems that enable people to get to safety when an event is expected. And we can invest in programs like FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program to help communities prepare for and better withstand disasters. Estimates suggest that implementing tornado-proofing measures—such as building to stricter codes and using anchors and metal clipping to connect a home’s wood framing to the roof—could cost just $1.50-$2.00 per square foot for new home construction.

To that end, Twisters felt to me like a rallying cry to boost disaster preparedness and recovery resources at every level, from the individual to the global. There’s a sense in the movie that only individuals working apart from our systems and structures can keep communities safe from storms, or help them recover in their wake, a la the amazing Cajun Navy. I agree that we do collectively need to take care of each other. And I was left thinking about the need for more structured support: community-level disaster mitigation plans, the rapid deployment of on-the-ground recovery teams, and the network of resources that’s needed to get people back on their feet over the long haul.

Also: cowboy hats (who says climate resilience can’t also be stylish?).  

When it comes to risk analytics data, who benefits?

If Twisters has a villain, it’s not the tornadoes themselves, and nor is it climate change. Rather, it is the company trying to collect tornado data, so they can swoop in after a strike and profit off of the housing losses in affected communities. Various forms of such disaster capitalism have been documented in the aftermath of events such as Hurricane Katrina, earthquakes in Haiti and Italy, and the COVID-19 pandemic. We must be diligent about who is benefiting in the weeks and months after a disaster.

While what’s depicted in Twisters is essentially disaster capitalism, it’s important to acknowledge that in real life, there’s a growing number of for-profit companies that sell climate risk data—often developed in-house using proprietary methodologies—that purport to help everyone from individual property owners to major insurance companies better evaluate their level of climate risk. On one hand, the holders (or potential holders) of financial assets need to better understand the risks climate change poses to those assets. On the other, without transparency on how these data are being developed, there are many potential pitfalls to its use. Companies could, for example, underplay uncertainty in the climate models they are using, or present a false sense of precision in their data. Either one could lead to poor decision making among users of that data. Moreover, the cost of the data could be a barrier to people and communities with low incomes, leaving them without information that could save them money, their homes, or even their lives.

All of that made for complicated feelings as the movie’s true villain came into focus.

As a summer blockbuster, Twisters likely gives moviegoers what they’re looking for in the moment: an entertaining story, dramatic visuals, and, hopefully, a couple hours in a nice, cool movie theater on a hot summer day. But I hope viewers also walk out of the theater and take a moment to think about—maybe even talk about—what wasn’t said.

When it comes to climate change, we have no choice but to face our fears and to ride ‘em.

Rising seas threaten the viability of thousands of coastal communities in the US. Encroaching water means higher high tides that seep into streets and first floors, sunny-day flooding, and more water to fuel dangerous and destructive storm surges. So many buildings—homes, schools, hospitals, parks, fire stations—are clustered on our coasts, at risk of being regularly inundated with seawater, and built for a climate that no longer exists.

In some communities, disruptive flooding is already affecting necessary infrastructure, especially housing. This crisis converges with the US housing crisis.

Millions of people in the US already struggle to find adequate and affordable housing, to pay bills and expenses while also paying exorbitant rents or mortgages. They are a personal calamity away from losing their homes. For those with low incomes who rely on public and affordable housing, there’s far more demand than supply: according to the U.S. nonprofit National Low-Income Housing Coalition, there’s a national shortage of more than seven million affordable homes for nearly eleven million extremely low-income families.

The UCS report Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience, which predicts risks across a range of infrastructure such as schools, power stations, and hospitals, finds that public and affordable housing represent the largest category of assets at risk of regular inundation.

Report co-author Rachel Cleetus, Policy Director, and Zoe Middleton, Associate Director of Just Climate Resilience—both for the UCS Climate and Energy Program—took the time to expand on the implications of their findings for public and affordable housing and sound the alarm for policymakers about the waning time to meaningfully address these concurrent crises.

AAS: In your opinion, what’s the worst-case scenario for this intersection of increased coastal flooding and public housing in harm’s way?

Zoe Middleton: We know what happens when public housing is lost, right? We’ve seen it in disasters already. It takes a very, very long time to rebuild. People are frequently displaced from their communities of origin and their support networks. There’s this great family-level disruption, but there’s also a large cultural disruption. And the issue of recovery gets incredibly politicized.

For example, in Galveston, Texas, where most public housing was destroyed by Hurricane Ike in 2008, the reconstruction of units was delayed by more than a decade. And our report found public housing on the island—which has a severe shortage of affordable housing—is at risk again due to high tides and extreme weather.

Rachel Cleetus: The context here is that as a nation, we’ve significantly under-invested in affordable housing. We are in an acute affordable housing crisis across the board, and it has a disproportionate impact on low-income families.

Not only has there been an under-investment in building enough housing, there’s also been a backlog of maintenance that’s been deferred, and a lot of these houses are not in great repair. And so, this is intersecting with the climate crisis and making everything worse because as our study is showing, a lot of this housing is now going to be vulnerable to high tide flooding—even without storms.

In the middle of what’s already an affordable housing crisis, losing any units will be devastating. And just the regular flooding itself can impose further deterioration on this housing stock, along with issues like mold and power outages. All those kinds of things start to have ripple effects.

AAS: Why is it so difficult to build new affordable housing, and make existing public and affordable housing climate-resilient?

Zoe Middleton: It’s very hard to build new public housing because of the 1998 Faircloth Amendment [which caps the number of units that any public housing authority can build]. Instead, there are set-asides for affordable units in developments, and tax credit programs—which are now the biggest vehicle for developing affordable housing. It will take massive investment by the federal government to build the amount of affordable housing we need, and further government action to strengthen housing rights in this country.  

Rachel Cleetus: As Zoe is saying, we’ve shifted to this model where affordable housing units are often privately owned, and there’s a contract with the local municipality or the state that they’re providing some units at an affordable rate. There isn’t a lot of ability to ensure that enough high-quality affordable housing is being provided. And there’s a lot of land zoning that is contrary to providing more space for this—many communities that require single-family zoning and don’t allow multifamily units. And that’s one way of just creating and reinforcing enclaves of privilege. I live in Massachusetts, and even in a forward-looking, fairly liberal blue state, I’m seeing these dynamics of NIMBYism.

You can’t think about housing on its own. We’re talking about a continuum, and it’s part of the system that’s delivering very inequitable outcomes. Housing is connected to transit. It’s connected to jobs. People need opportunities to get jobs easily, to be able to afford to live in the places where they work. And right now, as a nation, we’re creating a society where the people who are doing some of the most critical work cannot live in the communities in which they’re delivering those services, whether it’s teaching our children in schools, or fighting fires, or day laborers who are doing outdoor construction work in our neighborhoods.

With climate risks accelerating, these issues are going to become more and more acute. And it’s important when we think about resources and policies that can help, to not just focus them on people who have political power and relatively more resources. For example, in disaster recovery, often the focus is on single-family homes and homeowners. So, folks who are renters often get left out of critical programs to get back on their feet after disasters. They are subject to the whims of whoever the developers or the landlords are.

AAS: People living in public and affordable housing are often among millions in communities designated by the federal government as “disadvantaged,” overburdened and underserved. Your report found that these communities contain nearly twice as many at-risk assets per capita as non-disadvantaged communities. It’s difficult enough to fund climate resilience measures for privileged communities—what are the challenges for communities with fewer resources?

Rachel Cleetus: In our report, we find that there’s a lot of co-location of affordable and public housing in places that are overburdened with pollution, including in places that were formerly redlined. And this is no accident. The fact that they’re also exposed to flooding is just sadly unsurprising. It’s basically a series of cumulative harms that communities are being exposed to. I think it’s crucial for us to convey that this is not a new problem. There’s now a new risk, and it’s compounding and making worse a system that was already not delivering the needed outcomes.

One other fact in the report, which our colleagues at the National Low Income Housing Coalition flagged for us: that a number of households in public and affordable housing have a member of the household who is mobility impaired in some way. And that can make it even more challenging to prepare for flooding-related disasters. Some people seem to think it’s easy to evacuate, or even move—that you just get up and go. It’s important to recognize who is being served by this housing, and what their needs are.

So how can we now get back to root causes? Why have we as a nation not invested in affordable housing? And as we build climate resilience, we must be mindful of not reinforcing the current crisis of affordability. Climate resilience shouldn’t be the latest frontier of gentrification.

AAS: What are some of the solutions you identify in your report that can help people living in affordable and public housing?

Zoe Middleton: One of the most immediate things we can do is protect and improve existing public and affordable housing. That could look like weatherizing properties for added climate resilience, and investing in clean energy upgrades. Given the dire shortage of affordable housing, governments have an obligation to make sure that resilience measures are accessible and affordable.                                    

Rachel Cleetus: There is an acute affordable housing crisis right now that everyone in the nation recognizes, and it’s time for Congress to put more investment into solving this problem. And as we do it, let’s make sure that we’re targeting resources specifically to the lowest-income households, and those on fixed incomes—the whole range of folks who often are left behind in these conversations. There’s a lot of talk about revitalizing urban spaces, which has often translated into gentrification. Certain policies can sound good, but it’s important to figure out who they’re serving, and who’s benefiting. 

As you see in the report, there’s a twin imperative: we also must cut heat-trapping emissions. Let’s not continue to put more and more people in harm’s way.

Extreme heat and wildfire smoke should of course be defined as major disasters by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. According to the National Weather Service, heat kills more people in this nation than hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and lightning combined. The Washington Post reported that extreme heat killed at least 28 people across the nation in the past week.

Yet, despite several requests from states over the years, most recently California during a 2022 “heat dome” and wildfires, no White House has ever approved a disaster declaration for heat or smoke.

Some states outright ignore the dangers in the name of greed. Over the last 13 months, Texas and Florida have enacted laws that block localities from issuing heat protection rules for workers. Nationally, the Biden administration proposed on July 2 new rules to protect workers from heat. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a host of construction and agricultural lobbying groups have opposed the prospect of rules for months and are sure to oppose them in the courts.

It is clear that the opposition is willing to risk sacrificing lower-wage construction and farm workers to the sun’s brutality as executives count the cash in air conditioned offices. Farm workers make an average $13.59 an hour. Hispanic construction laborers make $15.34 an hour, well below the $25-an-hour living wage for a family of four in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator. Farm workers respectively have 35 times and 12 times higher risk of heat-related injuries than in all other industries.  

Making the latest case for disaster declarations is a consortium of 31 environmental, public health, labor, and justice groups, led by the Center for Biological Diversity. In a June 17 petition to FEMA, the groups warned that the record-breaking heat and fire disasters we are already experiencing are likely only the beginning. The world’s nations, particularly the top burners of fossil fuels such as the United States, have yet to unify to prevent uncontrolled global warming.

“These may be the coolest days and the cleanest air of the 21st century,” the petition said, “and it is already unbearably hot and unsafe for too many Americans.”

The petitioners hope that disaster declarations can unlock federal funds for short-term relief such as cooling centers, water supplies, emergency air conditioning and air filtration systems, and financial assistance for evacuations. Declarations could also lead to money for long-term, proactive mitigation, such as renewable energy storage and microgrids to withstand utility blackouts, and retrofitting of homes and buildings to be more energy efficient and weatherized.

That is vitally important for disadvantaged families who are more likely to live on shadeless, asphalt and concrete “heat islands.” Such communities are often already overburdened with pollution associated with fossil fuel burning and proximity to polluting industries. The petition called extreme heat a “harm multiplier” for these communities because of poor housing stock, difficulty in paying utility bills, and pre-existing poorer health.  

In making their case, the 31 environmental groups cite data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, projecting that financial cost of extreme heat in the United States will explode fivefold to half a trillion dollars a year by 2050.

There is something else that would make their case even stronger: Data on people. The federal government is woefully behind university researchers in calculating the current and future mortality of heat and smoke. 

It should be just as much an emergency for the government to tell us the toll of heat and wildfire smoke. Especially since the government itself says “most heat-related deaths are preventable.”

Death behind closed doors

Property damage from tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods is easy to visualize and leaves the costs of emergency assistance and repair without much question. Because of the nation’s overall wealth, which gives us relatively sturdier dwellings and stronger rebuilds, deaths from those weather disasters are a fraction of the fatalities suffered in lesser resourced parts of the world. For instance, while Hurricane Katrina took 1,400 lives in the US in 2005, Cyclone Nargis in the Bay of Bengal made landfall in Myanmar in 2008 and killed 140,000 people—100 times more people than Katrina.

People perishing by heat or smoke one by one in the privacy of their homes or in the sterility of hospitals is relatively invisible. An analysis of heat deaths by the Cincinnati Enquirer found that about half of heat deaths happen at home, often to people who lack air conditioning, are elderly with pre-existing medical conditions, or who are socially isolated.

The petition by environmental groups points to the current invisibility of heat deaths. It cites federal data saying there were 2,300 deaths last year where heat was listed as a factor on death certificates. That by itself was a record in nearly a half-century of such record keeping. But left as is, that toll would seem to pale next to last year’s nearly 43,000 car fatalities, nearly 43,000 gun-related deaths, or 107,000 drug overdose deaths.

The number of heat deaths is assuredly far more. Heat is often not listed on death certificates as a contributing factor to the final cause of death, such as kidney failure, organ failure, and heart attack. There is no uniform protocol tying together how the federal government, the 50 states, or the nation’s 3,000 counties calculate heat-related deaths.

University scientists and health and safety groups are filling in the gaps as best they can.

In 2020, a study in the journal Environmental Epidemiology determined that 5,600 deaths a year were attributable to heat from 1997 to 2006, eight times higher than federal figures. In 2022, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Medical Center calculated that the number of people who died from heat-related causes between 2008 and 2017 was two to three times higher than federal figures. The Penn and Philadelphia VA researchers also found that extreme heat days were associated with “significantly higher” cardiovascular mortality among adults.

This spring, Texas A&M climate scientists Andrew Dessler and Jangho Lee told the Associated Press that last year’s real national annual heat death toll may be 11,000, nearly five times higher than the 2,300 cited by the government.

In the work world, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics says 43 workers died in 2022 from heat. But reports by Public Citizen, the most recent being in May of this year, estimate that as many as 2,000 workers a year (46 times more) die from heat and another 170,000 are injuries triggered by heat, such as becoming dizzy and falling off a roof.

But the injury might simply be listed as a fall without mention of heat. Public Citizen says government figures are “decidedly unreliable” and “notoriously problematic” because they are based on self-reporting surveys of employers and “less than half of employers even maintain the required records.”

No matter what number you’re looking at, all of them are likely to soar much higher without concerted global action on climate change. Without a drastic and immediate cut in fossil fuel emissions, the planet is currently staring at a 5-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperatures this century, with the U.S. being the world’s biggest historical contributor to global warming gases.

According to a study published last year by Lee and Dessler in the journal GeoHealth, the US suffered an average of 36,444 deaths a year from extreme temperatures a quarter century ago, with most of those deaths being cold-related. With a rise of 5 degrees Fahrenheit, that number could explode to 200,000 a year this century, driven significantly by shifts of heat mortality to Northern cities. Among the cities with the highest projected temperature increases are Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Muskegon, Minnesota.

Smoking out data

Parallel to that, and arguably worse, there is virtually no federal data on the fatal impacts of wildfire smoke. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lists a mere 535 deaths directly from wildfires over the last 45 years in its list of “Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters.” But there are likely thousands more from the smoke, which is associated with cardiovascular, ischemic heart disease, digestive, endocrine, diabetes, mental, and chronic kidney disease mortality.

Such smoke is not covered by the Clean Air Act, and there is growing evidence that it is eroding decades of gains in the nation’s air quality under the act. A new study by researchers at UCLA found that the fine particulate matter (known as PM2.5) in wildfire smoke that easily passes into the lungs and spreads throughout the body, contributed to the premature deaths of more than 50,000 people in California from 2008 to 2018, with an economic impact of between $432 billion and $456 billion.

Another study this spring by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 16,000 people a year died from smoke PM2.5 across the US from 2011 to 2020. That study found that elevated long-term smoke concentrations “increase mortality rates at both low and high concentrations.” Wildfire smoke, as the nation found out last year with its orange-brown skies that dulled the sun into a moon-like disk, spreads for so many thousands of miles from its source that the study projects a “large mortality burden not only in regions where large fires occur but also in populous regions with low smoke concentrations (e.g., the eastern US).”

Juan Aguilera, a physician researcher at the University of Texas School of Public Health in El Paso, found that wildfire smoke stresses immune systems and triggers inflammation. He told National Public Radio that living in a wildfire-prone area is “something equivalent to smoking like one pack a day, or 10 packs a week.”

