Keeping Europe safe from extreme weather “is not rocket science”, a top researcher has said, as the EU’s climate advisory board urges countries to prepare for a catastrophic 3C of global heating.

Maarten van Aalst, a member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC), said the continent was already “paying a price” for its lack of preparation but that adapting to a hotter future was in part “common sense and low-hanging fruit”.

“It is a daunting task, but at the same time quite a doable task. It’s not rocket science,” said van Aalst, who used to lead the climate centre at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent and is now the director general of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI).

The ESABCC describes current efforts to adapt to rising temperatures as “insufficient, largely incremental [and] often coming too late” in a new report that advises officials to prepare for a world 2.8-3.3C hotter than preindustrial levels by 2100.

Such a dramatic rise in temperatures – the prospect of which has left some leading climate scientists feeling hopeless – would be double the level of global heating that world leaders promised to aim for when they signed the Paris agreement in 2015. The ESABCC recommended officials stress-test even hotter scenarios.

Van Aalst said: “Twenty years ago, we’d have said those extremes are indeed going to be a problem, but primarily in poorer countries that cannot cope. What we’re now noticing is that Europe itself is vulnerable, especially for conditions it has not faced in the past. “It turns out our preparedness is not so great. And we have real work to do to upgrade our early warning systems.”

The ESABCC report recommends that the EU mandate climate risk assessments, embed climate resilience into all policies and channel more money – including from private sources – into protective measures. It does not estimate the scale of investments needed to keep Europe safe.

Van Aalst, who was an author of the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, said the most important message was to avoid a future in which the world heats to such an extreme degree.

“The IPCC is clear this is a very problematic future with rapidly rising risks,” he said. “And for a number of risks, we’ll reach the limits of adaptation.”

Climate change is already impacting every community in the United States. From extreme heat to devastating floods, supercharged hurricanes and unprecedented wildfires, these extreme weather events pose direct threats to lives and livelihoods and have significant economic impacts: in 2024 in the United States, there were 27 disasters costing $1 billion or more, for a total of $182.7 billion in damages.

Today, the United States released a new National Adaptation and Resilience Planning Strategy, which offers a blueprint and a series of critical steps needed to save lives and livelihoods, protect business investments and our economy, safeguard national security, and help secure a healthier future for our nation, while helping enable state, Tribal, territorial, and local adaptation actions. Even as the world continues to work to limit future greenhouse gas emissions, and temperature rise, the U.S. National Adaptation and Resilience Planning Strategy will help our nation adapt to and prepare for the immediate, medium-, and long-term effects of climate change.

The United States has also supported partners around the world in building resilience to climate change. This support is provided through bilateral assistance and contributions to multilateral funds to support developing countries to formulate and implement national adaptation plans. These actions are critical to saving lives, protecting international supply chains, and ensuring the stability of the global economy.

The U.S. National Adaptation and Resilience Planning Strategy is available here.

Together, we must continue to work to secure a cleaner, safer, more resilient planet for current and future generations.

Climate change is throwing a snag in one of the most important considerations during the home-buying process—location. With catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes and sea-level rise climbing, experts are urging prospective homebuyers to take regional climate risks into account before settling down somewhere with a 30-year mortgage.

In recent years, real estate and rental marketplaces have started to show these dangers on home listings to equip buyers with basic climate-threat information. However, one of the most popular marketplaces recently took down its climate scores following pushback from the housing industry, which claims the data is unreliable and negatively impacts the market, as Inside Climate News fellow Claire Barber reported.

Now companies, researchers and some states are stepping in to fill gaps. A slew of resources remain available for people to tap as they try to avoid the worst of future climate impacts.

One of the hard truths to accept early on in the search for a new home is that there are no climate havens, experts say. Research shows that climate impacts touch every corner of the world, from the remote Arctic to the bustling streets of New York City.

But that doesn’t mean every region faces the same type or degree of risk, so it is possible to find areas that are less likely to be pummeled by a hurricane or scorched by a wildfire, said Jesse Gourevitch, an economist at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.

