A Dozen Dangers: The 12 climate risks that threaten our homes
The essential first step in identifying climate resilient homes is understanding the full set of climate threats they may face
The New York Times just published a big article called How to Shop for a Home That Won’t Be Upended by Climate Change. It goes through a long series of questions you one ask in determining whether a prospective home will be resilient to climate impacts. As someone who’s been on the climate durable homes beat for a number of years, it’s great to see.
I’m especially pleased the Times piece goes beyond the “climate havens” mode of thinking about climate resilience. The primary weakness of this approach is simply that there are no “havens” from climate change. There’s nowhere on earth that’s not affected by global warming (it’s right there in the name!). No place is perfectly safe from climate impacts.1
In addition, “climate haven”-style analysis (if you can even call it that) often obscures whatever insights and assumptions undergird its conclusions. We’re not able to judge the model or inputs for ourselves. Partly as a result of this lack of transparency, places like Vermont and Asheville, North Carolina have been included on climate haven lists, only to suffer climate disaster shortly thereafter. The list-makers, or the models they relied on, apparently didn’t appreciate how dangerous mountainous terrain lined with rivers and streams could be in the context of unprecedented rainfall. It’s an understandable mistake, but also a good argument for showing our work and doing rigorous, bottom-up analysis.
Importantly, there are regions and homes that are significantly safer than others. To identify them we first need to understand all the physical world mechanisms through which climate impacts threaten homes and infrastructure. I’ve been thinking about this and researching it in various ways for years, and below I lay out the 12 big climate change-related risks that home-buyers and current homeowners need to be aware of.
The Stakes
But before we dive in, what’s at stake here? Is this just an interesting exercise to understand our changing physical world and its effects on homes? Well, it’s definitely interesting, but it’s not just academic. If you buy a home this decade, the difference in your financial position by mid-century based on whether your home is climate resilient or climate vulnerable will be extremely large.
The stakes are so high, in fact, that deciding which home to buy is now the most important financial judgment most Americans will ever make.
Climate Threats to Homes
It’s essential, therefore, 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.2 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 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 erode the value of those homes if a backup water source isn’t available.
Without further ado, here are the 12 key climate threats to our homes.
A Dozen Dangers: the 12 climate risks that threaten our homes
WATER RISKS (TOO MUCH)
Ocean flooding – Flooding from the ocean has happened for centuries, and climate change-driven sea level rise is making it worse. Ocean flooding encompasses both extreme and dangerous storm surges, which occur during hurricanes and lesser storms, as well as chronic tidal flooding. Chronic tidal flooding, often called “sunny day flooding,” and higher ocean levels create risks like impeded drainage, which can exacerbate flooding from rain, and can lead to homes developing mold due to chronically damp conditions.
River flooding – Rivers and streams flood when heavy rains cause them to overflow the dykes and other barriers that hold them in place. Many such barriers have been sufficient for decades, but as climate change makes heavier, sustained rain commonplace, dykes that performed well for generations may not anymore. Overdevelopment in flood plains has left floodwaters no place to go, resulting in damage to river-adjacent homes, businesses, roads, and other infrastructure.
Flash flooding – Flash flooding happens when intense rain overwhelms natural absorption capacity and manmade drainage infrastructure and flows into low-lying areas. These powerful rains can happen during hurricanes or severe convective storms (powerful thunderstorms that the insurance industry calls “kitty-cats”3), and other times are just heavy rainstorms. Flash flooding and river flooding are both growing problems as the planet warms because hotter temperatures cause more evaporation from the earth’s surface, and warmer air can hold more moisture. When rain eventually falls from these increasingly water logged clouds, there’s more of it than there used to be.
Hail – Severe convective storms, aka kitty-cats (see above), are becoming more prevalent as climate change worsens. These powerful storms often produce hail, which can be large enough to damage homes and other structures. These storms are most prevalent in the Midwest and Great Plains, but can occur anywhere.
Saltwater contamination of drinking water – Rising sea levels can result in saltwater intrusion into aquifers and groundwater that feeds wells, as well as pushing further upstream into rivers. These dynamics can contaminate fresh water with salt water. When that happens, expensive and logistically difficult interventions are required. Sometimes entirely new sources of drinking water will be needed, and they may not always be possible. Reliable and clean running water is the lifeblood of human civilization and its reliability being called into question will make communities less desirable - or worse.
WATER RISKS (TOO LITTLE)
Wildfires – In hotter regions with dryer air, the most significant climate threat to homes is wildfires. Wildfires are a particular risk along the wildland-urban interface (WUI) where human civilization - often people’s homes - abuts wild terrain. As housing in cities has become increasingly expensive, more construction has occurred in the WUI, putting more homes at risk. But as we saw with the Los Angeles fires in January 2025, wildfires can quickly move from the WUI to the city, especially in high winds.