Today’s 16,000 deaths a year from wildfire smoke could grow to nearly 28,000 by mid-century under a high warming scenario and take a cumulative 700,000 lives by 2055, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“Our research suggests that the health cost of climate-driven wildfire smoke could be among the most important and costly consequences of a warming climate in the US,” NBER scientists said.  

That concern is bolstered by a new study by Australian researchers who found that the number of extreme wildfires has doubled since 2003, with the last seven years including six of the most extreme. Lead author Calum Cunningham told the New York Times last month, “That we’ve detected such a big increase over such a short period of time makes the findings even more shocking. We’re seeing the manifestations of a warming and drying climate before our very eyes in these extreme fires.”

Adaptation could cut into the mortality risk, but it alone is likely not enough, given how Lee and Dessler noted in their study: “Many adaptive responses (e.g., installing air conditioning, improved health care, better urban planning) are too expensive for poorer individuals or communities, so adaptation will necessarily require society to pay for much of the adaptation. This would represent a huge transfer of wealth from richer to poorer members of our society, a dicey proposition in today’s political environment.”

Even better, of course, would be a serious drive toward net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency says no new gas, oil or coal investment is necessary as renewables, energy efficiency and electrification already can deliver the vast majority of emissions reductions.

New mentality needed at FEMA

Though all heat-related disaster declaration requests to FEMA thus far have been denied, agency spokesperson Daniel Llargues told National Public Radio that “there’s nothing specific” in federal law that precludes such a declaration. “If a circumstance did occur where an extreme heat incident exceeded state and local capacity, an emergency or major disaster declaration request submission could be considered,” Llargues said in an email.

And the White House can make a disaster declaration regardless of FEMA’s recommendation. In May, President Biden overruled a FEMA denial of a major disaster declaration so parts of Massachusetts could get federal aid to recover from severe storms and flooding last September.

The process of FEMA better understanding a “circumstance” where extreme heat and wildfire smoke constitutes a disaster starts with a better understanding of the danger. Some parts of the government are trying to mine the data, such as the National Institute of Health’s Heat Information System.

Extreme heat and wildfire smoke also offers FEMA a fresh chance to create new paradigms of aid, to avoid inequities seen in other disasters. Current FEMA storm funding often maintains systemic racism, putting communities with more white residents and higher property values back on their feet, while low-income people and communities of color, historically hemmed into lower property values by redlining, are left on their knees.  

As Politico wrote in 2022, FEMA grants to help richer families raise homes above flood levels “have helped turn dozens of wealthy or overwhelmingly white areas into enclaves of climate resilience. The communities are seeing rising property values and economic stability, while much of the nation faces devastating effects of rising seas and intensifying floods.”

One can only imagine the results if the same mentality is ultimately applied to communities marooned on “heat islands.” Seniors and Black adults are at disproportionate risk of cardiovascular deaths from extreme heat according to a Penn study last year. A 2022 Penn study warned, “As extreme heat events increase, the burden of cardiovascular mortality may continue to increase and the disparities between demographic subgroups may widen.”

The same can be said for those lower-wage farmworkers, construction workers and other industries where heat is a major risk. Often, the workers in those industries are disproportionately of color and immigrants. Other trades where heat is a high risk include landscaping, and indoor jobs in warehouses, restaurant kitchens, mills, and doing maintenance.

And let’s not forget public school teachers and staff, as huge percentages of the nation’s public school buildings are not equipped for the rising heat.

Better data needed

There are scientists, including UCS’s Juan Declet-Barreto, who have long called for standard methodology to more accurately determine whether excess deaths originated with heat or smoke exposure. Last year, Ashley Ward, the director of Duke University’s Heat Policy Innovation Lab, wrote in STAT that we need much better and uniformed coding for external causes of injuries and incentives for health systems to apply the codes for cases involving extreme heat. Without uniform coding, the public is left to weigh the emerging body of studies that have different estimations and may “add to the incorrect assumption that there is a lack of scientific consensus.”

Seconding the call for data collection is the Federation of American Scientists. Among its major list of recommendations is a “whole-of-government strategy to address extreme heat.”  The federation said that true mortality counts are “essential to enhancing the benefit-cost analysis for heat mitigation and resilience.”

But having heat- and smoke-related mortality data is more than that. Knowing the true toll might help jolt the nation into action on climate change sooner and lessen the mitigation and resilience we will need. One only need think back to the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and how critical data was to devise public health policy. Currently, the federal data on extreme heat and wildfire smoke itself constitutes a major disaster. 

Last Friday, the Supreme Court overruled the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, fundamentally changing the landscape of federal regulatory power. This decision, reached with a 6-3 majority led by Chief Justice John Roberts, marks a significant shift in administrative law and has profound implications for environmental regulations and climate accountability.

Ironically, the downfall of the Chevron doctrine will give Chevron and other major oil and gas corporations more latitude to slow down and block regulations, allowing them to pollute with near impunity. At the end of the day, this decision means that courts will play a more active role in interpreting regulatory statutes, undermining scientific expertise, slowing regulatory processes, and creating obstacles at a time when urgent action is needed to address the climate crisis.

Understanding the Chevron Doctrine

The Chevron doctrine, established in the 1984 Supreme Court case Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., provided that courts should defer to federal agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. This deference allowed agencies (e.g., the EPA or FDA), staffed with experts, to interpret and implement laws within their purview effectively.

Under Chevron, when a statute was ambiguous, courts would typically side with the agency’s interpretation, recognizing the specialized expertise of agencies in their respective fields. This doctrine has played a crucial role in enabling agencies to enforce regulations on complex issues such as environmental protection, public health, and consumer safety. The ambiguity in statutes is often intentional, acknowledging that Congress isn’t equipped to design prescriptive policies across the whole suite of issues before them—let alone in a way that can evolve as science and technology evolve over time. This intentional ambiguity enables expertise to shape rulemaking as needed. During the 40 years Chevron was law, federal courts cited the doctrine more than 18,000 times.

The Supreme Court’s ruling

The recent ruling arose from two cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce. These cases involved a dispute over a NOAA Fisheries rule requiring herring vessels to pay for onboard monitors to prevent overfishing. Lower courts upheld the rule, citing Chevron deference. However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority saw this as an opportunity to dismantle the doctrine altogether.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, declared that courts must now exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, rather than deferring to the agency’s reasonable interpretation. He emphasized that this change does not retroactively affect past cases decided under Chevron deference but will influence all future regulatory interpretations.

Five implications for climate accountability

The elimination of Chevron deference significantly impacts the ability of federal agencies to enforce regulations—particularly those related to environmental protection and climate change, as many of these regulations were crafted to be flexible in interpretation by design. Here’s how:

1. Increased Legal Challenges to Regulations: By removing judicial deference to agency interpretations, the ruling opens the door for increased legal challenges to regulations. Agencies will now face a higher bar in defending their rules, as courts will no longer necessarily defer to their expertise. This means that every regulation, including those aimed at reducing global warming emissions or protecting endangered species, will be subject to more inconsistent, inexpert judicial scrutiny. Under this new reality, oil and gas companies may feel more emboldened to challenge existing regulations hoping to shape the legal landscape to be more favorable for them. Successful court cases could limit the scope of future regulations.
2. Shift in Regulatory Power: The ruling effectively shifts power from federal agencies to the judiciary. Judges, rather than agency experts, will have the final say on the interpretation of ambiguous statutes. This change could result in less predictable and likely less scientifically informed decisions on complex environmental issues, as judges do not have the same level of expertise as agency professionals.
3. Slower Regulatory Process: The decision introduces a new level of difficulty into the regulatory process. Agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will need to try to anticipate every potential legal challenge alleging statutory ambiguity and prepare comprehensive justifications that can withstand unbounded judicial scrutiny. This could slow down the implementation of new regulations, as agencies might take more time to ensure their rules can survive such legal challenges. Worse, agencies may decide not to even try.
4. Impact on Existing and Future Regulations: While the ruling does not immediately retroactively affect regulations upheld under Chevron, it will influence future regulatory efforts. For example, regulations under the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which often rely on broad and ambiguous statutory mandates, are now vulnerable to unfavorable rulings at the hand of activist judges. This could hinder efforts to implement climate policies at the federal level.
5. Lobbying for Favorable Decisions: Judges will have more leeway and more need to rely on Amicus, or “Friend of the Court” briefs in writing opinions. Fossil fuel companies and their attorneys will have the incentives and funding to file such briefs aggressively. The views expressed by oil companies will have equal weight compared to agency scientists and experts. It should be noted that the plaintiffs in both cases leading to the overturning of Chevron were represented pro bono by attorneys from conservative law firms with ties to the Koch brothers.

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Chevron represents a seismic shift in administrative law with far-reaching implications for climate accountability. By reducing the power of federal agencies to interpret and implement ambiguous statutes, the ruling complicates the path forward for robust environmental action. Oil and gas corporations have long been adept at manipulating the legal system to their advantage. Just hours after the Supreme Court’s decision, corporate lobbyists began strategizing to use the ruling to their advantage, aiming to challenge and reduce regulations in climate, finance, health, labor, and technology.

By employing a range of tactics, these corporations can delay public health and environmental protections, effectively postponing climate accountability cases for years. This strategy not only prevents plaintiffs from achieving justice through the courts but also allows these companies to use the courts to delay essential regulations. During this time, they can continue their operations with minimal restrictions, further exacerbating environmental and public health issues. Overturning the Chevron doctrine underscores the need for continued advocacy and a diversity of tactics to address the pressing challenges of climate change.

A new map tool from the Union of Concerned Scientists shows you where and when critical pieces of coastal infrastructure such as public housing buildings, schools and power plants are at risk of repeated, disruptive flooding due to climate change­­­­­-driven sea level rise.

The map tool is based on data from our new analysis and report, Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience: Rising Seas, Disruptive Tides, and Risks to Coastal Infrastructure. Covering the contiguous United States, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and Guam, the analysis finds that by 2050, with a medium sea level rise scenario, seawater would flood more than 1,600 critical coastal infrastructure assets twice or more per year. This scenario projects roughly one foot of sea level rise by 2050 relative to a 2000 baseline and is consistent with the trajectory of observed sea level rise for most regions of the United States.

With the map tool, you can see exactly which facilities in your community are at risk, which we hope sparks discussions and planning around how to cope with future sea level rise and flood risks. In this post, we’ll explore the tool and highlight the types of information it can provide. For those who want to dive deeper, we’ll also show you where you can find even more information that you can use to engage your community, your elected officials, and candidates running for office in conversations about how to plan for sea level rise.

Explore infrastructure at risk from sea level rise through 2050

The first map you’ll come to in the Looming Deadlines mapping tool shows critical coastal infrastructure assets at risk of flooding twice or more per year by 2050 under the medium sea level rise scenario described above. The symbols on the map correspond to the six different categories of infrastructure we included in our analysis:

• Public housing buildings and affordable housing units
• Energy infrastructure, including power plants and electrical substations
• Industrial contamination sites, such as Superfund sites and brownfields
• Public safety and health facilities, such as hospitals and fire stations
• Educational institutions, including K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities
• Government facilities, such as city halls, post offices, and prisons

The new mapping tool from the Union of Concerned Scientists shows critical coastal infrastructure at risk of flooding twice or more per year by the year 2050.

Clicking on any facility will bring up more information, including the name and address of the facility, what subcategory of infrastructure it belongs to (e.g., a hospital or a fire station within the category of public safety and health facilities), and an assessment of how frequently it is expected to flood in the 2050 timeframe. Of the 1,600 assets we identify as being at risk of disruptive flooding by 2050, roughly 1,100 are expected to flood, on average, monthly and more than 900 would flood an average of every other week.

With this information, you’ll be able to see exactly what is at risk—an important first step in thinking through how to make your community more resilient.

Examples of communities with infrastructure at risk from sea level rise

Most coastal communities in the United States have at least some infrastructure assets at risk of flooding due to sea level rise in the decades ahead. Some communities are already grappling with frequent flooding that poses an increasingly real threat to infrastructure with each passing year. The second section of the map tool provides a window into the risks and complexities a few communities are already facing. In doing so, it drives home just how much is at stake along our coasts.

Here’s an example we highlight from Charleston, South Carolina:

The new map tool from the Union of Concerned Scientists highlights how sea level rise is already threatening critical infrastructure in some coastal US communities. Photo credit: Ben Neely/MyCoast.org. Seeing why our choices today matter for our kids and grandkids

The amount of sea level rise expected between now and 2050 is fairly certain because it is largely dictated by how much global-warming pollution we’ve already dumped into the atmosphere. The amount of sea level rise that happens over the second half of the century, however, is much less certain because it will depend on our future emissions of heat-trapping gases as well as how glaciers, ice sheets, and other Earth systems respond to those emissions. The third section of our map tool explores the range of late-century possibilities through the lens of our collective emissions choices.

The new map tool from the Union of Concerned Scientists allows you to compare late-century risks to coastal infrastructure, shown here as circles, under a low sea level rise scenario (on the left) versus a high sea level rise scenario (on the right).

Limiting future warming to 1.5°C or 2°C would improve our chances of limiting future sea level rise. The way to do that is by slashing heat-trapping emissions—by phasing out global fossil fuel use and ramping up clean energy. Under a low sea level rise scenario, our analysis finds that roughly 3,500 critical infrastructure assets along US coastlines are at risk of flooding twice or more per year by 2100. On the other hand, if global emissions continue to rise and global temperatures rise to 3°C or more, there’s an increased chance that a higher sea level rise scenario would come to fruition. Under a high sea level rise scenario, roughly four times as many infrastructure assets—nearly 15,100 total—are at risk of disruptive flooding.

What did you say? You want more data? And ways to act, too?

Our map tool is a great way to start exploring what is at risk as sea level rises, but it contains just a few slivers of the giant data pie that we baked for this report. If you’re hungry for a bigger piece of that pie, our downloadable spreadsheets will no doubt satisfy. These spreadsheets contain:

• Data for assets at risk in 2020 and 2030 as well as in 2050 and 2100.
• Filterable lists of all the assets at risk.
• Data for assets at risk under three different sea level rise and with three different flooding frequencies (2, 12, or 26 floods per year)
• Community-level data summarizing the total assets at risk in each category of infrastructure
• Estimates of the number of people living in communities with infrastructure at risk
• Data on how many of these assets fall into communities designated as “disadvantaged” by the federal Climate and Environmental Justice Screening Tool and what the demographics of affected communities are like.

Our Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience report points to risks to coastal infrastructure that are largely flying under the radar. But it also points to the many solutions already available to communities and the many ways that planners, policymakers, and the private sector can help communities build the resilience they need as sea level rise. For a full set of recommendations, check out the report itself.

Using our new map tool, we can see clearly the problems sea level rise poses for the infrastructure we rely on for homes, electricity, public health, safety, education, and much more. But we can also see a clear path to a coastline dotted with resilient communities. Armed with information from our maps and a set of commonsense recommendations, we hope you can too.

A new analysis out today and led by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) reveals a significant amount of critical infrastructure along US coastlines at risk of disruptive flooding today and in the near future as sea level rises, potentially affecting millions of coastal residents. We unpack the results of our analysis in a new report—Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience—and a slick new interactive mapping tool. Here, I’ll summarize why we did this analysis, what we found, and how the nation can address the risks we’re facing.

Climate risks to critical coastal infrastructure are flying under the radar

Sea level rise is a climate change impact that doesn’t charge into our lives the way a wildfire or a hurricane might—exploding in size and causing catastrophic damage in a short period of time. But over the last century, sea level has risen enough that coastal communities are starting to feel its effects.

In Norfolk, Virginia, the razing of a public housing development due to coastal flood risks has forced former residents of Tidewater Gardens to fight to secure their right to inhabit new affordable housing. Down the coast, in Charleston, South Carolina, sewer overflows due to tidal flooding have sent unhealthy, partially treated wastewater into nearby waterways.

Even without storms or heavy rainfall, high tide flooding driven by climate change is accelerating along US coastlines. It is increasingly evident that many critical infrastructure assets along our coasts—such as power plants, wastewater treatment plants, and schools—that were safe when constructed are now at risk of being regularly inundated with seawater. 

Hundreds of coastal infrastructure assets at risk this decade

To determine where and when coastal infrastructure would be at risk of flooding, we first mapped out areas along the coast that would flood 2, 12, or 26 times per year under a range of different amounts of future sea level rise. We then overlaid those maps with a dataset of infrastructure located along the coast, which included six different categories of buildings and services, from public and affordable housing to schools, hospitals, fire stations, and industrial contamination sites.

Our Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience analysis evaluated where and when assets within six categories of critical coastal infrastructure will be at risk of disruptive flooding due to sea level rise.