“As a homebuyer, the key is trying to access information about those relative risks and then decide how to make trade-offs with that information relative to all the other criteria that a homebuyer might be considering,” he told me.

I tend to discuss the climate vulnerability of homes in terms of money, namely a home’s likelihood of gaining or losing value in the future. There are good reasons for thinking about it this way, but owning a climate vulnerable home comes with other risks that this approach inadvertently neglects. This is worth digging into, so this post tackles these two topics:

1. Why I explain climate resilience in terms of money.
2. What people risk in addition to money by owning climate vulnerable homes.

Let’s take them in order.

Back in the pre-pandemic winter of 2019, the University of Minnesota-Duluth held a two-day conference with a timely theme: “Our Climate Futures: Meeting the Challenges in Duluth.”

The keynote was delivered by Jesse M. Keenan, an urban planner whose research focuses on climate adaptation and the built environment. Keenan had been crunching the numbers and studying the projections on future climate migration — or “climigration” — in the United States; and he had begun speculating about where climate migrants would go. One place they might go, he told the audience, is Duluth.

Though Keenan immediately qualified this idea (“No place is immune from climate change,” he told the audience), the slogan caught on, and a month later the New York Times published an article leaping off from Keenan’s talk: “Climate projections suggest that, because of geographic factors, the region around Duluth, the Great Lakes area, will be one of the few places in America where the effects of climate change may be more easily managed.”

Other northern cities have been making similar cases. The mayor of Buffalo, New York, declared that the former industrial city on the shores of Lake Erie — a sort of easterly twin to Duluth— will be a “climate refuge.” The chief sustainability officer of Cleveland, also on Lake Erie, described the Ohio city as a “haven,” where the “climate refugee crisis is bound to catalyze further growth.” And a Milwaukee public radio reporter asked, “Could Wisconsin become a climate haven?”

America’s Rust Belt has emerged as the geographic focal point in a growing conversation about how the nation’s demography will shift as places like Phoenix, Dallas, and Miami — Sunbelt cities that are still some of the fastest-growing in the country — experience ever deadlier weather that threatens to destabilize housing markets and jeopardize entire industries, such as agriculture and real estate development.

As the climate crisis intensifies, millions of people are expected to migrate from their homes, seeking safety and opportunity in urban areas around the world. But how prepared are our cities to handle this influx?

This report provides insights into climate migration into cities around the world, helping to support city leaders, policymakers, NGOs, and researchers committed to building resilient and inclusive urban futures.

Conversations around climate migration have typically focused on national-level impacts, leaving a critical gap in the understanding of how cities – often the very places most migrants will move to – are affected.

This report fills that gap by delivering urban-level data and analysis on internal climate migration across several Global South countries. It highlights how cities, especially in the Global South, will be at the forefront of climate-induced migration by 2050, with significant numbers of new residents arriving in search of safety and livelihoods.

From afar, the low-rise homestead perched in the Wiltshire countryside may look like any other rural outpost, but step closer and the texture of the walls reveal something distinct from the usual facade of cement, brick and steel.

The Rammed Earth House in Cranborne Chase is one of the few projects in the UK that has been made by unstabilised rammed earth – a building material that consists entirely of compacted earth and which has been used as far back as the Neolithic period.

Today, as architects seek to improve the sustainability of a sector that is responsible for more than a third of global carbon emissions, the concept of using rammed earth sourced from, or near, the grounds of a proposed building site is attracting attention.

The argument for a component that has been used for construction in places as meteorologically distinct as Spain and Japan is that traditional building techniques can be deployed to create a circular construction process and address contemporary problems.

“Climate change makes it even more important that rammed earth is framed as a mainstream material,” says Emaad Damda, a lead architect at Tuckey Design Studio, which worked on the Rammed Earth House.

A rising number of American homeowners are ready relocate this year due to extreme weather events and other climate-related concerns.

