Climate risks house-by-house

Ways to see what's going to cost us

Our readers can be assured that Buddy often double-checks my judgment, particularly around numbers, which he hates.

Two weeks ago Buddy and I had just returned from that bird’s-eye-view over the US, looking down town-by-town at their future risks of flooding, drought, heat, hurricanes, and other natural hazards. Yes, we enjoyed the flight and were fascinated by what we saw. (And a whole lot of our subscribers also clicked through to the National Risk Index Map.) But the big surprise was to learn those risks projected by FEMA did not take the unseen multiplier effects of global warming into account!

We will need good predictions if we’re to select our next, safer, hometown. Or steer our kids away from settling somewhere that’s going to be damaged. Or maybe make a property investment in a safe town, soon to be swarmed by migrating home buyers.

MORE DATA (Those with little use for numbers should stop here.)
The good news is that times are changing. FEMA, as we have learned, is really slow at creating useful flood and other projections. But industries, like insurance and real estate, live or die by them. Several services have sprung up to provide lots of hyper-local risk predictions for American homes, and those data are available to homeowners, city planners, and others.

The bad news? The latest entries into the place-specific evaluations are mostly numbers or, worse yet, graphs and polar plots! (We much preferred the color-coded maps we saw on our aerial view.)

Let’s start with ClimateCheck, a free service that quantifies the risks to any particular property. The likelihoods of damage by 2050 from storm, flood, drought, heat, and fire are each rated from 1 (low) to 100 (high). We can get ratings for whole states, individual towns, or specific street addresses.

We thought we’d check the ratings for some towns that the popular magazines are touting as relatively climate-proof, plus others which are said to be in the crosshairs of climate change. Here are a few we looked at.

ClimateCheck uses predictive models from many sources and its own method of applying them to individual towns and properties. This process seems to contain a whole lot of challenges and uncertainties. For instance the ratings reflect “risk at a property relative to the rest of the contiguous United States,” which means we can’t see any concrete scale of pain or damage. And “homes expected to experience more dramatic changes are given a higher risk compared to ones already experiencing such hazards.” I can’t think why, but CC says this reflects “the challenges and cost of adjusting to climate change and the increased stress on local infrastructure.” And, hooray, this does acknowledge that many ‘future’ effects of climate change are well underway now.

A PINCH OF SALT
As a result of these and other complexities in calculating ratings, Buddy and I are taking the numbers for a town solely as guides to further investigation. For instance comparing coastal towns in California, we see two that have Storm Risks of 82 (extreme) and 12 (relatively low) - that’s Bodega Bay and Encinitas. They’re on the same stretch of coast, but ClimateCheck tells us that 500 miles makes a huge difference in potential damage from storms. Anyone interested in Bodga Bay should look carefully at what storm protections the town is creating. For Encinitas, ask how they are combatting drought.

The EPA is also getting into the act with county-by-county data that characterize climate risks from a different point of view. Their new Climate Resilience Screening Index (CRSI) goes beyond the vulnerability of a place to evaluate its potential recoverability, an often overlooked factor. They look, not just at the natural environment, but at what’s built there, the local government’s capacities, and the locality’s social structure (an important risk factor we’ll be writing about soon).

The index uses “20 indicators, calculated from 117 metrics” and the report runs 287 pages. A real put-off, right? Between pages 205 and 286, yes, we can find numerical ratings for each US county, but we’re hoping the next batch will show the ratings, preferably as words or colors, by just entering the name of a county.

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH ALL THESE DATA?
Most obvious is to assess the comparative risks our own town faces. Next is to compare ratings for various places to help decide where we - and our children - should be in 2050. Climate costs coming down the road, many discussed in ClimateDog, will be massive for endangered hometowns, their budgets, and their residents. As America wakes up to this fact, lots of migrating families could dramatically push up property prices in the safer towns. We’d want to beat the rush.

A second use for these data may be to beat up on our local officials and local media about a particular risk. Cities have engineers and planners who eat this kind of stuff up. The numbers may catch their eye and strengthen any arguments they’re already using to draw the City Council’s attention to urgent climate risks.

MORE THAN WE WANT TO KNOW
We’re reaching the point where the data available to us may be more than we, as individuals, can really use to see local risks and identify climate-proof towns. But there’s more and more of this stuff coming. Buddy and I will keep track of what’s available and - who knows? - those writers of Best-Places articles may begin to see that these concerns belong right up there with good schools, hospitals, and golf courses.

We should all think about how we can use this forward-looking information to dodge the big costs facing our family and community. Buddy and I welcome your ideas; no numbers, please.

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LEARN, THINK, ACT

• We can see ClimateCheck’s ratings for an individual property, town, or state. We can also order a free “full report” on any property, to be emailed to us. It includes a bit more information. But ClimateCheck asks for our email address and status - home buyer, seller, or investor - presumably so they can offer services.

• Lots of media have compiled ‘Best Places’ lists. We took the cities scored above from The Best Places to Live in the U.S. if You're Concerned About Climate Change. This article in US News lists their selection of most climateproof metro areas in the lower forty-eight states.

• The New York Times interviewed a Harvard climate lecturer who designated Duluth, MN at the very western tip of the Great Lakes as ‘“the most climate-proof city in America.” He pointed to its access to fresh water, its positive attitude towards resilience and adaptation. He projected significant migration from the rest of the country over the coming decades.

• When we bemoan the low level of interest being shown by the federal government in climate change, we must exempt the military. We figure the Pentagon has more studies and plans than all the other federal agencies combined. After all, around the world the Department of Defense manages more than 1,700 military installations in coastal areas that may be affected by sea-level rise.

• Data companies group together distinct climate damages and costs into broad categories like storm, drought, flood, fire and heat. But there are dozens of different threats in these groupings. ClimateDog will explore lots of these in detail, and many are discussed in my book, Climate-Proof Your Personal Finances, How (and where) to safeguard your family's budget and lifestyle.

• This is the second ClimateDog post about specific climateproof qualities to look for in American towns, and where to find measurements on towns and individual properties. To see a (growing) list of these qualities, with town by town numbers, visit Our List of Climateproof Indicators.