Over the course of this decade, our data show a sharp increase in the amount of infrastructure exposed to two or more disruptive flooding events annually, from 904 assets nationally in 2020 to 1,085 assets nationally in 2030. Those assets currently serve communities that are home to 2.2 million people—roughly the population of the fourth biggest city in the country, Houston, Texas.

Some communities will be more affected than others. Atlantic City, New Jersey, for example, is among the hardest-hit communities in this time frame, with 44 public and affordable housing facilities at risk of flooding twice annually by 2030. In the town of Raceland, Louisiana, 16 public housing buildings, an electrical substation, and a sheriff’s office are all in danger of flooding twice annually by the end of this decade. 

Of note, communities designated as disadvantaged by the federal government contain nearly twice as many at-risk assets per capita as nondisadvantaged communities. Additionally, communities in which five or more infrastructure assets are at risk are home to a disproportionately higher percentage of Black residents compared to the national average. This greater potential for disadvantaged communities to be affected by flooding is poised to exacerbate existing, unaddressed inequities caused by environmental racism and toxic pollution.

Major risks within the next 25 years

By 2050, with a medium sea level rise scenario in which sea level rises by roughly one foot, 1,662 critical infrastructure assets are at risk of flooding an average of twice annually. Overall, public and affordable housing, brownfields, electrical substations, wastewater treatment plants, and fire stations are the types of infrastructure with the most facilities at risk.

Between 2030 and 2050, the number of coastal infrastructure assets at risk of flooding twice or more per year increases steeply.

In this midcentury timeframe, disadvantaged communities contain, on average, about twice as many at-risk infrastructure assets per capita as nondisadvantaged communities, and more than 70 percent of the public housing at risk is located in disadvantaged communities. Moreover, disadvantaged communities with at-risk infrastructure are home to significantly higher percentages of people who identify as Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, or Native American than the national average. In Maryland, for example, 82 percent of the assets at risk are in disadvantaged communities, where 41 percent of the population identifies as Black or African American, compared with roughly 32 percent of the population in the state as a whole.

Roughly 35% of coastal communities are categorized as disadvantaged by a federal screening tool, but more than 50% of the infrastructure assets at risk through midcentury are located within these disadvantaged communities. Our collective choices now will determine fates later this century

With higher emissions and greater warming, higher amounts of sea level rise late this century become more likely, mostly because there is greater potential for ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica to shrink, adding more water to the ocean. With such scenarios, more present-day infrastructure would be exposed to persistent flooding, with potentially grave consequences for the continued livability of coastal communities. Conversely, lower sea level rise scenarios are more likely if global emissions decrease substantially, and future warming is limited to 2°C or less. With lower sea level rise scenarios, less infrastructure would be at risk late this century.

We found that under a low sea level rise scenario, roughly 3,500 critical infrastructure assets would flood twice annually by 2100—a challenge, to be sure, and a substantial increase from the amount of infrastructure at risk today. Under a medium scenario, roughly 6,500 assets would flood with that frequency. And under the high scenario, that figure jumps to 15,081. 

The low, medium, and high scenarios result in profoundly different implications for the level of adaptation required, for state- and community-level consequences, and for the number of people whose daily lives could be affected.

Funding and leadership are needed now to build coastal resilience

The risks to vital infrastructure and services that millions of people depend on will grow as the global sea level rises in the coming decades, with wide-ranging implications for public health, safety, education, and well-being, and for coastal ecosystems and ways of life. This predicament creates a profound and urgent responsibility for policymakers and public and private decisionmakers to take protective action now, working together with communities. In our report, we outline six recommendations decisionmakers should act on: 

1. Use science and innovation to plan for near- and long-term risks
2. Scale up public and private sector funding for infrastructure resilience 
3. Reduce historical inequities and prevent future harms
4. Protect affordable housing; open just pathways to retreat
5. Start informed, flexible, adaptive planning now for later-century potential outcomes
6. Cut heat-trapping emissions to limit the pace and magnitude of sea level rise

You can read more about each of these recommendations in the report itself or in report co-author Rachel Cleetus’s blog post.

There is a narrow window of time for federal, state, and local policymakers to provide funding and resources and for local decisionmakers to use this backing to make transformative changes to their communities that would help them to withstand future flood risks. Our analysis shows that the scale of the challenge is daunting, but it also points to actionable, science-informed steps that can and must be taken to protect vital infrastructure and services. Investments in resilience, equitably shared, can help build a safer, fairer future for all.  

El mar se nos echa encima–y no estamos preparados.

Los océanos de nuestro planeta suben sin parar. Cada año que pasa, las aguas del mar, impulsadas por el cambio climático y la quema de combustibles fósiles, penetran cada vez más lejos tierra adentro. En Estados Unidos y sus territorios, las casi 90 millones de personas que viven en comunidades costeras se enfrentan a mareas altas e inundaciones en días de sol.

Dicha población depende de una amplia gama de instalaciones que proveen infraestructura y servicios esenciales, como por ejemplo, escuelas de nivel preprimario a universitario, estaciones de policía y bomberos, hospitales, centrales eléctricas y plantas de tratamiento de aguas residuales. Pero también viven cerca de predios que manejan o albergan peligrosos contaminantes industriales y tóxicos. ¿Qué pasará cuando las instalaciones que proveen servicios esenciales se inunden y se vea interrumpido el servicio eléctrico o de agua potable, o los niños no puedan ir a la escuela porque el plantel está bajo agua o el camino que da acceso se ha inundado? 

Según un nuevo análisis publicado hoy por la Unión de Científicos Conscientes (o UCS, por sus siglas en inglés) titulado Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience, en español Urgen medidas para la resiliencia costera, para el año 2050 casi 1.100 instalaciones de infraestructura esencial ubicadas a lo largo de la costa de Estados Unidos se inundarían en promedio 12 veces al año, lo cual equivale a una vez por mes, en base a un aumento mediano (de 3,2 pies, o 97.5 cm en promedio a nivel global) en el nivel del mar. Esa cifra pudiera elevarse a más de 5.300 instalaciones de infraestructura esencial que estarían en riesgo para el año 2100 con el mismo aumento mediano.  

Este riesgo está distribuido muy desigualmente, ya que mucha de la infraestructura en riesgo está localizada en comunidades desfavorecidas debido al racismo, la discriminación y la contaminación. En nuestro estudio, integramos los datos de la herramienta de evaluación de justicia climática y económica del Consejo de Calidad Ambiental de la Casa Blanca (CEJST, en inglés) para determinar si la infraestructura en riesgo de inundación se ubica en comunidades identificadas como “marginadas” o “no marginadas.”

Los factores que contribuyen a que una comunidad se considere como marginada incluyen, entre otras, los retos a los que se enfrenta la comunidad en relación con la salud, la vivienda, el cambio climático e ingresos. En nuestro análisis encontramos que las comunidades identificadas como desfavorecidas tienen, per cápita, el doble de infraestructura esencial en riesgo para el 2050 en comparación con las comunidades que no han sido designadas como marginadas.

Gran parte de la infraestructura esencial en riesgo de inundación por mareas en 2050 en Florida, Puerto Rico, y Nueva Jersey está localizada en comunidades en desventaja. Imagen: UCS Las comunidades Latinas están muy expuestas en algunos estados y territorios

En particular, muchas comunidades costeras con altos porcentajes de Latinos están en riesgo. El estado de la Florida—donde casi un tercio de la población es de origen Latino— tiene el tercer número más grande de instalaciones que estarán en riesgo de inundación para el 2050, y ocupará el primer lugar en este rubro en 2100. Los resultados de 2050 indican que casi la mitad de dichas instalaciones están localizadas en comunidades en desventaja.

En la Florida, la infraestructura esencial en más alto riesgo de inundaciones para el 2050 y el 2100 incluye la vivienda pública y la vivienda asequible, predios con contaminación industrial, e inmuebles de salud y seguridad pública. Y según avance el cambio climático y los océanos se eleven, el riesgo continuará en aumento para comunidades en desventaja tanto para comunidades más favorecidas. En la Florida, de aquí al 2050 habrá 114 comunidades con infraestructura esencial bajo riesgo, y para el 2100 esta cifra aumentará a 409 comunidades. Se prevé un aumento de casi el doble en el número de instalaciones de infraestructura esencial bajo riesgo de inundaciones para el 2050 y que este número crezca trece veces para el 2100, en comparación con el año de referencia 2020.  

Sin acción climática, mucha infraestructura esencial en la Florida estará bajo agua en el 2050 (en base a un aumento de 3,2 pies, o 97.5 cm en promedio a nivel global para el 2050). Mapa elaborado por UCS. 

Puerto Rico, por su parte, tiene la fracción más grande de instalaciones esenciales en riesgo que están localizadas en comunidades en desventaja. En Puerto Rico, un máximo de 28 instalaciones esenciales correrían el riesgo de inundarse dos veces al año en promedio para el 2050. De este total, 20 estarían en riesgo de inundarse en promedio una vez cada dos semanas. Para finales de siglo, hasta 325 instalaciones correrían el riesgo de inundarse dos veces al año. De esos, 322 estarían en riesgo de inundarse en promedio una vez por mes y 300 en promedio una vez cada dos semanas.

Los más graves impactos de inundaciones costeras por incremento en el nivel del mar llegarían a Puerto Rico para finales de siglo, cuando el territorio ocuparía el séptimo lugar más alto en cuanto a infraestructura en riesgo de inundaciones perjudiciales en el 2100. La infraestructura esencial en más alto riesgo de inundaciones para el 2100 incluye residenciales públicos así como predios con contaminación industrial.

Entre estos se encuentra el complejo de vivienda pública más grande tanto en Puerto Rico como en Estados Unidos, el Residencial Luis Lloréns Torres (con aproximadamente 2.700 unidades de vivienda a unos 500 metros de distancia en línea recta de la costa de San Juan). En efecto, de aquí al 2050 habrá nueve comunidades con infraestructura esencial bajo riesgo, lo cual aumentará a 35 comunidades en 2100. También se prevé un aumento de más del 55% en el número de instalaciones de infraestructura esencial bajo riesgo de inundaciones para el 2050 y un incremento de 18 veces para el 2100, en comparación con el año de referencia 2020.  

Puerto Rico está a tiempo para prepararse para la gran cantidad de infraestructura esencial que estará bajo agua en 2100 (en base a un aumento de 6,5 pies, o 198.1 cm en promedio a nivel global para el 2100). UCS. 

En el condado de Camden, Nueva Jersey la población Latina ronda el 15 porciento y el 12 porciento de la población general vive bajo el umbral de pobreza. Aquí, la vivienda pública y a bajo costo, múltiples instalaciones que albergan o manejan contaminantes industriales o tóxicos y una central eléctrica estarán en riesgo de inundación en el 2050.  

Predios con contaminación industrial y la vivienda pública y de bajo costo en las áreas costeras de Gloucester City y Camden, Nueva Jersey se encuentran en riesgo de inundación cuando menos dos veces por año para el 2050. UCS.  Crisis climática: creada por la extracción y quema de combustibles fósiles, pero tenemos soluciones a la mano

Las comunidades que señalé son ejemplos de la multiplicidad de riesgos y disrupciones a la vida cotidiana para familias que viven en comunidades que dependen de la infraestructura esencial. Las y los jefes de familia se pudieran ver obligados a cambiar a sus hijos a nuevas escuelas apartadas de sus comunidades, que las inundaciones en tierra y suelos contaminados afecten el suministro de agua potable, que contaminantes peligrosos se esparzan por agua, aire o tierra, o que familias enteras sean desplazadas de sus comunidades. Si no damos prioridad a las soluciones para crear resiliencia en estas comunidades, corremos el riesgo de aumentar el dañino legado del racismo ambiental y del colonialismo en lugares que ya están de por sí muy desatendidos y olvidados. 

Este problema ha sido causado por décadas de hacer caso omiso a las advertencias de la comunidad científica y continuar y expandir la extracción y quema de combustibles fósiles. Es un problema causado por los seres humanos y por ende tiene soluciones que están a nuestro alcance. Nuestro informe ofrece una serie de recomendaciones para los responsables de las políticas públicas y los encargados de la toma de decisiones para promover preparación adecuada entre las comunidades para los riesgos y desafíos que se avecinan. Las recomendaciones incluyen: 

• El uso de la ciencia más avanzada para orientar la planificación de adaptación a los riesgos a corto y largo plazo.
• Incrementar en el fondeo público y privado en adición a las asignaciones contempladas en las políticas existentes, tales como la Ley de Inversión en Infraestructura y Empleos, con el fin de aumentar la resiliencia climática de la infraestructura costera.
• La implementación de políticas públicas para reducir las desigualdades históricas y prevenir daños a futuro.
• Proteger los residenciales públicos y vivienda asequible en la medida que sea posible.
• Crear oportunidades equitativas para las personas o comunidades que opten por reubicarse, y elaborar planes para una amplia variedad de posibilidades que pudieran presentarse a medida que el aumento del nivel del mar se acelere rápidamente. 
• Reducir drásticamente las emisiones de carbono para reducir el ritmo y la magnitud del aumento en el nivel del mar.

Estas comunidades son ejemplos de los riesgos a los que están expuestas las comunidades Latinas – pero hay muchas más. Busca tu comunidad en nuestro mapa y descubre cuáles son los riesgos de inundación por mareas impulsadas por el cambio climático y qué hacer al respecto.

Recursos:

• Lee nuestro informe aquí (en inglés)
• Consulta el blog en español que explica nuestro mapa interactivo aquí. ADD SPANISH MAP EXPLANATION BLOG LINK
• Consulta nuestro mapa interactivo aquí (en inglés)
• Accesa nuestras hojas de cálculo disponibles sobre la infraestructuras en riesgo en estados y comunidades (en inglés)

A new UCS study released today, Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience, shows that risks are growing to vital infrastructure and services that millions of people in coastal communities depend on as global sea levels rise in the coming decades. This will have wide-ranging implications for public health, safety, education, and well-being, and for coastal ecosystems and ways of life. Policymakers and public and private decisionmakers must act with urgency to take protective action now, working together with communities.

Decisionmakers, planners, and technical experts involved in funding, developing, designing, insuring, operating, and maintaining infrastructure must take immediate steps to safeguard critical infrastructure and ensure a more transformative path to true resilience over time, instead of business-as-usual maladaptive choices (see figure below).

Our study highlights six important recommendations to enhance resilience to coastal flooding for coastal infrastructure:

1: Use science and innovation to plan for near- and long-term risks

Across communities, there is a shared need to assess physical exposure and vulnerability to sea level rise risks and to develop plans to address them. Scientific projections of sea level rise and coastal flooding should be incorporated into all infrastructure investments, construction, operation, and maintenance. Local and state governments should conduct localized scientific risk and vulnerability assessments of critical infrastructure, including the potential for cascading vulnerabilities of interconnected infrastructure. They should develop comprehensive climate resilience plans to mitigate those risks and build inclusive processes to regularly update them.

Owners and operators of infrastructure, together with engineers and other experts, should develop action plans to address the risk of sea level rise, with public and private resilience planning being appropriately coordinated. And these plans should be regularly reevaluated based on the latest science and for robustness across plausible future scenarios.

New and improved infrastructure should be designed—and existing infrastructure upgraded—to meet stringent protective flood standards and engineering and building codes that account for rising seas and that remain effective for the assets’ expected lifetimes. In addition to measures onsite, community-wide measures, including beneficial land zoning and protection of natural flood mitigation assets, like wetlands, are extremely valuable and must be prioritized.

With sea level rise accelerating and significant infrastructure investments flowing through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the next 10 years are crucial to make meaningful progress in building climate resilience and safeguarding those investments from flooding. Congress should build on the Biden administration’s National Climate Resilience Framework by enacting a comprehensive national resilience strategy that provides guidance and technical assistance, and helps coordinate and target federal resources for state, regional, and local adaptation efforts.

2: Scale up public and private sector funding for infrastructure resilience

US infrastructure has long been woefully underfunded and routinely assessed as requiring attention, and sea level rise exposes and exacerbates those vulnerabilities. Public and private investments in infrastructure resilience must be scaled up across the board. Data from the National Institute of Building Sciences show that investing in retrofitting infrastructure such as wastewater facilities and electric substations has a benefit-cost ratio as high as 31 to 1.

State and federal policymakers must marshal funding for the proactive protection of infrastructure and prioritize resources for less wealthy and historically disadvantaged communities. Although existing federal funding is helpful, it falls well short of what is required and must be better aligned with projections of future flood risks.

Congress should also consider public-private opportunities, such as through a national resilient infrastructure bank. Funding raised through taxes, fees, utility rates, municipal bonds, and loans will all likely need to play a role, given the scale of the challenge. Litigation pathways could help make polluters fund climate resilience in addition to paying their share for damages, as part of holding fossil fuel companies accountable for their outsize role in the climate crisis.