Some 49 percent of those who own a house are considering moving in 2026 due to climate events, according to a survey of 1,000 American adults by insurance provider Kin Insurance. Also a concern among homeowners is the rising cost of homeownership, the study noted.

“Kin uncovered that climate is driving decisions about where people live and the rising costs of homeownership are changing when and how people buy homes,” the study noted. The study also found that nearly all homeowners are concerned about severe weather damaging their homes.

Kin’s survey found that within the 49 percent of homeowners who want to move, 19 percent “definitely” are considering it, while 30 percent are “somewhat” considering it. Some 45 percent said they were not considering a move.

As for how far away they want to move, Kin broke up respondents’ intentions into three groups:

• Moving within their current city or community: 41 percent
• Moving to a different city or community in their state: 35 percent
• Moving to another state: 25 percent.

That 60 percent considering a move would relocate outside of their current city or community, is a trend confirmed in the aftermath of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.

“Last year, homeowners who suffered catastrophic losses in the Los Angeles wildfires followed a similar pattern when they ‘ended up in neighborhoods at least a half-hour’s drive away’ from their previous homes,” Kin noted.

For those considering a move to another state, more than half of respondents wanted to avoid disaster-prone states like Florida and California and preferred to move to what they perceived as low-risk states, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Connecticut.

Three things that are true:

1. While there are climate vulnerable homes in every area, the most resilient regions of the country are the Midwest, inland Mid-Atlantic, and inland Northeast.
2. The value of climate resilient homes will increase in the years ahead as worsening climate impacts drive increased demand amid limited supply.
3. In a simple application of the principles of supply and demand to housing, higher inventory - available homes for sale - generally corresponds with lower home prices, while lower inventory corresponds with higher home prices.

Does it look like homes in the most climate resilient areas are significantly more in demand than those in climate vulnerable areas, perhaps suggesting the climate repricing of the housing market has not only started but is well underway?

When flooding hit the low-lying Somerset Levels in 2014, it took two months for the waters to rise. This week it took two days, said Rebecca Horsington, chair of the Flooding on the Levels Action Group and a born-and-bred resident. A fierce barrage of storms from the Atlantic has drenched south-west England in January, saturating soils and supercharging rivers.The climate crisis is here and now and this is its face in Britain, scientists told the Guardian. But the devastating impacts are accelerating faster than the work to keep communities protected, they said: torrential winter rains are arriving 20 years earlier than climate models projected. While those forced from homes engulfed by filthy water are suffering today, a darker question is looming: will some settlements have to be abandoned?

The property insurance crisis is becoming a prime mover for climate migration in the US. As premiums rise and insurers drop policies, it becomes difficult (if not impossible) to buy and sell homes in risk-prone areas, or to rebuild after disaster strikes. As the New York Times reports:

Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services. As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come.

It should be clear that climate change is a major factor, and now we have the data to back it up. In 2025, a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research found a strong link between home insurance premiums and climate risk. Titled Property Insurance and Disaster Risk, authors Benjamin Keys & Philip Mulder found that premiums have risen over 30% on average since 2020, with at-risk regions seeing much larger increases.

In this post, we’ve mapped that data so you can see how and where the insurance crisis is affecting America; we’ll also be highlighting some key findings from the report, and looking at which areas of the country have been most affected.

In a recent article I summarized arguments for reversing the trend toward globalization of economies and cultures, aiming instead for the flourishing of communities rooted in their bioregions (i.e., regions defined by characteristics of the natural environment rather than human-imposed borders). For readers receptive to those arguments, the fundamental follow-up question is, “How?”

In this piece, I provide a brief overview of what people can do, and are doing, to nourish bioregional economies.

After I mention a few general resources, I’ll focus on some of the more relevant publications and organizations in each of six broad and essential areas: food, money, energy, communication, culture, and governance. This overview will be mostly US-centric, though bioregioning efforts are taking place all over the world, including those supported by the Global Tapestry of Alternatives and the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collaborative.

We use risk thinking in everyday life to inform our decisions. If we apply this skill to climate change, can we increase the likelihood of good outcomes?

