RESILIENCEAmidst Compounding Disasters, Resilient Housing Can Anchor Communities
Back-to-back hurricanes wreaking havoc across huge swaths of the Southeast were yet another sign of the intensifying impacts of climate change. The nationwide shortage of reliable, affordable housing and the increasing tempo of extreme weather events are separate crises that overlap and magnify each other’s impacts.
Back-to-back hurricanes wreaking havoc across huge swaths of the Southeast were yet another sign of the intensifying impacts of climate change.Hurricanes Helene and Milton left a path of destruction that rightly drew attention to a more subtle consequence of the climate crisis: compounding impacts on homes. The nationwide shortage of reliable, affordable housing and the increasing tempo of extreme weather events are separate crises that overlap and magnify each other’s impacts.
On October 25th, the National Academies hosted a Climate Conversation on the intersection between housing and compounding disasters, taking a closer look at these twin challenges, how we might better address them in tandem, and building on a 2024 report exploring the impacts of these disasters on Gulf Coast communities. New York Times reporter Christopher Flavelle moderated a rich discussion between Tracy Kijewski-Correa, Professor of Global Affairs and Civil Engineering and Director of the Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame, and member of the committee that authored the 2024 report, and Carlos Martín, Project Director of the Remodeling Futures Program at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and incoming Vice President for Research and Policy Engagement at Resources for the Future.
The science indicates that climate change is not only increasing intensity of major disasters, but driving disasters to strike in quicker succession, leaving communities to deal with compounding impacts and little time to fully recover between each one. For some areas, the cumulative impacts become so great that they may never recover at all. This is often felt most keenly with housing—without a safe and secure space, families and individuals are even more vulnerable to climate impacts. “Housing is critical infrastructure, and we haven’t treated it as such,” said Kijewski-Correa.
Housing policy and stock is shaped by many forces and the relationship between insurers and building codes is especially important in the context of disasters. Building codes help insurers decide where to offer coverage, and insurers can influence codes and standards by adjusting premiums or declining to provide coverage at all. Disasters are upending this delicate relationship. Damages from disasters in several states—including wildfires in California, flooding in Iowa, and hurricanes in Florida—have been so high that insurance premiums have skyrocketed and, in some cases, led major private insurance companies to stop offering homeowner’s insurance in certain areas.