Many critical infrastructure assets, including those in the power and wastewater management sectors, are owned, operated, or managed by private-sector entities, which makes their role essential in planning for and investing in climate resilience measures. Public utility commissions should require that utilities account for climate risks and make prudent investments in resilience while safeguarding the interests of ratepayers and protecting low-income households from potential rate spikes related to adaptation investments.

Market signals and incentives must be science-informed to prevent maladaptive choices and promote resilient outcomes. This is creating specific challenges in the context of insurance. In addition to climate impacts on homes and homeowner’s insurance, power sector assets, wastewater treatment plants, and public housing are also at risk of flooding from rising seas. These assets, too, require insurance—and that insurance is about to get more costly or hard to come by in some places, if it isn’t already.   

My colleague Shana Udvardy also lays out important recommendations to boost infrastructure resilience to climate impacts as this summer’s Danger Season of climate extremes gets under way.

3: Reduce historical inequities and prevent future harms

Our results show that communities already disadvantaged by historical and present racism, poverty, and other factors face a disproportionate burden of the nation’s current and future risks to coastal infrastructure. In some cases, these communities are in particularly flood-prone areas because economic factors, colonialism, racism, and deliberate policies such as mortgage redlining denied them access to, dispossessed them of, or forcibly moved them from more desirable areas on higher ground. Often, these same communities have also borne the health impacts of polluting and risky infrastructure intentionally sited within or near them, such as Superfund and other toxic or hazardous contamination sites. Worsening coastal flood risks add an additional layer of risk and compound harm.

Policymakers and decisionmakers should undertake resilience investments that limit further burdens on these communities; ensure that historically disadvantaged communities are prioritized for resources, including through effective implementation of the Justice40 Initiative; reduce barriers to funding and resources; reflect risk aversion through Office of Management and Budget guidance; and enable better outcomes. Communities should also have a direct say in the decisions that affect them, and policymakers must respect Tribal sovereignty. Decisionmakers must ensure that harmful histories of racism and inequities are not repeated as we invest in upgrading and building new climate-resilient infrastructure.

4: Protect affordable housing and open just pathways to retreat, where necessary

Public and affordable housing represents the single most at-risk category of infrastructure assets evaluated in the UCS Looming Deadlines analysis. Any loss of these units will add to the already acute crisis in the availability of such housing, driven by decades of under-investment and racial discrimination. Repeated flooding can also cause structural problems, mold, and other hazards to residents. All levels of government must invest in the protection, renovation, and construction of climate-resilient and energy-efficient affordable housing.

In places most highly exposed to flood risks, multiple critical infrastructure assets as well as homes and businesses may be in jeopardy, making the task of protecting them all eventually untenable. In such cases, decisionmakers may need to initiate hard conversations about managed retreat of entire communities. These discussions should include both resettlement resources for displaced communities, and resources and infrastructure investments for communities that receiving the displaced. Crucially, all these decisions must take place within a broader institutional framework that provides for meaningful engagement with communities and a human rights–centered approach to addressing climate-related displacement.

5: Start informed, flexible, adaptive planning now for later-century potential outcomes

Both the emissions choices we make over the next several decades and ice sheet dynamics will have significant bearing on the magnitude of the threat sea level rise poses to coastal infrastructure and communities in the long term. For this reason, it is important to embark on adaptation pathways that enable future flexibility. Adaptive design of engineering projects and buildings can help ensure they reliably function over their full lifetime—with the potential to be upgraded as needed—taking into account the plausible range of climate futures.

Communities will need to weigh their choices: for example, making a limited investment to protect an asset at risk in the near term, and then using the time gained to relocate the services it provides—or the community more broadly—to higher ground.

6: Cut heat-trapping emissions to limit the pace and magnitude of sea level rise

Sharply curtailing global heat-trapping emissions and phasing out fossil fuels while ramping up clean energy solutions must also be a cornerstone of our work to enable resilience on our coastlines. While near-term sea level rise is largely locked in, the choices nations make about reducing global emissions, starting right now, could lead to profoundly different levels of risk on our coastlines over the course of the century. As a relatively wealthy nation and the leading contributor to historical heat-trapping emissions, the United States has a unique responsibility to contribute to global climate efforts. Decisionmakers at local, state, federal, and international levels must prioritize a rapid and equitable transition to clean, affordable energy while ensuring a phaseout of fossil fuels.

For more information about coastal infrastructure at risk, you can view the report, use our interactive map to learn what vital assets are exposed to sea level rise in many coastal communities, and read our blog posts.

Una nueva herramienta de mapeo de la Unión de Científicos Conscientes (o UCS, por sus siglas en inglés) muestra dónde y cuándo la infraestructura costera esencial, tales como edificios de vivienda pública, escuelas y centrales eléctricas, corren el riesgo de sufrir inundaciones recurrentes y perjudiciales debido al aumento en el nivel del mar provocado por el cambio climático.  

La herramienta de mapeo se basa en los datos de nuestro nuevo análisis e informe, Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience: Rising Seas, Disruptive Tides, and the Shrinking Window to Tackle Risks to Coastal Infrastructure, en español, Urgen medidas para la resiliencia costera ante el aumento del nivel del mar, inundaciones por mareas altas y riesgos a la infraestructura. El análisis abarca Estados Unidos contiguos, Puerto Rico, las Islas Vírgenes estadounidenses y Guam, y concluye que, con un aumento mediano del nivel del mar, el agua del mar inundaría más de 1.600 instalaciones esenciales de infraestructura costera unas dos veces o más al año para el año 2050. Este escenario proyecta un aumento aproximado de un pie en el nivel del mar para el 2050 en comparación con los datos de referencia del año 2020 y es coherente con la trayectoria del aumento en el nivel del mar que se ha observado en la mayoría de las regiones de Estados Unidos.  

Mediante el uso de la herramienta de mapeo, usted podrá conocer exactamente cuáles instalaciones de su comunidad están en riesgo, lo que esperamos propicie conversaciones y actividades de planeación sobre cómo hacer frente al futuro aumento en el nivel del mar y a los riesgos de inundación. En este blog exploraremos la herramienta y explicaremos el tipo de información que puede proporcionar. Para aquellos que quieran profundizar en el tema, también mostraremos dónde se puede obtener más información útil para involucrar a su comunidad, a los funcionarios electos y a los candidatos a puestos públicos en conversaciones sobre cómo planificar y prepararse para el aumento en el nivel del mar.  

Explore la infraestructura que está en riesgo debido al aumento en el nivel del mar de aquí al año 2050 

El primer mapa que aparece en la herramienta de mapeo Looming Deadlines muestra las instalaciones de infraestructura esencial ubicadas a lo largo de la costa que corren el riesgo de inundarse dos o más veces al año de aquí al año 2050, esto según el escenario de aumento mediano en el nivel del mar descrito anteriormente. Los símbolos del mapa corresponden a las seis diferentes categorías de infraestructura que incluimos en nuestro análisis: 

• Edificios de vivienda pública y unidades de vivienda asequible 

• Infraestructura energética, lo cual incluye centrales eléctricas y subestaciones eléctricas 

• Instalaciones con contaminación industrial, como por ejemplo aquellas del Superfondo y terrenos industriales abandonados 

• Inmuebles de salud y seguridad pública, como hospitales y estaciones de bomberos 

• Instituciones educativas, incluyendo escuelas desde nivel prepimario hasta preparatorias, escuelas técnicas y universidades 

• Instalaciones de gobierno, como ayuntamientos, oficinas de correos y prisiones  

La nueva herramienta de mapeo de la Unión de Científicos Conscientes muestra la infraestructura costera esencial que está en riesgo de inundarse dos o más veces al año para el año 2050.  

Al hacer clic en cualquier instalación aparecerá más información, incluyendo el nombre y la dirección de la instalación, la subcategoría de infraestructura a la que pertenece (por ejemplo, un hospital o una estación de bomberos dentro de la categoría de instalaciones de salud y seguridad pública) y una valoración de la frecuencia con la que se prevé que se inunde para el año 2050. De las 1.600 instalaciones que identificamos en riesgo de sufrir inundaciones perjudiciales para el 2050, se estima que aproximadamente 1.100 se inundarán en promedio una vez al mes y más de 900 lo harán cada dos semanas en promedio. 

Con esta información, usted podrá saber exactamente lo que está en riesgo, un primer paso importante para pensar en cómo hacer que su comunidad sea más resiliente. 

Ejemplos de comunidades con infraestructura en riesgo debido al aumento en el nivel del mar

En la mayoría de las comunidades costeras de Estados Unidos hay al menos algunas instalaciones de infraestructura en riesgo de inundación debido al aumento en el nivel del mar durante las próximas décadas. Algunas comunidades ya están lidiando con inundaciones frecuentes que representan una amenaza cada vez más real para la infraestructura con cada año que transcurre. La segunda sección de la herramienta de mapeo le permite conocer los riesgos y las complejidades a los que ya se enfrentan algunas comunidades. Esto pone de manifiesto lo mucho que está en juego a lo largo de nuestras costas. 

Este es un ejemplo destacado de Charleston, Carolina del Sur: 

La nueva herramienta de mapeo de la Unión de Científicos Conscientes pone de relieve cómo el aumento en el nivel del mar ya amenaza a la infraestructura esencial de algunas comunidades costeras en Estados Unidos.  

Las decisiones que tomemos hoy son importantes para nuestros hijos y nietos

Hay bastante certidumbre en la magnitud del aumento en el nivel del mar previsto de aquí al 2050, ya que depende en gran medida de la contaminación causante del calentamiento global que ya hemos emitido a la atmósfera. Sin embargo, no es tan certero el aumento en el nivel del mar que ocurrirá durante la segunda mitad del siglo, pues dependerá de las futuras emisiones de gases que atrapan el calor, así como de la forma en que los glaciares, las capas de hielo y otros sistemas terrestres respondan a esas emisiones. La tercera sección de nuestra herramienta de mapeo explora la gama de posibilidades para finales de siglo en función de las decisiones colectivas que tomemos en materia de emisiones. 

La nueva herramienta de mapeo de la Unión de Científicos Conscientes le permite comparar los riesgos que enfrentará la infraestructura costera para finales de siglo, misma que aparece como círculos, en un escenario de un aumento bajo en el nivel del mar (a la izquierda) en comparación con un escenario de un aumento elevado en el nivel del mar (a la derecha).  

Si logramos limitar el calentamiento futuro a 1,5°C o 2°C, aumentarían las posibilidades de limitar el aumento en el nivel del mar a futuro. La forma de hacerlo es mediante la reducción drástica de emisiones que atrapan el calor, eliminando progresivamente el uso de combustibles fósiles a nivel global e incrementando el uso de energías limpias. En un escenario de un aumento bajo en el nivel del mar, nuestro análisis concluye que unas 3.500 instalaciones de infraestructura esencial ubicadas a lo largo de las costas estadounidenses corren el riesgo de inundarse dos o más veces al año para el 2100.

Por otro lado, si las emisiones globales siguen aumentando y las temperaturas globales suben 3ºC o más, hay mayores posibilidades de que se presente un aumento más elevado en el nivel del mar. En un escenario de un aumento elevado en el nivel del mar, aproximadamente cuatro veces más instalaciones de infraestructura (cerca de 15.100 en total) corren el riesgo de sufrir inundaciones perjudiciales. 

¿Qué dijo? ¿Quiere más datos? ¿Y también formas de actuar?  

Nuestra herramienta de mapeo es un excelente recurso para empezar a explorar lo que está en riesgo a medida que suba el nivel del mar, pero sólo contiene algunas rebanadas del gigantesco pastel de datos que hemos horneado para este reporte. Si usted quiere un pedazo más grande de ese pastel, nuestras hojas de cálculo descargables sin duda le interesarán. Estas hojas de cálculo contienen: 

• Datos de las instalaciones en riesgo para el 2020 y 2030, así como para el 2050 y 2100. 

• Listas filtrables de todas las instalaciones en riesgo. 

• Datos de las instalaciones en riesgo bajo tres escenarios diferentes de aumento en el nivel del mar y tres frecuencias de inundación diferentes (2, 12 ó 26 inundaciones al año) 

• Datos a nivel comunitario con un resumen del total de instalaciones en riesgo en cada categoría de infraestructura 

• Estimaciones del número de personas que viven en comunidades con infraestructuras en peligro 

• Datos sobre cuántas de esas instalaciones se encuentran en comunidades designadas como “desfavorecidas” por la herramienta federal de evaluación de justicia climática y económica y sobre la demografía de las comunidades afectadas. 

Nuestro informe Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience señala los riesgos para la infraestructura costera que están pasando desapercibidos en gran medida. Pero también destaca las diversas soluciones disponibles para las comunidades y las muchas maneras en que los planificadores, los responsables de las políticas públicas y el sector privado pueden ayudar a las comunidades a desarrollar la resiliencia que necesitan a medida que sube el nivel del mar. Consulte el informe para conocer el conjunto completo de recomendaciones.  

Mediante el uso de nuestra nueva herramienta de mapeo, podemos ver claramente los problemas que representa el aumento en el nivel del mar para las infraestructuras de las que dependemos para la vivienda, la electricidad, la salud pública, la seguridad, la educación y mucho más. Pero también podemos ver un camino claro hacia una costa compuesta de comunidades resilientes. Esperamos que usted también pueda verlo aprovechando la información de nuestros mapas y aplicando una serie de recomendaciones con sentido común. 

We’re now in the midst of “Danger Season”– the months between May and October when we witness extreme events turbo-charged by climate change. These six months bring dangerous and often deadly conditions due to peaks in heat waves, heavy rainfall, hurricanes and wildfires.  

We’re witnessing an increase in costly damages thanks to fossil-fueled climate change, which has increased the intensity and frequency of some extreme events, and also thanks to more buildings and people in risky areas. On the ground, this means communities, local, state and the federal government, territories and tribes have less time to prepare for the next event and less time to respond after an event. These shorter timeframes between disasters pose significant challenges to finance and implement measures to make the infrastructure resilient to the next extreme event. 

Climate Change Is Straining Critical Infrastructure 

As climate drives global average temperatures to record highs month after month and year after year, our infrastructure is facing harsher conditions than ever. In the week preceding the official start of summer alone, conditions were already looking more and more dangerous: 

• Extreme Heat: Earlier in June, a heat wave in Puerto Rico stressed energy infrastructure damaged after hurricanes Maria and Fiona and caused transmission line failures between San Juan and Aguas Buenas. As a result, 350,000 people lost power.  As my colleague John Rogers explains, extreme heat can have cascading impacts on our electricity system making electricity more expensive, more polluting, and less reliable. As temperatures rise, so too does the demand for energy as more people turn to AC to keep cool. Higher demand means power grid operators, who start with the cleaner and cheaper plants like solar power, need to pull other, often dirtier, gas or coal-fired power plants online. As demand escalates beyond supply, grid operators run out of supply options which can result in blackouts. Under high heat conditions, power plants can also be less efficient at producing electricity as they normally would under cooler conditions.  But there is some good news: grid operators are finding that the solar power capacity has increased the grid system’s reliability during heatwaves. Sadly, extreme heat has disruptive impacts on other infrastructure as well, for example it can buckle railways, warp pavement and tarmac and melt tires on planes.  

• Heavy Rainfall and Flooding: Heavy rainfall in southern Florida in June swamped places like Fort Lauderdale, which received a record daily rainfall of 9.5 inches, bringing many places to a standstill. Roads were closed, people and vehicles were trapped by waist-high flooding, flights at airports in Miami, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood and Orlando were delayed, and disaster declarations were issued for 5 counties (Broward, Collier, Lee, Miami-Dade and Sarasota Counties). Southeast Texas suffered a deluge of rain from back-to-back storm events causing homes, gas stations, restaurants and neighborhoods to flood. Families were rescued from rooftops and some “lost everything”.  From April 28 to May 7 parts of East Texas recorded a massive 25 inches of rainfall compared to the average 1.2 inches during that same period (1981-2010). High water levels forced dam operators to implement controlled flow releases to alleviate the risk of aging dams breaking. The Upper Midwest is also suffering from major to historic flooding. The Governor of Iowa issued disaster declarations for 21 counties and reported that “hospitals, nursing homes and other care facilities were evacuated. Cities are without power, and some are without drinkable water.”  
• Wildfires: In early June, wildfires ignited at a rapid pace in California and in other western states causing road closures, evacuations, structural damage and poor air quality. My colleague Paul Arbaje explains that wildfires can have direct impacts on critical components of the power grid. For example, the intense heat can cause transmission lines to sag towards the ground, and the soot and smoke can weaken the transmission lines’ insulation causing a greater likelihood of faulting. And the damages to transmission and distribution systems can be costly. Arbaje notes that wildfire damage over six years (2000 to 2016) caused more than $700 million in damages to California’s transmission and distribution systems. 
• Compound and Cascading Events: In New Mexico, the reports of the compound disasters in just a short period of time are harrowing. High temperatures and sustained drought provided the conditions for two wildfires that burned thousands of acres, destroyed structures and took lives. Then Tropical Storm Alberto dropped eight inches of rainfall in some of the central parts of the state, more than the state sees in most years. This heavy rainfall resulted in flash flooding and dangerous debris flow. If those impacts weren’t enough, high winds caused a massive dust storm or “haboob” which clouded people’s visibility, leading to a traffic nightmare and a 20-car crash in a deadly pile-up. Even with the rainfall, wildfire containment and suppression efforts continue. And on one of the hottest days in New York City, a malfunctioning circuit breaker caused a power outage disrupting Amtrak train schedules and long delays for commuters. Scientists describe how compound events like what New Mexico experienced and cascading impacts like the disruption in train travel will become more frequent with climate change.   