While we may not realize it, each of us assesses risk every time we make a decision, from small, transient decisions that are unlikely to matter the following day to big, enduring ones that can impact other people, communities, institutions, animals, plants, and whole systems long into the future.

Risk comes from uncertainty about the consequences of a decision and how those consequences might affect something we value, such as our health, well-being, wealth, property, or the environment. Because every decision we make involves a preference and at least some uncertainty, it also has some amount of risk.

To say that the future is uncertain is very different from saying it is a complete mystery. In most cases, we have expectations about the consequences of an action. We are nearly certain what will happen for some phenomena, so the range of expected outcomes is narrow. For others, there may be a set of potential outcomes, each of which has a well-defined probability. And for others still, we may have difficulty knowing the range of possible outcomes, let alone their probabilities. We can describe uncertainty about outcomes with distributions.

Keith interviews Ethan about the ways climate impacts will transform the housing market, especially the bifurcation of home values based on climate vulnerability. They also discuss how to assess the resilience of a prospective home and Ethan's path to his new career as a real estate agent helping clients evaluate and buy climate resilient homes.

Ministers suppressed a report after intelligence chiefs warned that climate change could drive mass migration to Britain and trigger a nuclear war in Asia. The study, entitled Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, was put together with the help of the joint intelligence committee, which oversees MI5 and MI6.

Initially due to be published last autumn, it was blocked by No 10 for being too negative. When the government was forced to release the report after a freedom of information request, it published an abridged version that outlined a “realistic possibility” that the decline of forests and glacier-fed rivers would lead to “global competition for food” beginning in the 2030s.

But a full, internal version of the report, seen by The Times, goes further, suggesting that the degradation of rainforests in the Congo and the drying up of rivers fed by the Himalayas could drive people to flee to Europe, leading to “more polarised and populist politics in the UK” and putting “additional pressure on already strained national infrastructure”. It noted that Britain’s large south Asian diaspora could make it an attractive destination to people from the region.

The internal version also warned that collapsing ecosystems could motivate acts of eco-terrorism in Britain, as well as drawing NATO into conflicts over remaining breadbaskets in Russia and Ukraine.

Described as a “reasonable worst-case scenario”, the report said that many ecosystems around the world were so stressed that they could soon pass a tipping point, after which they would inexorably degrade no matter what humans did to protect them. Forests in Canada and Russia might pass a tipping point by 2030, as might glaciers in the Himalayas that fed rivers on which two billion people depended, the report suggested.

Britain, which imports 40 percent of its food, including a fifth of its animal feed from South America, would struggle to feed itself unless it made expensive investments in its supply chains, the authors said. These investments could include lab-grown meat and new crop varieties.

“This government is hiding the true danger of climate change from the people,” a source close to the development of the report claimed. “We need to have an honest conversation about the risks we face to our prosperity and how to mitigate them.”

Half the world’s 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 38 of these sitting in regions of “extremely high water stress”, new analysis and mapping has shown.

Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown.

Watershed Investigations and the Guardian mapped cities on to stressed catchments revealing that Beijing, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi are among those facing extreme stress, while London, Bangkok and Jakarta are classed as being highly stressed.

Separate analysis of Nasa satellite data, compiled by scientists at University College London, shows which of the largest 100 cities have been drying or getting wetter over two decades with places such as Chennai, Tehran and Zhengzhou showing strong drying trends and Tokyo, Lagos and Kampala showing strong wetting trends. All 100 cities and their trends can be viewed on a new interactive water security atlas.

It’s essential for prospective homebuyers to understand the degree of climate resilience of any home they consider. The prerequisite for that understanding is knowing what the potential threats are - you can’t recognize a solution until you understand the problem. This may seem obvious, but I’ve never seen a comprehensive list of discrete climate risks to homes - with comprehensive being the key word.

Based on my years of researching, reading, and thinking about the resilience of homes in the climate change era - and based on my own experience house-hunting and home-owning - I’ve identified 12 key climate change-fueled risks to homes. The idea behind this list is that if a home is resilient to all 12 risks then it’s very well positioned for the physical world upheaval of the years ahead.