Water shortages – Unlike wildfires and hurricanes, water shortages are not yet an acute threat in most the U.S. That said, we have seen at least one town in Arizona, Rio Verde Foothills, get cut off from the water they had been getting from the city of Scottsdale, which decided that for the sake of its own water security it couldn’t afford to continue selling water to Rio Verde. We’ve also seen global cities like Sao Paulo, Cape Town, Mexico City, and Jakarta come perilously close to running out of water in recent years. We would obviously struggle to live without water, much less live as well as we do in the 21st century. Water shortages are an underappreciated climate risk.
AIR RISKS
High winds – The most destructive winds tend to come from hurricanes, tornadoes, and kitty-cats. At their strongest, these winds can pull roofs off houses, knock down trees, and break windows by turning everyday objects into projectiles. Wind can also exacerbate wildfire risk and intensify already-burning fires. When windows break in a storm, rain often gets inside and destroys homes. Unlike other climate risks, high winds are a threat almost everywhere.
Extreme heat – There’s enjoyable hot weather and then there’s dangerous extreme heat that forces you inside for extended periods of time. The latter is getting worse, especially in the south and southwest. People continue to move to hot places like Arizona, Texas, and Nevada in part because housing is relatively affordable. But as summer days more frequently hit 110 degrees, it’s reasonable to wonder if the number of people interested in living in these climates may decline in the future. If that were to happen, home values might start to reflect an emerging imbalance between decreased demand and increased supply.
Air quality – One of the most dramatic findings in public health over the past couple decades is just how bad for humans air pollution is. Microscopic particulate matter lodges in the linings of our lungs and can cause all kinds of health problems. Unfortunately, wildfire smoke is among the most harmful sources of air pollution. Regions where wildfire smoke is relatively common are therefore both more dangerous and less pleasant places to live. Eventually, that combination may weigh on home values in those areas.
EARTH RISKS
Landslide and erosion risks – Erosion and landslides both involve seemingly solid ground proving less solid than it appears. Erosion occurs as water washes away soil, whether gradually as with rain runoff, or destructively and all at once as with a rampaging river. Landslides occur when a hillside becomes so saturated with water that the micro-connections enabling the friction that holds the dirt, pebbles, and rocks in place get disconnected and the earth experiences a phase shift from a solid to a viscous liquid. Both of these risks are associated with heavy rain and are often adjacent to flooding. Their severity depends on the topography of the land, rootedness of the vegetation, and other factors.
Infrastructure/access risk – Serious enough damage to non-redundant infrastructure, often a lone bridge or road, can render a home unreachable. It’s a particular risk in rural areas where population density is lower and there are fewer roads. The risk is exacerbated by the fact that low-density communities often lack the resources and political influence required to get the needed repairs completed in a timely fashion. This happened in some western North Carolina communities after the flooding from Hurricane Helene.
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This list gives us a starting point in thinking about what to look for when evaluating potential homes to buy. The next step is figuring out how, concretely, to assess the climate resilience of individual homes.
We’ll dig into that next time. See you then.
I remain appreciative of the outstanding climate thinker, Alex Steffen, for his correct and simple insight that in the climate change era, “no place is safe, but some places are safer.”
While the 12 risks above are the most relevant to future changes in home value, a few other climate-related threats to homes are worth noting:
Subsidence – This is the gradual sinking or settling of land, often caused by extended drought, thawing permafrost, or the ongoing effects of past glacier activity. While subsidence can damage homes (look out for foundation and other cracks, as well as window and door frames that are slightly out of square), it’s a more localized issue and didn’t quite make the main list.
Extreme Winter Storms – Some areas unaccustomed to winter weather have experienced severe cold stretches and ice storms in recent years. If I lived in the South I would definitely want a well-insulated home with a good heating system and a backup power source. That said, as of today the evidence that winter storms are worsening in these areas is inconclusive.
Desertification – The combination of extreme heat and prolonged drought can degrade soil and make areas less appealing. However, since extreme heat is already covered in the main list, desertification is mostly redundant. We can think of it as a potential symptom when hot places get hotter.
These risks are still worth keeping in mind, especially if you're buying in a region prone to them, but they don’t pose the widespread, home-value-altering dangers of the 12 core risks.
In the insurance industry, severe convective storms (powerful, damaging thunderstorms) are often called “kitty cats” to distinguish them from larger natural catastrophes, which are known as “nat cats” for short.