As the costs of billion-dollar disasters continue to rise and we witness shorter intervals between disasters, how we build and repair infrastructure now matters. Climate science, policy incentives, standards and adaptation plans will help to advance the resilience of critical infrastructure and ensure it is built or repaired to withstand climate change risks over the lifecycle of the asset. But first we need major investments in climate resilience.   

Here are a few essential steps Congress must take: 

Factor in “Danger Season” when it comes to FEMA’s Disaster Resilience Fund and the appropriation of sufficient funds 

There’s a nagging challenge each year before the end of the fiscal year and around the start of Danger Season when FEMA’s Disaster Resilience Fund (DRF) is nearly running on empty. The DRF is FEMA’s primary source for funding its operational needs and disaster assistance for local and state governments and households after a disaster declaration. According to FEMA’s latest report, the DRF could be more than $6.8 billion in the red by September. FEMA administrator Criswell is still waiting for Congress to fulfill her request for an additional $9 billion for the DRF. 

Congress must prioritize robust funding for disaster relief and not leave FEMA hanging when it’s clear we’re in for a busy danger season. We also need Congress to come up with a more reliable and direct way to sustain DRF resources and to amend the Stafford Act to make clear that heat waves and wildfire smoke qualify for disaster assistance under the disaster declaration process.  

Congress must also pass the bipartisan and bicameral Reforming Disaster Recovery Act, which would permanently authorize the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) Program. The CDBG-DR program provides long-term recovery assistance grants to households and communities after a disaster. The bill would ensure more predictable dispersal of grants among other vital changes and important improvements.  

Provide federal funding to ensure critical infrastructure is Danger Season-proof and climate-ready

We rely on infrastructure like electricity to power our lights, hospitals when we’re hurt and schools to educate our children. Yet much of the US infrastructure is in disrepair, earning a below average, passing grade due to the lack of systematic investments in maintenance. This decade, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that  $2.58 trillion is needed to close the investment gap in critical infrastructure systems. Climate change-related impacts, such as sea level rise and extreme heat, have exacerbated these vulnerabilities and stressed the interdependent infrastructure systems causing complications if for example electricity shorts out and the lights go off at a local hospital.  

While funding challenges exist across the board, even in metropolitan areas with robust tax bases, an array of proactive financial mechanisms exist that local, state and the federal governments can implement to enhance funding opportunities. Uniting resources across public and private entities and sectors and at multiple scales helps to increase the capacity to plan and finance adaptation. The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) in San Francisco, for example, has developed a framework in which they identified resources they could pull from, including local taxes, local and state bonds, and state and federal grants, while also identifying potentially new funding avenues. Given the upfront costs of some adaptation measures, successful projects often pool from multiple government grants, as in the case of ABAG, which identified funding resources from seven different federal agencies.  

Federal, state and local governments can establish financial mechanisms such as infrastructure banks and revolving loan programs to help fund adaptation and resilience measures. For example: 

• FEMA has the Safeguarding Tomorrow Revolving Loan Fund Program, which provides $150 million for Fiscal Year 2024 to help state and local governments finance water, wastewater, infrastructure, disaster recovery, community and small business development projects. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) provided FEMA with $100 million annually for five years to support this program. 
• Rhode Island has an infrastructure bank to help develop and implement clean energy, climate resilience, brownfield remediation, and water infrastructure solutions and capital improvement projects for roads and bridges.  

• Miami’s Forever Bond provides support for sea level rise and flood prevention, roadways, parks and cultural facilities, public safety, and affordable housing. 

While the BIL investments are an important step forward to sustain and rebuild infrastructure systems, a limited portion of these funds will ensure infrastructure is built and repaired to withstand climate change risks. We will need Congress and the administration to develop additional programs and new pots of money to advance the much-needed resilience and reliability of the nation’s critical infrastructure into the future. 

Data show that federal dollars spent on mitigating extreme weather and climate change-related risks are cost effective. For example, on average, federal hazard mitigation grants save $6 for every dollar invested in damages avoided. And critical “lifeline” infrastructure projects, such as water treatment plants, can have a return of up to $31 for every dollar invested.  

Target funding to where—and who—needs it most 

As the BIL funds are being invested in projects across the country, it’s important that federal agencies guide the funding to those communities that have historically been disadvantaged and have the least resources to prepare for extreme weather and climate change related risks. If the goal of the Justice40 Initiative (J40) is met and 40 percent of the benefits of certain programs are targeted to disadvantaged communities, it’ll be a significant milestone for these communities and the federal government alike. 

However, a new UCS study by Amanda Fencl and colleagues followed federal funding flows from the BIL for the state of California. They found that, to date, only 24% of the BIL funding allocated in California went towards the designated disadvantaged communities J40 was designed to benefit. While it’s still early in the BIL allocation process, the Follow the Money report provides a useful snapshot of potential challenges at this stage in the implementation process, and recommends that the federal government improve the tracking of federal funding throughout the funding process. My colleague Chitra Kumar provides insights on J40 and additional recommendations here.  What I think most can agree on is that investments are sorely needed in these communities, and the federal agencies and the administration should commit to continuous improvements to meet the goals of J40. 

It’s time for sustained action to ensure climate-ready infrastructure 

There is no doubt the nation has a big to-do list when it comes to advancing climate-resilient infrastructure across sectors. But there is good news: we know investments now can save money down the road by reducing damages; we can learn a lot from how the BIL is being implemented and do better to close the resilience and Justice40 gaps; we have the latest climate science to inform planning; and we have resilience frameworks (e.g. the White House National Climate Resilience Framework and UCS’s Toward Climate Resilience framework) to help guide decisionmakers.

With Danger Season providing an unwelcome look into our climate future, wealthier nations like the United States must rapidly reduce global heat-trapping emissions, phase out fossil fuels and ramp up clean energy solutions. The administration and Congress must also invest in climate-ready infrastructure at the scale the climate crisis demands. In the interim, we also need the administration, Congress, state and local governments and the private sector to ensure we have the standards to guide the building and repair of climate-ready infrastructure. 

In an era when massive heat domes blanket large swaths of continents for days, wildfires burn through areas the size of small countries, and hurricanes regularly push the limits of what we once thought possible, sea level rise can seem like extreme weather’s low-key cousin. But with estimates suggesting that sea level rise will affect more than one billion people around the world in the next 25 years, this is one member of the dysfunctional climate change family that shouldn’t be ignored.

Why is this? Read on for the science you need to know about sea level rise, in seven parts.

1. Sea level rise is picking up speed

Globally, sea level is rising at more than double the 20th-century rate. Since 1901, global average sea level has risen at a rate of about 1.7 mm per year for a total rise of about 8 inches since that year. The pace of sea level rise since the start of the 20th century has been faster than at any point in the last 3,000 years.

As if that weren’t worrisome enough, studies show that it has been accelerating since the 1960s. Since 1993, sea level has risen by an average rate of 3.1 mm per year—just shy of double the 20th century average rate. And since 2006, it has been even faster: as high as 4.2 mm per year, according to recent estimates by NASA.

2. The primary cause of accelerating sea level rise is human activity

As people burn fossil fuels and emit heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide, our atmosphere and our oceans warm up. As the ocean warms, it expands. Historically, this was the dominant cause of sea level rise. But a warmer atmosphere and ocean also contribute to a loss of land-based ice sheets (Greenland and Antarctica) and glaciers (like those in Glacier National Park). That adds water to the oceans, which raises their level. This loss of land ice has been the dominant contributor to sea level rise since 2006.

Since the 1970s, global sea level rise has accelerated significantly and ice loss from glaciers and ice sheets has become the dominant contributor to the global trend. Source: IPCC AR6, WGI, Chapter 9, Cross-Chapter 9.1, Figure 1

Depending on how you slice it and what time period you’re looking at, at least 70% of global sea level rise since 1970 is attributable to human-caused climate change. A big chunk of the rise—roughly 30% since 1880 and roughly 10% since 1980—has been more directly attributed to heat-trapping emissions tied to the world’s largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.

3. Sea level rise along US coastlines is faster than the global average

Sea level rise rates vary significantly from region to region and even between locations in a given region. On average, sea level along the coastlines of the contiguous United States is rising more quickly than the global average.

Along much of the Eastern seaboard, for example, the pace and magnitude of sea level rise reflect both the global average and natural sinking—what scientists call subsidence—of the land. Much of that subsidence is happening for geological reasons. At the end of the last ice age, when the massive ice sheet that covered much of northern North America melted, much of the land sprung back up after having been pushed down by all that heavy ice for thousands of years. Like a spring bouncing up and down, the land is now sinking back down.

Along with the withdrawals of hydrocarbons, such as gas, human engineering has changed the amount of sediment flowing from rivers into the ocean. The settling of areas built on artificial fill has also contributed to land subsidence, land loss, and higher-than-average rates of sea level rise, particularly along the Gulf Coast. (Groundwater withdrawals globally have shifted so much water that it has affected the tilt of the Earth, but that’s another story!)

On average, over the 1993-2020 period, sea level has risen more quickly along the coastline of the contiguous United States than it has globally. Sea level rise rates are notably higher along the East and Gulf Coasts than they are on the West Coast. Source: Fifth National Climate Assessment, Figure 2.5. 4. Sea level rise is making storm surge more extensive and damaging

Storm surge is often the most damaging aspect of hurricanes, nor’easters, and other coastal storms. “Surge” happens when the winds generated by a storm system push surface water toward the coast over a long expanse of ocean. Depending on the size of the storm, that water can build into a large surge where sea water many feet deep overtakes coastal areas. More than simply the presence of water, though, surge is made more damaging by the excessive wave energy that typically accompanies it. The combination can lead to catastrophic conditions.  

Add higher sea levels and the threat is obvious: surge that can reach farther inland, bringing taller waves and causing greater destruction.

And when that destructive potential meets our increasingly- and often highly-developed coastline, disaster ensues.

Hurricane Sandy is a stark example of storm surge damage in a highly-developed region, made worse by rising seas. Scientists calculated the added economic damage inflicted on the region by the additional, climate-change driven water levels in 2012, and found that sea level rise caused an additional roughly $8.1 billion in damages (or approximately 13% of the $60 billion total) and affected approximately 71,000 additional people.

With 90 million people living along US coastlines and a coastal economy valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, our nation is far too exposed to the “when,” not “if,” of storm surge damages.

Flooding from Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge in the New York City metropolitan area in 2012 affected 71,000 more people than it would have without human-caused sea level rise. Source: Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 5. But storm or no storm, higher seas mean high tide flooding

Whether or not a storm ever strikes our coasts again, water is coming inland, delivered by one of nature’s gentlest cycles: the daily tides. Tidal flooding is now expanding in reach and frequency, along all the coasts in the contiguous U.S.

The tides are caused primarily by the gravitational force of the moon, which essentially pulls a bulge of water toward it (while inertia creates a bulge on the opposite side of the Earth).

(Cool fact: we say that the tides rise and fall, but a more accurate way to think about it is that, as the Earth rotates through that ^^ bulge of water, we move into and pass out of those higher water levels. Cool, right?) But sticking with the language we know, tides rise and fall once or twice daily along coastlines around the world, with a smaller change in water levels closer to the equator, and greater change farther from it.

Take Charleston, South Carolina, as an example: the average difference between high and low tide is 5-6 feet. Twice a month, when the moon is full and new, it exerts a stronger gravitational pull on the oceans and the tides are higher and lower than normal. There are more variations caused when the sun, moon and Earth align, but suffice to say, some tides are higher than others. And because the sea level in Charleston has already risen roughly 16 inches since 1901, normal high tides are now flooding Charleston in disruptive ways and with increasing frequency.

Charleston is far from alone; in little more than a decade, elevated sea levels along all the coasts have turned this into a disruptive national phenomenon.  A 2019 UCS analysis, Underwater, found that Charleston can expect roughly 500 homes to flood on a chronic basis by 2035. The increasing reach and frequency of this flooding are inexorable; our agency lies in what we do to slow sea level rise and what we do to prepare the communities in its path.

When higher sea levels are added on top of the normal variations in tide height, the more extreme high tides can reach onto normally dry land. As sea level rises further, this occasional flooding can become chronic, as less extreme tides begin to cause flooding as well. Source: Union of Concerned Scientists. 6. We know more sea level rise is unavoidable. How much more is uncertain.

With sea level rise accelerating, where are we headed? The many dynamics that contribute to rising seas mean there is a significant amount of uncertainty about future increases. That said, we have much more certainty than just a few years ago about the likely increases a few decades from now. Projections for the likely amount of global average sea level rise through 2050 now range between 7.5 and 11.4 inches while projections for the average rise on US coastlines is somewhat higher at 12.6 to 17.7 inches.

Longer term, two particular drivers loom large, with significant uncertainty around each—resulting in significant uncertainty around late century increases.

Currently, the projected range of global average sea level rise is between 2 and 6.5 feet by 2100. Though the higher end of that range is presently considered unlikely, it’s vital to future generations that we appreciate that sea level rise will continue long after the end of this century. We are unleashing a long-term process where ocean levels will rise over many centuries, depending heavily on what we do in the near term.

There is wide range in possible sea level rise amounts late this century for a couple reasons. First, we don’t know how much more carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping gases humanity will emit in the coming decades. Second, we don’t know exactly how Earth’s systems—especially land-based ice—will respond to those future emissions. Potentially large contributions from Antarctica, in particular, are not yet well enough understood. But we don’t need to pinpoint the time of, for example, the Thwaites Glacier collapse to say with certainty that we face an enormous threat that must be slowed.

Observations show that sea level rise is accelerating both globally and, as shown here, along the coastlines of the United States. The amount of sea level rise projected by 2050 is largely dictated by past human emissions of heat-trapping gases and is therefore more certain. The amount of sea level rise the US will experience by 2100 is much less certain, as it depends on current and future global emissions choices and the response of Earth’s systems—particularly the response of large ice sheets—to those emissions. Source: Fifth US National Climate Assessment, Figure 9.1. 7. Now is the time to slow–and prepare for–sea level rise

Which brings us to the other primary source of uncertainty: our societal actions. Knowing what’s at stake, our leaders should be working with urgency to rein in emissions of the heat-trapping pollution that’s driving sea level rise. They should be working with urgency to enable communities, economic sectors, and whole nations to prepare for the increases that are inevitable and increasingly likely.

Collectively, coastal communities in the US and around the world face a massive deadline if we’re aiming to get ahead of the flooding that is coming our way. A deadline to prepare, protect, or move communities and their assets out of the ocean’s reach. A deadline that poorer communities and nations have done little to create and require resources of richer ones to meet.

Sea level rise is a tricky beast. At the rate of just a few millimeters per year, it’s easy to think that it’s a threat that won’t need to be dealt with for decades. But preparing, protecting, or moving the people, assets, communities, and economies located along the coast will be a massive, costly, sustained undertaking. As such, it needs to start now. But because sea level rise is just a few millimeters per year, if we start now and build flexibility into future planning and policies, it’s possible for coastal communities to meet this looming deadline.

If you own a home in a flood-prone community or in a wildfire-prone area, you’ve probably seen your flood or home insurance rates go up in the last year, or are worried that they soon will. You may even worry you’ll be dropped entirely by your insurance provider.

If you’re a renter, you too may be feeling the pinch as rising insurance premiums are also hurting the rental market for affordable housing. Accelerating risks from climate change are colliding with shortcomings in insurance markets—such as a lack of transparent information and affordability provisions—to create a perfect storm for people and communities on the front lines of floods, droughts, and wildfires. As climate scientist Michael Mann has said, “Uninsurability is the first stage of uninhabitability.”