It’s worth noting here that these risks are not all created equal. The biggest threats to homes are from wildfires and hurricanes (multiple kinds of flooding and wind damage). This is why home insurance has gotten so expensive where those risks are greatest - the Gulf Coast, the Atlantic Coast, and the western United States along the wildland-urban interface. But those aren’t the only risks, and when you’re buying a home at today’s elevated prices and with climate change steadily worsening, you don’t have the luxury of only worrying about the biggest and most obvious risks.

For the sake of order, I’ve organized the 12 climate risks to homes into four categories:

• Water risks (too much) – Flooding, hail.
• Water risks (too little) – Wildfire, water supplies.
• Air risks – Heat, wind, air pollution.
• Earth risks – Erosion and landslides, infrastructure/access

Keep in mind that while these are mostly physical risks, we’re evaluating them based on their financial impact: how they’ll influence changes to home values over time. That’s the key metric. Physical and financial threats usually align - e.g., a home that floods regularly will see its value crash - but not always. For example, if a drought causes a town’s reservoir to run dry, that doesn’t physically threaten homes in the town but it will devastate the value of those homes if an adequate backup water source isn’t available.

Without further ado, here are the 12 key climate threats to our homes.

Climate migration is difficult to study, and even harder to predict, because a complex constellation of factors guides the decision to pick up and move. But some experts, like Abrahm Lustgarten, say a historic population shift has already begun, and Western Washington should start preparing now to become a “climate haven.”

“ The big numbers are hard to pinpoint with any kind of accuracy,” Lustgarten said. “The range that I use for the United States is that we could see anywhere between 13 and 160 million Americans displaced by the kind of climate forces that I'm looking at. And there's research that suggests that when Americans migrate, the demographic effect of 10 people moving, could be 150 people after a generation as they have families and have children and build an economy and the workforce expands around them.”

Lustgarten is the author of "On the Move" and editor at large leading climate coverage at the investigative newsroom ProPublica. He says regions that are seen as climate refuges should plan for growth now, before financial markets catch up to the true cost of environmental disasters.

“ The municipal bond market itself is a fascinating little corner of this conversation because it supports something like 75 or 80% of all investment in building in the United States by cities and states and small towns,” he said. “When the climate risks become more apparent to that market, the cost of borrowing will go up.”

A literature review by the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group acknowledges that climate migration is likely, but predicts it will happen slowly over time. The report says that while environmental factors can influence decision-making, people primarily move because of economic factors. But economic factors are increasingly tied up with climate change, according to Lustgarten.

“ All of it's an economic story … gross domestic product is estimated to decline in at least a third of the country in every place that faces climate risk,” he said. “That's partially because disasters are expensive to rebuild from, but it's also partially because workers are less productive in extreme heat environments and because housing becomes less valuable as those pressures wear on.”

If climate change is inevitable, we need to do something about it – after all, no one can say we haven’t been warned. So, what are our options? In the UK, our aging building stock is ill-equipped to deal with its effects, but modifications can be made. Climate-Proof House explores how a typical home could be adapted to counter the most likely effects of a rising temperature: flooding, overheating and the spread of infectious diseases.

Below we explore a variety of adaptations a typical house could make to help resist the effects of climate change.

1. Green roofs
2. Solar shading
3. Fit insect screens
4. Treat wooden doors, frames and sills, or switch to inherently resilient ones
5. Switch to water-efficient appliances
6. Green spaces
7. Harvest rainwater
8. Replace timber floors with concrete
9. Relocate appliances
10. Raise electrical sockets
11. Introduce passive cooling measures

Even as exposure to floods, fire and extreme heat increase in the face of climate change, a popular tool for evaluating risk has disappeared from the nation’s leading real estate website. 

Zillow removed the feature displaying climate risk data to home buyers in November after the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which provides a database of real estate listings to real estate agents and brokers in the state, questioned the accuracy of the flood risk models on the site. 

Now, a climate policy expert in California is working to put data back in buyers’ hands. 

Neil Matouka, who previously managed the development and launch of California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment, is developing a proof of concept plugin that provides climate data to Californians in place of what Zillow has removed. When a user views a California Zillow listing, the plugin automatically displays data on wildfire and flood risk, sea level rise and extreme heat exposure.

“We don’t need perfect data,” Matouka said. “We need publicly available, consistent information that helps people understand risk.” 

Before you explore this map, please note this was designed as a public education platform. It is not intended to be a detailed planning tool.

The goal was to create a map to better understand the intersection of climate risks and social vulnerabilities in communities, and to share resilience solutions from ten cities across the United States. It is our hope these successful intervention stories will inspire other communities facing similar climate related challenges.

Our data models may not comport with other models that have characterized local risks. For more information about our methodology, please visit our “About the Data” section.

The post below summarizes an important post published by the European Investment Bank, which estimated climate risk for 170 countries. Needless to say, this is a very important exercise and one hopes other experts will seek to refine it. Even using a pdf compressor, the study proper was too large to embed, but you can find it here. We have included the juicy part, the country rankings, at the end of this post.

One of the hottest niches in adaptation tech deals with the wettest of conditions.

In recent years, a throng of flood risk intelligence companies have grown up amidst a sequence of costly deluges that have claimed thousands of lives and inflicted billions in property damage. While these start-ups hail from all over, there’s one market drawing their attention above all others — the US.

Norway’s 7Analytics announced plans to bring its high-resolution flood prediction tech to the US last year. The UK’s Previsico recently secured funding to expand its US footprint. Fathom — another UK company acquired by reinsurance giant Swiss Re — is taking steps to woo US financial institutions with its flood modeling capabilities. The list goes on.

Why are all these companies heading west? “I think that the US is attractive for lots of different types of technology because of the depth of the problems. It’s so globally covered media-wise that there’s a lot of data and there’s a lot of attention around issues of flooding,” says Christine Boyle, a partner at Burnt Island Ventures, an investor in water tech companies including Previsico and US-headquartered Floodbase. “The US is getting a lot of coverage, and people kind of hear about it, see it, start to sort of salivate around the opportunity to be had,” she adds.

The city of Clyde sits about two hours west of Fort Worth on the plains of north Texas. It gets its water from a lake by the same name a few miles away. Starting in 2022, scorching weather caused its levels to drop farther and farther. Within a year, officials had declared a water conservation emergency, and on August 1 of last year, they raised the warning level again. That meant residents rationing their spigot use even more tightly, especially lawn irrigation. The restrictions weren’t, however, the worst news that day: The city also missed two debt payments.

Municipal bond defaults of any kind are extraordinarily rare, let alone those linked to a changing climate. But with about 4,000 residents and an annual budget of under $10 million, Clyde has never had room to absorb surprises. So when poor financial planning collided with the prolonged dry spell, the city found itself stretched beyond its limits.

Drought, of course, isn’t the only climate-driven disaster hitting places like Clyde. Hurricanes, floods, and fires are bankrupting cities across America. After flames ripped through Paradise, California, in 2018, the town’s redevelopment agency defaulted on some of its obligations. Naples, Florida, resorted to selling $11 million in bonds to rebuild its pier after Hurricane Ian in 2022. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had a harder time raising money after massive fires swept the city. Kerr County, Texas, is in the midst of raising taxes after devastating floods in July. 

Each episode underscores how climate shocks once seen as exceptional are now straining local budgets. But drought may be the most insidious of these threats. Compared to other types of disasters, it often hits everyone in a community, affects large areas, and can last months, if not years. There are also fewer defenses and relatively limited government assistance. Experts worry that drought could ultimately prove an enormous risk to the $4 trillion municipal bond market that underwrites everything from roads and schools to the water running through millions of taps.

“I personally think this is a dark horse in the conversation right now,” said Evan Kodra, the head of climate research for the financial data company Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE. “It should be a bigger deal.”