An insurance market in crisis

Last year, I wrote about the worsening risks of climate change for insurance, and since then the challenges have only grown and spread to more people and places. As another summer Danger Season gets underway with extreme floods in Texas and Florida, wildfires in California, and an above-average hurricane season predicted, it’s time for policymakers and regulators to get serious about real solutions to address the insurance crisis.

Having access to affordable home insurance is crucial to helping people safeguard what is likely to be their single biggest asset, and in turn protect their sense of well-being and stability. But we’ve all seen the news headlines of insurance companies withdrawing from states or announcing that they will stop issuing new property insurance policies, including in California, Florida and Louisiana. Data show that insurers in many states are facing growing losses in the homeowner’s insurance part of their business, in large part due to the escalating impacts of extreme weather and climate.

Recent news stories also indicate that rapidly rising insurance costs are becoming a pain point for landlords and developers of affordable housing. Survey data show that this is quickly escalating into a crisis for the rental market for affordable housing. This has significant equity implications, given our nation’s long-standing under-investment in affordable housing and the huge housing affordability crisis we are already in.

Egregiously, even as climate-driven disasters leave communities reeling, private insurers are continuing to underwrite insurance for the expansion of massive new fossil fuel projects that are directly responsible for fueling the climate crisis—and show no sign of withdrawing from these markets!

As the global insurance market reacts to a worldwide increase in costly extreme disasters, major reinsurance companies (which provide insurance for primary customer-facing insurance companies) are also raising rates. And insurers are in turn trying to pass those rate hikes through to consumers. Rate hikes can be significant from one year to the next, an unexpected shock to many homeowners, especially those on low or fixed incomes. While the changes are most acute in highly exposed states (such as Florida), climate risks are now so widespread that the increase in insurance premiums is spilling into the broader market, even in places less exposed, and could also affect the mortgage market and taxpayers more broadly. These larger macroeconomic risks were highlighted in a recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) workshop during a panel I chaired on insurance and climate risks.

How climate change is making things worse

The fossil fuel-driven increase in global average temperatures has induced a significant rise in extreme weather and climate events including extreme heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, and flooding. Last year the US experienced a record-breaking 28 extreme weather and climate disasters whose costs each surpassed one billion. As a recent report from Moody’s shows, insurance costs have also been rising as disasters mount (see graph below). Many of these disasters bear the fingerprints of climate change. Continued development in high-risk areas is also increasing costs when disasters do strike. Insured losses are a big part of the costs measured but uninsured losses and incalculable losses—like loss of lives, and mental health impacts—are also mounting.

With the relentless rise in global average temperatures continuing, unfortunately, we can expect the trend of extreme weather and climate related disasters to continue. Today’s challenges in the insurance markets are likely just a taste of what’s to come.

Insurers of last resort

Florida has seen a number of private insurance companies go into receivership in the last few years, and Citizens Property Insurance, the state taxpayer-backed insurer of last resort, has taken on more policies as private insurers go out of business. The latest data show another uptick in Citizens policies in advance of what is expected to be an active hurricane season.

This trend of more and more policyholders moving from the private homeowners insurance market to state-backed insurance of ‘last resort’—called Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plans—is also happening in other highly exposed states like California, Louisiana, and North Carolina. In California, the FAIR plan’s exposure to loss is getting increasingly unsustainable, putting it at risk of insolvency. Data from CA FAIR Plan show that: “As of March 2024 (partial fiscal year), the FAIR Plan’s total exposure is $340 billion, reflecting a 20% year-over-year increase.” (See chart below)

Source: California Fair Plan Property Insurance

A report from Milliman shows that:

• Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation grew by +277% between 2017 and 2022, resulting in $423 billion of in-force Total Insured Value (TIV) at the end of 2022.
• The Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corporation experienced the highest overall growth over the period, +414% resulting in $41 billion of 2022 in-force TIV.
• The Washington FAIR Plan (WA FAIR Plan) showed a five-year exposure increase of +226%, with about $70 million in TIV at the end of 2022.

Turmoil in public and private insurance markets

In both the public and private insurance markets, climate-driven risks are creating turmoil. The private homeowner’s insurance market—which covers insurance against wildfires—has seen major insurers like State Farm and Allstate cease to offer new insurance policies in California, and rates for others going up (as Travelers Insurance announced recently). Similar actions are also happening in parts of Colorado, Oregon and Washington, which are also severely wildfire prone.

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), administered by FEMA, is the primary source of flood insurance that isn’t covered by typical homeowners insurance. FEMA has also recently implemented changes to NFIP rates, with the intended aim of better reflecting current flood risk under the Risk Rating 2.0 program. Some of the steepest increases have come in states like Louisiana which are highly exposed to flooding; ten states have sued FEMA to block the changes. And because Congress has long failed to enact affordability provisions—which the NAS, FEMA, and others have called for—these rate increases are causing significant hardship to many people with the least resources.

Much of the nation’s housing stock is also likely under-insured against flooding because only homes in FEMA’s high flood-risk zones with federally backed mortgages are required to carry flood insurance—and that insurance is likely inadequate given what the science shows about accelerating coastal flood risks, which are not captured by current FEMA flood maps.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has repeatedly called out the taxpayer-backed flood insurance program in its ‘High Risk Series’ of reports on areas of exposure for the federal government. In its 2023 report, the GAO says: ‘The federal government needs to take additional actions to improve the long-term resilience of insured structures and crops. It also needs to address structural weaknesses in its insurance programs.’

The role of policymakers and regulators

Last year, Senators Whitehouse and Wyden launched an investigation into the climate-driven insurance crisis and sent letters to 41 insurance companies requesting more information on how they are addressing this problem. Earlier this month, the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing on how climate change is challenging insurance markets. The hearing featured wrenching testimony from Deborah Wood, a Florida resident who has had to sell her home because of the unaffordability of insurance. Non-coastal states were also represented as Senator Grassley admitted in his opening statement that ‘Iowa had six property and casualty companies pull out of insuring Iowans.’

Private insurance—the category into which most homeowners’ insurance falls—is regulated at the state level by state insurance commissioners who are supposed to look out for the interests of consumers. However, their role can be different in different states, and even in the states with strong oversight, the power of regulators is somewhat limited. For example, California has tried to implement a moratorium on rate increases in the past, but that has only been possible on a temporary basis as wildfire impacts grow. Ultimately, some insurers are making the decision that it is unprofitable to operate in certain markets and are choosing to exit them.

The US Department of the Treasury’s Federal Insurance Office and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners have jointly issued a call for data to better understand the impacts of climate-driven risks on the homeowners insurance market, with a focus on affordability and availability of insurance. The first tranche of data is expected this month; however, some of the most climate-exposed states—including Florida, Texas and Louisiana—will likely choose not to participate.

Having access to the latest data and science to understand not just today’s risks, but how those risks will change over the lifetime of a property, is crucial. Congress and regulators need to ensure more transparency in the insurance market on how companies are evaluating risks as they make decisions about premiums. There also needs to be better information on what kinds of incentives companies are providing for adaptation measures that would help reduce risks. Transparency will also help regulators look out for the interests of consumers and ensure that companies are not using climate risks as a cover for dropping less profitable lines of business—for example in less-wealthy communities.

The limits of insurance—and the need for just resilience policies

One sobering reality is that the pace and magnitude of the physical risks from climate change in all too many places is outpacing the ability of insurance to provide protection. Former California insurance commissioner Dave Jones has said, “I believe we’re marching toward an uninsurable future,” in many places. That will have significant consequences for the many people, homes, and the trillions of dollars of infrastructure assets in harm’s way, and we need to plan for it now.

Alongside the necessary but ultimately bounded role of insurance in a warming world, public and private decision makers must also shift investments away from business-as-usual maladaptive and risky choices to more resilient ones. The nation must scale up resources for climate resilience and ensure they are reaching communities in a just and equitable way. Funding for safe, affordable and climate-resilient housing must be expanded. Some places just won’t be possible to insure indefinitely, but people need options for fair pathways away from the risks.

And we’ve got to sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions and phase out fossil fuels to limit catastrophic climate impacts and help keep people safe in an increasingly perilous world.

The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” is a dangerous and detailed guide to undermining our democracy and a broadside attack on our health and well-being, not to mention our economic prosperity. Among other things, it takes specific aim at the federal government’s ability to address the climate crisis and instead doubles down on actions to worsen it. Anyone sobered by the relentless rise in global average temperatures and the spate of devastating and costly extreme weather and climate disasters we’ve been experiencing, anyone who thinks policies to benefit the public should be informed by robust, independent science, should take this threat very, very seriously.

Project 2025 has four pillars: a policy agenda, a Presidential Personnel Database, a Presidential Administration Academy, and a (yet to be released) playbook for the first 180 days of the next Administration. For the purposes of this blogpost, I will focus on the policy agenda.

So, what’s in this 920-page monstrosity of a document?

The first thing that strikes one as one reads the policy agenda document is that it is rooted in opposition to many hard-fought social gains, especially advances in civil rights, and instead panders to the interests of the rich and powerful. The document is littered with harmful mischaracterizations and attacks against the rights of Black, Brown and Indigenous people, women, LGBTQ+ people, people forced to migrate, and more. While claiming to uphold the interests of ordinary people, the document seeks to eviscerate protections crucial to guarding against money and power being the ultimate arbiters of policy decisions.

Another strong undercurrent is the attack on multilateral organizations and our nation’s interest in, and responsibility for, helping to solve global challenges through diplomacy and fair, joint agreements. Instead, an insular and militaristic approach emerges from the document—one that would take us back to a nasty, brutish world order, completely out of step with what this moment in time calls for. In a deeply interconnected world with complex global challenges—including the threat of autocratic governments and the dangerous proliferation of misinformation and disinformation—rising above short-sighted self-interest and working together with other nations is essential to our shared well-being.

Quite simply, the recommendations, which are listed agency-by-agency, are designed to undermine the institutions and governance structures our democracy relies upon to protect the public interest. If implemented, “Project 2025” would make addressing issues like climate change—which touches practically every aspect of our lives and is an urgent, collective global challenge—practically impossible.

Cliched phrases like “woke agenda” and “climate fanaticism” are used liberally throughout the document, demonstrating the unseriousness of the proposals and the intended targets of this destructive agenda.

Below are a few specific examples that highlight the harms, using direct quotes from the document (Fair warning: these quotes contain highly misleading or downright false information!):

1. Attacks on the process of advancing climate science to inform policymaking

In a blatant effort to politicize climate science, Project 2025 states that ‘The President should also issue an executive order to reshape the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and related climate change research programs… The next President should critically analyze and, if required, refuse to accept any USGCRP assessment prepared under the Biden Administration. Downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research…’ And then it goes on to spread disinformation: ‘OAR is, however, the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.’

Here are the facts: The USGCRP is tasked by Congress (under the 1990 Global Change Research Act, passed under the Bush administration) to produce regular updates on the state of climate science via the National Climate Assessment (NCA), with the Fifth NCA being released last year. As my colleague Rachel Licker and former UCS-er Andrew Rosenberg point out in this blogpost, the NCA provides exactly the kind of information policymakers need, without being policy-prescriptive. The NCA is produced through the work of hundreds of scientists, relying on research done by thousands more. It is not a political document. Suggesting that a new President “critically analyze” the work of scientists or reject their work just because it was done under a different administration is a blatant attempt to politicize science and would leave us all worse off.

NOAA scientists are doing essential work to keep us safe, including generating the science we need to understand and prepare for the rapidly worsening impacts of climate change. Good governance and leadership require facing hard facts—like the reality of climate change—head-on and taking decisive action to address problems rather than pretending they don’t exist.

2. A polluting fossil-fueled energy agenda

Unsurprisingly, Project 2025 also pushes for more fossil fuels, with statements like ‘Affirm an “all of the above” energy policy…’  and ‘Support repeal of massive spending bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).’ And in an appalling twist on reality, it includes a call to ‘Stop the war on oil and natural gas’—when in fact, it is big oil and gas corporations that are waging a war on our climate and health.  

The facts are clear that fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—are the leading cause of climate change and also cause air, water, and soil pollution that imposes an enormous public health and environmental burden. Yet the authors of this policy document are intent on promoting fossil fuels and protecting the massive profits of the fossil fuel industry at any cost. Rolling back the IIJA and the IRA—which are already delivering tremendous benefits to working people around the country while boosting clean, affordable energy, in red states and blue— is just plain perverse. A transition to a clean energy economy is not just good for the climate, it’s good for our economic prosperity and well-being, as our research shows.

3. Attacks on the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)

Project 2025also launches a broadside attack on our nation’s bedrock environmental law, NEPA: ‘The President should instruct the CEQ to rewrite its regulations implementing NEPA along the lines of the historic 2020 effort and restoring its key provisions such as banning the use of cumulative impact analysis.’

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was originally signed into law by President Nixon in 1970 and is considered the Magna Carta of federal environmental laws, as my colleague David Watkins writes. And consideration of cumulative impacts has been part of it dating back to at least 1997.  This must remain the case. Public health science and the lived experience of overburdened communities shows that the combined effect of pollution from multiple sources accumulating over time and concentrated in communities is much more harmful to health and the environment than any single pollutant or source measure would indicate. Cumulative impacts analyses and policies better reflect reality—and they can be more efficient in capturing the impacts of multiple sources and pollutants than addressing them one by one.

The 2020 actions to gut NEPA, including by removing mention of cumulative impact analysis, were far from being historic and might more accurately be called infamous. They were also completely at odds with long-standing bipartisan support of this bedrock protective law. The CEQ has recently restored those provisions and updated NEPA in line with requirements of the bipartisan permitting reform rule passed last year. Reversing these changes would once again set back progress on protecting people’s health and the environment and would quite simply be a massive giveaway to polluting companies and a waste of taxpayer resources.

4. Attacks on international climate finance aligned with climate and development goals

On the global dimensions of the climate crisis, Project 2025 completely distorts the facts and cynically pits the imperative to alleviate poverty against the twin imperative to limit the disproportionate impacts of the climate crisis on those who have the fewest resources: ‘The Biden Administration’s extreme climate policies have worsened global food insecurity and hunger. Its anti–fossil fuel agenda has led to a sharp spike in global energy prices.’

Global energy prices have little to do with climate policies and instead price spikes and volatility are driven by global supply and demand factors, weather, and geopolitics (e.g., in the recent past, events like Russia’s unjust war on Ukraine and the macroeconomic impacts of COVID-19). Meanwhile, devastating climate impacts—including multi-year drought, extreme heat and flooding—have had significant impacts on people’s health, livelihoods, and food and water availability around the world, including for people in Africa (which the document repeatedly references). The latest IPCC report shows that these impacts are likely to worsen as climate change accelerates.

Addressing poverty and climate change together, instead of pitting these goals against each other, is vital. Setting up this false dichotomy exposes how little the authors truly care about or understand what’s needed to protect the well-being of people who are at risk of being driven further into poverty by the ravages of climate change, as research from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund show. According to the World Bank’s estimates, “Climate change could drive 68 million to 135 million into poverty by 2030. Climate change is a particularly grave threat for countries of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia — the regions where most of the global poor are concentrated.”

As the largest historical contributor to global heat-trapping emissions, and a relatively rich country, the U.S. bears responsibility for providing climate finance to help lower income nations cope with climate impacts and transition away from fossil fuels. Addressing these issues domestically, too, in a fair way is critical. Within the U.S., it is the relatively rich who are most responsible for carbon emissions and have benefitted the most from the fossil fuel-dependent economy. They should help ensure a just and equitable transition to clean energy that protects the well-being of fossil fuel-dependent workers and communities and frontline communities overburdened by pollution from fossil fuels.

5. Eliminating the Use of the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC)

In yet another blatant attempt to prop up the fossil fuel industry and pretend away the reality of climate change, Project 2025 says that ‘The President should eliminate the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), which is cochaired by the OSTP, OMB, and CEA, and by executive order should end the use of SCC analysis.’

Climate change is costly, there’s no question about that. Right now, those costs are borne by all of us, not the fossil fuel industry that’s profiting from its climate-destroying products and its decades of deception that have delayed the transition to clean energy. The social cost of carbon is a widely accepted economic metric that puts a dollar value on the damage caused per ton of carbon, allowing us to set policies that take those costs into account. In economist-speak, this is just a commonsense way to correct a market failure and internalize the externality costs of fossil fuels. The National Academies of Sciences has advocated for updates to the social cost of carbon, and the Environmental Protection Agency has recently undertaken an update to the SCC based on the latest science and economics. The EPA’s update has undergone rigorous independent external peer review.

Trashing all this careful work and ending the use of the SCC does not change the fact that climate change is expensive. Just ask anyone who’s lost their home to an extreme wildfire or to coastal flooding exacerbated by sea level rise—risks that are set to accelerate with fossil-fueled climate change. Or think about the millions of dollars at risk in lost wages or health costs for outdoor workers on extreme heat days. Burying the facts doesn’t change them but it can adversely affect policies we must enact to cut the heat-trapping emissions driving climate change. Again, we lose, and the fossil fuel industry wins if the SCC is eliminated.

6. Prohibitions on Treasury and SEC actions to account for the financial risks of climate change

Project 2025 is more interested in promoting fossil fuels and protecting the profits of the fossil fuel industry and its allies, rather than protecting the financial stability of our economy, as these excerpts show:

‘The next Administration should use Treasury’s tools and authority to promote investment in domestic energy, including oil and gas. It should reverse support for international public- (and private-) based efforts promoting Environmental, Social, and Governance and Principles for Responsible Investment, both of which have badly damaged U.S. energy security.’ And: ‘Congress should: Prohibit the SEC from requiring issuer disclosure of social, ideological, political, or “human capital” information that is not material to investors’ financial, economic, or pecuniary risks or returns.’.

Once more, the intent could not be clearer: rather that ensure that fossil fuel companies disclose the material risks their products pose to our climate and economy, and investors’ exposure to those risks, the report’s authors prefer to protect short-term corporate profits over the stability of the financial system. As my colleague Laura Peterson writes, opposition to ESG mandates is ‘largely whipped up by dark money groups connected to the fossil fuel industry.’

SEC-mandated climate disclosure for public companies was long overdue, and the final rule fell short of what is needed. Yet opponents including the US Chamber of Commerce sued to block the rule, and the SEC has recently paused enforcement. A group of legislators is nevertheless urging the SEC to move forward in as robust and expeditious a way as possible, noting that ‘Investors need access to climate risk disclosures that are reliable, standardized, and easily accessible to properly assess the risks associated with their investments. Climate change is transforming the economy, increasing mitigation and resilience costs and risks from weather and supply chain disruptions for all businesses.‘

There is so much more that is egregious in the Project 2025 policy agenda, it’s quite honestly stomach-churning to contemplate. Let’s hope it never gets beyond a theoretical exercise in how to destroy our country and leave our children’s futures dark and uncertain. Fortunately, science, democracy and justice provide a much better path forward.

Can a heat wave ever melt climate denial in Florida? It certainly hasn’t yet. Governor Ron DeSantis’s recent response is a scorched-earth campaign to wipe out climate science from state policy. On the very day in May that Key West registered a record 115-degree heat index, DeSantis signed a bill that:

• Eliminates requirements for businesses to consider climate friendly products and practices in lodging and vehicle fuel efficiency;
• Prohibits offshore wind energy;
• Prohibits localities and homeowners associations from restricting or banning fuel sources and appliances, most notably gas;
• Eliminates requirements for the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to establish goals and strategies to increase renewable energy and include renewable energy development and reduction of fossil fuels in long-range forecasts of energy supply and demand;
•  Repeals grant programs and incentives for individuals, businesses, school districts and local governments to diversify energy supplies to mitigate the effects of climate change;

Waving his magical-thinking wand to make climate change disappear from virtually every aspect of policymaking, DeSantis bloviated that he is “rejecting the agenda of radical green zealots.” Not even two weeks later, Florida was hit with a Memorial Day weekend of yet more heat records in Miami and Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Tampa hit a daily record of 97 degrees on May 29.

That caused a television meteorologist at NBC’s Miami affiliate to all but say that Florida is under a state of climate emergency, inflamed by political insanity. Meteorologist Steve MacLaughlin said on social media that “Florida is on fire, underwater and unaffordable.” He told viewers in a video that the state was rolling back important climate change legislation and language despite “record heat, record flooding, record rain, record insurance rates and the corals are dying all around the state.”

MacLaughlin did not stop there. He made a public plea for viewers to register their concern for climate change at the ballot box. “Please keep in mind the most powerful climate change solution is the one you already have in the palm of your hands — the right to vote,” MacLaughlin said. “And we will never tell you who to vote for, but we will tell you this: We implore you to please do your research and know that there are candidates that believe in climate change and that there are solutions, and that there are candidates that don’t.”

MacLaughlin’s stance was especially notable given the harassment many television weather forecasters have experienced for following the science to tie climate change to increasingly severe weather. The harassment was symbolized by last year’s resignation by Chris Gloninger, an award-winning television meteorologist in Des Moines, Iowa after he received threatening emails.  

“Danger Season” realities

Florida is hardly the only state in a state of denial as the United States enters what the Union of Concerned Scientists describes as “Danger Season”–the period from late spring through early fall where the nation is at particular risk of a host of devastating rains that can trigger floods, hurricanes and storms that can deliver baseball-sized hail, and extreme heat and drought that can kill people and ignite wildfires.

As heat saturated the Sunshine State, a siege of severe storms killed at least dozen people on Memorial Day weekend across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia and Alabama. Hundreds of thousands of people in Texas lost power, many streets in Houston were under water and several people were killed by blown-down trees and limbs that fell on houses, tents, trailers and vehicles. A few days later, Denver recorded the largest hailstones in 35 years.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has dutifully issued disaster declarations for many counties that have been battered by severe weather since late April. On May 15, as DeSantis deleted climate change from state policy while Florida broke heat records, Abbott wrote President Biden for a White House disaster declaration. Abbott said the incidents were “of such severity and magnitude that an effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments, and that supplementary federal assistance is necessary to save lives and to protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a disaster.”

Deadly state policies

When it comes to acting on climate change to avert the threat of disasters, though, Abbott is much like DeSantis. He has vetoed legislation for energy efficiency in new construction, signed laws banning localities from banning gas in new construction and issued an executive order that directs “every state agency” to fight federal actions to reduce dependence on oil and gas.

Most cruelly, Abbott signed a bill last year that bars cities and counties from mandating heat protection rules stronger than the state’s, that might allow for things such as more frequent water breaks,. This year, DeSantis signed a similar bill. This is despite the fact that Texas has set heat death records three years in a row, and  leads the nation in heat-related construction worker deaths. Both Texas and Florida were in the top five states for heat deaths last year. A 2021 analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that by 2065, the outdoor exposure to hazardous heat could quadruple.

Last week, the Associated Press published an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that last year was the deadliest for heat across the nation in 45 years of record keeping, with heat listed as a factor on more than 2,300 death certificates. It was a sorry exclamation point on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s assessment that 2023 was the Earth’s warmest year on record..

And even that number of US deaths may be a vast understatement given that heat illnesses are often not mentioned on death certificates. Texas A&M climate scientists Andrew Dessler and Jangho Lee told the AP that last year’s real national annual heat death toll may be more like 11,000–and that it could get much worse. “We’re going to look back at 2023 and say, man, that was cool,” Dessler said. “The problem with climate change is, if it hasn’t pushed you over the edge yet, just wait.”

The question is: when will the toll of heat and severe weather push DeSantis, Abbott and like-minded politicians toward policies to cool the planet? Last year, the nation suffered a record 28 billion-dollar weather disasters, hugely impacting Midwestern and Southern states thus far resistant to climate-friendly policies.

Quietly reaping benefits

There are occasional nods to reality as DeSantis last month signed into law a measure requiring homeowners to disclose a property’s flood history. But for the most part, conservative states are engaged in a selfish game of quietly reaping the benefits of renewable energy while doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, to retard progress on the national level.

For instance, the top four states for wind generation growth over the last decade, according to a report in April by Climate Central, are Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Kansas. The top states for solar power growth since 2014 are Texas and Florida. Two of the top three states for adding clean energy jobs in 2022 were Texas and West Virginia, according to the US Department of Energy.

Nonetheless, all of those states are among the more than two dozen suing the Environmental Protection Agency over the Biden administration’s rules that cut carbon pollution at the national level from existing coal-fired power plants and new natural gas plants. They all are also among the two dozen states that currently have laws on the books prohibiting localities from banning gas in new buildings, despite the wealth of science showing that the methane associated with gas production is a potent contributor to global warming. Not surprisingly, many of these same states also rank in the bottom half of the State Energy Efficiency Scorecard published by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

Yet, when climate-related disaster strikes, these same states beg for federal disaster aid. Only then do they become, to borrow from DeSantis, “radical green zealots.” Except that the only green they are seeking is federal cash.

While the government should indeed deliver aid to families and businesses that suffer destruction, it would be a lot better if Abbott and others returned the favor by not trying to destroy federal efforts to stem the forces behind the damage. Abbot has boasted that “Texas is not going to stand idly by and watch the Biden administration kill jobs.” It will be more momentous when he and his ilk are finally humbled enough by storms and heat to say they will no longer stand idly by to watch climate change kill people.

Source: https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-predicts-above-normal-2024-atlantic-hurricane-season

The May 23 outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecasts 17 to 25 named storms, eight to 13 of which could become hurricanes.

NOAA https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-predicts-above-normal-2024-atlantic-hurricane-season

Four to seven major hurricanes are forecast. This is a concerning outlook, and it can be explained as follows.

The recipe for the 2024 hurricane outlook

Ingredients:

1. Record warm sea surface temperature (SST) for most of the Atlantic (currently 1-2 degrees Celsius above average, which is more like temperatures seen in August; promotes rapid intensification).
2. High Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE – second highest after 2010; a high ACE is linked with the most destructive hurricanes).
3. La Niña (77% chance of forming in late summer-early fall; La Niña is linked to reduced wind shear. High wind shear breaks down cyclone formation, especially in the Western Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean).

NOAA https://www.climate.gov/media/13556

Instructions:

Put everything together leading up to May, test for possible results.

Results:

1. A likelihood of higher-than-normal level of activity (record warm SST contributes to the high end of the forecast; the longer the ocean is super warm, the longer and stronger the season is likely to be).
2. Potential for rapid intensification of storms when approaching land (in less than 24h, brings intense rainfall and challenges for preparedness; most if not all Category 5 hurricanes in the last few years intensified rapidly).

Serious potential consequences, need for increased preparedness

This is the highest ever May hurricane outlook issued by NOAA. But that is not what we should focus on, because we know it only takes one landfall to bring disaster.

We must be ready. US coastal communities are tired of crossing their fingers and hoping these storms of epic, record-breaking proportions veer away from their homes, dissipate, or spin out over the Atlantic.

It’s imperative that local, state, and federal policymakers and emergency planners help keep communities safe by prioritizing investments to get homes, businesses, and infrastructure in frontline communities climate-ready and be prepared to ensure a quick and just recovery should disaster strike. Reining in heat-trapping emissions driving the climate crisis is also essential.

If we act on climate, we may be able to substitute some of the ingredients in the outlook recipe, and come out with better results in future tries. And who doesn’t like a good recipe substitution?

At this year’s annual general meetings, major investor-owned fossil fuel corporations are facing fewer climate-related shareholder proposals than at any time since the adoption of the Paris climate agreement in 2015. But that doesn’t mean they’re under less pressure over their role in driving the climate crisis. As ExxonMobil retaliates against its own shareholders with an unprecedented lawsuit over a resolution requesting medium-term targets for reducing global warming emissions, institutional investors are upping the ante with calls to vote against members of the company’s board of directors.

And this spring’s corporate annual meetings are taking place against a backdrop of protests, new climate lawsuits (including a criminal complaint against the CEO and directors of TotalEnergies), a bicameral congressional investigation into Big Oil’s climate disinformation, and a call by congressional leaders for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long history of engaging in deceptive practices.

Here’s what’s happening—and what to expect as Big Oil’s annual meetings wrap up this week.

Shell evades questions and highlights “uncertainty”

On May 21, Shell held its hybrid annual meeting—disrupted by shareholders fed up with the corporation’s weak-and-getting-weaker climate action.

Attending virtually thanks to a proxy provided by the UK responsible investment organization ShareAction, I was able to ask our question:

Internal corporate documents made public through a bicameral Congressional investigation in the US demonstrate that days after President Trump was elected, a Shell media manager worked to “soften [methane reduction] language and still be true to ourselves” in an effort not to upset the Trump Administration, which sought to roll back methane standards. Meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute (API)—in which Shell holds a leadership role—launched a voluntary methane program in 2017 that internal documents reveal was explicitly designed “to stave off future regulation.” Why, then, did Shell’s Gretchen Watkins call the final watered down Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations “frustrating and disappointing” in 2020?

Unfortunately, Shell CEO Wael Sawan’s response failed to address the blatant inconsistency between Shell’s internal and external communications about methane regulations, or between the corporation’s stated support for methane regulations and its trade association’s creation of a voluntary initiative to block mandatory rules.

Throughout the meeting, Shell used “uncertainty” as an excuse for rolling back its climate targets, claiming that the corporation can’t stick with medium-term emissions reduction benchmarks because it doesn’t know what governments or customers will do. Such doublespeak is the latest evolution in the fossil fuel industry’s deception playbook. These corporations may no longer be disputing climate science—now they are creating doubt about climate policy even as they seek to water it down, directly and through trade associations such as API. Yet no such uncertainty prevents them from planning further expansion of their oil and gas business.

In the face of opposition by the board, about one-fifth of Shell’s shareholders nonetheless voted in favor of a resolution put forward by the climate advocacy organization Follow This, calling for the corporation to align its medium-term emissions reduction targets—including emissions from use of its oil and gas products—with the goals of the Paris agreement.

BP keeps climate-conscious shareholders out

BP faced no climate-related shareholder proposals this year. On April 25, the corporation held only an in-person annual meeting, with no webcast and very little news coverage—even as activists protested the corporation’s role in the climate crisis and fueling the war in Gaza.

A supporter of ShareAction had planned to ask a question on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists, but was wrongly denied entry into the meeting.

Here’s the question we wanted to ask BP:

In its annual report, BP disclosed that total emissions had increased over the past year as a result of increased oil and gas production, representing a setback to corporate climate goals. Climate attribution science has quantified BP’s historical responsibility for global emissions, and social science is building a base of evidence of past and ongoing climate disinformation and obstruction campaigns by the fossil fuel industry. In recent weeks, two more jurisdictions in the US brought lawsuits to hold BP and other major fossil fuel producers accountable for climate damages and deception. Also, a report by the NGO Carbon Tracker found that BP’s transition plan is not aligned with the Paris climate goals. How do you calculate BP’s potential liability for its past actions and future foreseeable and preventable harms associated with its business plans?

We are still waiting for an answer.

ExxonMobil and Chevron on the hot seat

This week, ExxonMobil and Chevron will hold their annual meetings. They’ve both been in the news recently for being represented at a meeting at which former President Trump reportedly requested $1 billion in oil and gas industry contributions to his campaign in exchange for promised deregulation and dismantling of climate measures, accelerated permitting, and preservation of tax breaks.

Chevron bankrolls front group

Chevron’s virtual annual meeting comes near the end of what our allies at Amazon Watch are calling #AntiChevronMonth, when people around the world take action to call out the corporation’s horrific track record driving climate change, pollution, environmental injustice, and human rights violations.

Attending on the proxy of a climate-conscious shareholder, my colleague Laura Peterson plans to ask one question of Chevron:

In the first six months of 2023, Chevron directed between $2.5 and $7.5 million to a group new to Chevron’s trade association disclosures—Californians for Energy Independence. The group characterizes itself as a coalition of 200,000 Californians, but research has shown it’s actually a classic “astroturf” group funded by fossil fuel companies and related organizations. The group is behind expensive media campaigns to defeat legislation that would protect communities from harmful emissions resulting from oil and gas extraction, and incorrectly blames high gas prices in California on state politics. A Chevron 2023 report says the company lobbies “ethically, constructively and in a nonpartisan manner.” How does financing a front group that spreads partisan disinformation align with that statement?

ExxonMobil adapts disinformation strategies

ExxonMobil’s virtual annual meeting comes amid an unprecedented lawsuit by the corporation against its own shareholders, with growing numbers of institutional investors saying they will vote against one or more board members to protest this bullying. It also marks the end of the Board tenure of climate scientist Dr. Susan Avery.

I’ve submitted two questions to ExxonMobil:

1. ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods has recently been dismissing evidence of the company’s climate deception as “what was said 30 years ago,” and insisting that “the world has moved on.” But when I asked one of my climate scientist colleagues to evaluate the corporation’s latest “Advancing Climate Solutions” reports, she found them misleading at best, dishonest at worst—and concluded that while ExxonMobil’s strategy may have changed, its output of disinformation continues. And this month, congressional leaders called on US Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate ExxonMobil, other major oil and gas companies, and two of their trade associations for their decades-long climate disinformation campaign—including claims and actions since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015. What legal and financial consequences should shareholders anticipate from the ever-growing mountain of evidence of ExxonMobil’s deceptive practices and other corporate misconduct?
2. In its latest Climate Lobbying Report, ExxonMobil revealed that in 2022 it withdrew from the Independent Petroleum Association of America, which represents “independent” (i.e. smaller) oil and gas producers. The same report found 52 trade associations “aligned” with ExxonMobil’s climate policy positions, and three groups “partially aligned.” Yet many of the associations in which the corporation maintains membership are actively spreading climate disinformation and obstructing climate progress. For example, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers is running a massive ad campaign falsely claiming that the US Environmental Protection Agency has banned gasoline-powered cars. Why is ExxonMobil using a report requested by shareholders to justify its ongoing support for trade associations that promote climate disinformation, oppose climate action, and seek to delay the urgently needed transition to clean energy?

Based on my experience attending ExxonMobil corporate annual meetings on behalf of climate-conscious shareholders since 2016, I don’t expect a sudden rush of candor from Chair and CEO Darren Woods. Yet ExxonMobil’s efforts to censor climate-conscious shareholders—rather than transforming climate-destroying business model—are likely to provoke increased outrage from investors and affected communities.

The leaders of these corporations may think they can escape accountability by stonewalling, greenwashing, blocking shareholders from even discussing climate-related issues, and engaging in a concerted campaign to undermine Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing. They couldn’t be more wrong. These efforts to suppress shareholder input are exactly why investors are turning their attention to unseating oil and gas company board members.

As Danger Season 2024 brings extreme events like heat waves, heavy rainfall, wildfires, and poor air quality to millions of people across the United States, major oil and gas corporations should expect growing scrutiny from policymakers and public prosecutors over their role in driving the climate crisis—and rising votes of no confidence in corporate leadership the longer they continue to delay, deceive, and disinform.

Announcing recently that the world broke a record by generating 30 percent of all electricity from renewable sources in 2023, the British think tank Ember said the data proves we are in a “new era” of energy in which a permanent decline in fossil fuels is “inevitable.”

The new era would be even more inevitable if the United States fully committed to phasing out fossil fuels. More on that shortly. But first, the undeniably good news.

The new global record in the generation of renewable energy was powered primarily by solar and wind. Solar power has been the fastest growing source of electricity in the world for 19 years in a row according to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2024. Providing just 1.1 percent of the globe’s electricity in 2015, solar now produces 5.5 percent of the supply.

In that regard, the United States is a major player. Our share of solar electricity has grown from 1 percent to 6 percent since 2015. In terms of raw numbers, the United States is the world’s second-leading generator of electricity from solar energy, with China the global leader by far.

Wind power offers a similar story, having more than doubled its share of the world’s electricity from 3.5 percent in 2015 to nearly 8 percent in 2023. And again, the United States looks great, doubling wind’s share of US  electricity generation from 5 percent in 2015 to 10 percent in 2023, coming in, again, second behind China.

The combined 16 percent of wind- and solar-powered electricity flowing throughout the nation is especially impressive given the fact that only 0.2 percent of US electricity came from these sources just a quarter century ago. The shift helped the United States to drop its share of fossil fuels in the energy mix from 67 percent in 2015 to 59 percent last year. The shift, combined with the huge shift from ultra-dirty goal to more-moderately dirty gas helped cut our power sector carbon dioxide emissions by 41 percent  from a peak in 2007.

US still needs to do more

But that pace of change remains far from sufficient for the United States to do its part for climate change and to help the planet’s temperatures stay under the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7-degrees Fahrenheit) limits of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The main reasons: our unsustainable levels of energy consumption as a wealthy nation and our too-slow phaseout of fossil fuels.

According to the Ember report, per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the United States are three times higher than the global average and remain among the highest of all major economies.

Many US politicians who are apologists for the fossil fuel industry often deflect blame for heat-trapping gases onto newer mass emitters such as China or India. Indeed, China is a conundrum, adding more than half of the world’s solar and wind installations last year yet still producing more than half the world’s electricity from coal and spewing nearly a third of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Countries like China and India clearly need to do more. But the fact remains that, even with reductions of recent years, the United States, which produced one quarter of the world’s global warming gases two decades ago, still produces between 13 percent and 14 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, more than triple our share of the world’s population. As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says on its Climate.gov website: “The United States bears a greater share of the responsibility for current conditions—on both a national and per-person level.”

A recent analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) shows that the best ways for the United States to meet its climate goals under the Paris Agreement and achieve a near phaseout of fossil fuels are to ramp up renewables in the power sector, increase energy efficiency, and  electrify buildings, transportation, and industry.

Doing so would generate tremendous benefits, including a more than $100 billion reduction in consumer energy costs in 2030, $800 billion in public health benefits by 2050, and nearly $1.3 trillion in avoided climate damages by 2050. While the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) roughly doubles the current pace of annual emissions reductions to about 3 percent per year through 2030, the country will need to further accelerate its reductions to roughly 5 percent per year to achieve its climate targets.

Slash gas

Fully decarbonizing the power sector—which is a key strategy for meeting our climate goals—will require dramatically slashing gas use as we continue to phase out coal. A UCS analysis showed that wind, solar and other renewables would nearly triple to 60 percent of US electricity generation in 2030 and 92 percent in 2050, while gas use would fall from more than 40 percent of the US electricity mix today to 25 percent in 2030 and a mere 2 percent in 2050.

Gas once played an important role in suppressing coal-fired electricity, with less carbon emissions. But the benefit has expired. The emissions of methane, which traps heat much more effectively than carbon dioxide, is now widely viewed alongside carbon dioxide as a critical threat that could lead the United States to miss its commitment to the Paris Agreement.

One key reason our power sector emissions are triple the global rate, according to the International Energy Agency, is that we still source 42 percent of our electricity from gas. Politicians can sneer at China all they want for coal and carbon emissions, but the United States spews so much methane via gas and oil operations that it is far and away the world leader for that fossil fuel. The United States pumped a world-record amount of crude oil last year, with ExxonMobil and Chevron seeing some of their biggest profits in a decade. Our gas generation last year hit a new record too, preventing a global drop in generation.

Globally, the IEA’s net zero scenario says the world’s gas generation must fall from its current 23 percent of the world’s electricity to just 2.4 percent over the next 16 years, with “no need for new long lead time upstream oil and gas conventional projects.” To help meet that goal, both UCS and IEA analyses call for roughly tripling the electricity generated by wind, solar, and other renewables by 2030. 

Other wealthy nations are proving that the technology is already here to reduce our carbon intensity and speed the energy transition. While 59 percent of electricity in the United States is produced by fossil fuels, the share in several other wealthy major economies such as the United Kingdom and Germany, now stands under 50 percent. Britain’s per-capita carbon emissions are a quarter of those in the United States.

Tug of war

The major question in this country is the will to act. We are currently in a tug-of-war between progress and the pugnacity of the fossil fuel industry. Our potential to speed toward net zero is obvious. There are the commercial-scale offshore wind farms being developed off the East Coast. Solar offers many avenues for adoption, from individual rooftops to large-scale fields. Electrification, from home heat pumps to vehicles, is no longer an oddity.

Significant tax credits and incentives are available in the Inflation Reduction Act that will significantly ramp-up investments in all these areas. The Biden administration has also launched several initiatives to boost renewable energy infrastructure and announced several major rules to cut methane emissions and carbon pollution from coal plants and motor vehicles and trucks. If they all became permanent, the United States would take a rightful place in global leadership.

But some of those rules are already being challenged in the courts by the fossil fuel and auto industries, and conservative states friendly to oil and gas interests; more are likely to be challenged. The ultimate future of those rules may rest in the hands of a conservative US Supreme Court and former President Trump, who pledges to kill those rules if elected.

He renewed that pledge last month at a private gathering of oil and gas executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In attendance, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times, were executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron and the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s top lobbying arm.  

Meanwhile the oil industry continues to smother this nation like no other wealthy nation with disinformation, denial, and delay on the transition. Last month, Democrats in the House and Senate published a joint staff report loaded with so much evidence of disinformation that Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin last week urged the US Department of Justice to investigate the fossil fuel industry for its coordinated campaign.

Last fall, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods deployed the industry’s playbook of doubt and diversion in a speech to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit. Despite the IEA’s assessment that no more major oil and gas projects are needed, Woods claimed, “While renewable energy is essential to help the world achieve net zero, it is not sufficient—wind and solar alone can’t solve emissions in the industrial sectors that are at the heart of a modern society.”

This month, the American Petroleum Institute launched an ad campaign urging the nation to “harness America’s abundant oil and natural gas.” The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a top trade organization representing many top oil and chemical companies, launched a Don’t Ban Our Cars ad campaign against the Biden administration’s new tailpipe rules. The rules are not a ban; rather, they tighten standards that the administration hopes will result in incentivizing 56 percent of new cars to be electric by 2032.

When you consider all the disinformation, it’s remarkable that the United States has any kind of leadership in the renewable revolution. What we can hope for is that reports such as the one from Ember are a sign that, for all the huffing and puffing of Big Oil and Gas, the market—that is to say, the people—are speaking more loudly.

Most people in the United States—perhaps because of disinformation—are not yet be ready to completely do away with oil and gas. Still, according to a Pew survey last year, two of every three people in the United States want policies that prioritize renewables over more fossil fuel generation. In a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll last year, three out of four respondents say they would be comfortable with solar panels in their community and nearly 7 in 10 respondents said they would be comfortable with wind turbines.

As Darren Woods pontificates about the “unmatched” societal benefits of oil and gas, the deficits are piling up all around us. Climate change and its associated storms, heat waves, droughts and spread of infectious diseases now stand at the tipping point of making life miserable and unsustainable across the planet. Woods skips over the wealth of studies in recent years that say millions of people die every year around the world from pollution associated with fossil fuels.  

More and more, people no longer want to join Woods and the fossil fuel industry in skipping over the carnage. No matter the disinformation, the nation has begun to say the benefits are far greater from weaning ourselves off oil and gas. A majority wants the United States to enter the new era of renewable energy and play its part in assuring that inevitable decline of fossil fuels.

Ahead of Memorial Day, the unofficial kick-off of summer, we are back with an annual warning that gets more pointed each year: it is now Danger Season 2024, and everyone needs to be ready. Because the hits are coming, and they’re going to hurt.

“Danger Season” refers to the warmer months when, turbo-charged by climate change, extreme events like heat waves, heavy rainfall, wildfires, and poor air quality bring miserable and often dangerous, conditions. You already know you’re not experiencing the summers of your youth (given the accelerating pace of climate change, this applies to almost anyone who can read this post). It’s important to know, also, that climate change isn’t going to unfold for us in barely perceptible increases in temperature, upticks on a graph we can scan in the morning news. It’s going to crash into our lives in the form of damaging, even devastating, extreme events, particularly in Danger Season.

Here at UCS, we’re tracking Danger Season impacts on a daily basis with this interactive tool, capturing and communicating the climate change connections, highlighting harm to vulnerable people, and talking about what we can do to prepare, to build equitable resilience, and to slow down this runaway climate train with a fast, fair phaseout of fossil fuels and accountability for the fossil fuel companies whose deception and delay tactics played a huge role in getting us into this mess—and who continue to profit as people suffer.

What happened to summer?

Summers–and all the seasons–happen because of Earth’s tilt on its axis as it orbits the sun. With this tilt, the Northern Hemisphere will face more directly toward the sun during the May through August stretch of the orbit, causing us to experience summer, while from December-February the tilt causes the Southern Hemisphere to experience summer. “Danger Season” follows that more direct gaze of the sun. With fossil-fuel pollution trapping heat and driving up global average temperatures, those warmer months are warmer than ever. And, in human history, I do mean ever. Higher ocean and air temperatures manifest in storms, heat, precipitation, drought and wildfires that can be more intense, more frequent, and/or longer lasting.

This NASA graphic captures how climate change affects the extreme weather that tends to play out in Danger Season. Watch the full animation here: https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/ExtremeEventsGraphic.mp4

Wherever one lives in the U.S., these trends are inescapable. Whether we’re under the orange skies millions experienced last summer amidst smoke from Canadian wildfires or evacuation orders from those same fires, whether unnerving or downright traumatizing, climate change is making its presence known, and these warm months—Danger Season—are its main stage.

Now, is every extreme weather event we experience made worse by climate change? No. But we know that climate change has made many disasters more frequent and more severe. Scientific analysis, called “event attribution,” can help quantify whether and how the fingerprint of climate change impacted a particular event, and these analyses are often available in rapid response formats following a disaster.

What’s happening with this summer?

Any sense that climate change would unfold gradually was laid to rest in 2023 when so many significant climate records were shattered by previously unthinkable margins. The first few months of 2024 have seen the continued march of record global heat conditions. April marked the 11th hottest month on record.

Source: https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-global-temperature-record-streak-continues-april-2024-was-hottest-record

Average ocean temperatures have also been at record levels since May of 2023.

Source: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/?dm_id=world

This heat was enabled in part by the fact that we were in the El Niño phase of the so called El Niño Southern Oscillation inter-annual climate cycle. El Niño typically drives higher global average temperatures. Here in 2024, we are seeing the transition from El Niño to a neutral phase, and we can likely expect a shift to La Niña to happen late this summer. Given that global average ocean temperatures remain at record high levels, and air temperatures continue to break records, there’s uncertainty about how summer 2024 will play out. But here’s what NOAA, our federal climate agency, is currently forecasting.

• Widespread above-normal heat

The forecast for July through September is for above-normal heat conditions from coast to coast, with highest heat risk in parts of the country—like the Southwest and Texas—that weathered unprecedented heat last year.

Source: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range/seasonal.php?lead=3

• A hectic hurricane season

Just this morning, NOAA released its Atlantic hurricane season outlook, anticipating an above-normal and possibly record-breaking season. The North Atlantic remains incredibly hot, and hot water is a hurricane’s source of fuel. With the official start of hurricane season next week, we’re entering a “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” situation.

Source: https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-predicts-above-normal-2024-atlantic-hurricane-season

• Precipitation and drought forecast

An updated drought forecast will be released next week, but at this time, drought persistence and development are forecast for large areas of the Northwest, Southwest and South Central U.S.

Source: https://www.drought.gov/data-maps-tools/us-seasonal-drought-outlook

It is worth noting that the drought conditions our northern and southern neighbors are facing are currently far more severe, with much of Mexico facing severe, extreme, or exceptional drought.

• Wildfire forecast

Atmospheric rivers doused California with such exceptional rainfall earlier this year that the threat of wildfire there has for now been greatly tamped down (though this also spurred the growth of vegetation that will fuel future fires). The persistent dry conditions in Canada, unfortunately, point to an active wildfire season there, with potentially harmful air quality impacts for Canadian territories and U.S. states downwind. And Hawaii, still reeling and recovering from last year’s devastating wildfires, faces another season of wildfire risk.

Source: https://www.nifc.gov/nicc-files/predictive/outlooks/NA_Outlook.pdf What we’re already seeing on the ground

It’s the third week in May, and already we’re seeing extremes that alarm us in their magnitude and hurt like hell on the ground.

Canadian wildfires are once again burning and compromising air quality in the Midwest.

A prolonged heat wave has beset a large swath of the Southeast. In Florida, Key West was shocked with 115 degree Fahrenheit heat index conditions last week, tying the all-time record high temperature in the middle of May.

Source: https://x.com/BMcNoldy/status/1790880195609547084

Much of Puerto Rico has endured heat index conditions well over 100 degrees. And Texas… whew.

The derecho that slammed down in Texas earlier this week has left the Houston area reeling and the recovery situation is being made much worse by early-season extreme heat, an outbreak of mosquitoes, some of which are testing positive for West Nile Virus, and power outages which, though largely addressed, left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity and air conditioning over a miserable several days.

The official start of summer may be a month away, but Danger Season has begun.

What’s next?

As outlined above, the forecasts are coming into better focus. Inevitably, it promises to be a dangerous season. And given the enduring inequity and legacy of racism across the nation, it promises to harm marginalized and historically disadvantaged people most. Tune in soon for my colleague Juan Declet-Barreto’s take on the outlook for inequitable harm as the season’s impacts unfold.

We’ll be tracking the 2024 Danger Season in our daily-updated web feature, and with quick-breaking analyses focused on issues of racial equity. We’ll be flagging fossil fuel accountability for climate harm. And we’ll be calling for more ambitious climate action on both heat-trapping emissions reductions (e.g., the clean energy transition and a modernized grid) and adaptation (e.g., just and climate-informed preparedness and recovery efforts in the wake of inevitable disasters).

Follow us on social media for rapid response updates as situations unfold.

Stay tuned, prepare now, and let’s try to stay safe.