- In 2021, just one year,
nearly one in 10 homes in the US were impacted
by natural hazards,
and many places with the highest climate risk
in the US are also seeing some of the highest growth.
- When we ask home buyers and sellers directly,
is climate change impacting your decision to buy a home,
to move to a particular location?
It's yes, the answer is yes.
But then when you look at the macro trends
of where people are actually moving,
they're moving into harm's way.
- Here's the thing, a quick search for weather hazards
in just about any geographic location
will bring up news of disasters
and dire predictions of worse to come.
So how can we make informed decisions
about where to live and how to manage risk?
It turns out that even though some places
will face far more hazards as the climate warms,
identifying the riskiest places
in the future is really hard.
Take Alexander Pyslarash as an example.
In 2020, he was living in Portland, Oregon,
and the wildfires and smoke of that summer got so bad
that he decided to move to Florida.
But when his car nearly flooded
while driving through Miami Beach during heavy rain,
he realized he hadn't escaped his weather woes.
So we worked with some of the best minds in this space
to help us sift through the data,
find where hazards overlap,
and map out the riskiest places in the US.
And stay with us to find out
where we think the single riskiest place might be.
(foreboding music)
As extreme weather increases all over the country,
how do we figure out the riskiest places?
First, let's look at the safest places.
These are the safest 10% of counties in the US,
based on projections of how climate will change
by the middle of the century.
As the humid climate niche,
characterized by mean annual temperatures
around 55 degrees Fahrenheit, moves north,
some places that are particularly cold now
might actually get safer,
because, as we know from previous episodes,
the most deadly weather in the US is extreme cold.
This ProPublica study also lists
the most dangerous US counties,
and we'll get to that in a bit.
But first, let's add to our map mid-century projections
for flood, storm, fire, drought, and heat risk.
Starting with one of the most local hazards, flooding.
This map shows the number of properties impacted
by future floods due to rain, overflowing rivers,
high tides, and storm surge.
Many coastal towns will be impacted by rising sea levels,
and places like West Virginia will be slammed
with heavy rain as the climate warms.
According to Redfin,
by 2050, 84% of properties
in Cape Coral, Florida,
and 98% of properties in New Orleans
will be at risk for flooding.
Houston is also an outlier on this list,
due to the sheer number of properties at risk,
as we saw when Hurricane Harvey submerged the city
under its record-shattering rains in 2017.
But what about storms?
It seems like these extreme precipitation events
are causing more and more damage as the climate warms.
The top 10 cities impacted by storms are mostly
in the Northeast, but Portland and Seattle,
both infamously rainy cities, also appear here.
Now, let's look at fire.
Here, the map shifts dramatically
to the West and Southeast.
This map shows the annual likelihood of wildfire in 2050.
The places most at risk
of devastating wildfires aren't cities,
but instead houses and developments
on the edge of wildlands and places with lots of fire.
And it's not just forested areas that are at risk,
but also the grass and shrublands
of regions like the Great Basin,
particularly places that are getting drier.
Which brings us to drought.
This map shows decreases in precipitation
over the last 30 years compared to the 20th century.
But what about the future?
Well, here are the top five cities projected
to be impacted by drought in 2050.
Four of them rely on water from the Colorado River,
which is already in a decades-long drought,
and large water-use cuts in the basin are inevitable.
Lastly, let's look at the second most common cause
of weather-related deaths in the US, heat.
This map shows projected days over 100 degrees in 2053.
Oh man, Florida, Texas,
and Arizona are looking pretty toasty.
Phoenix is hotter than anywhere else,
but, in Florida, temperatures don't need to be as high
for it to become dangerous because it's also humid there.
That makes it harder for the body
to cool itself by sweating.
If we take a look at the combined risk
of all these climate impacts,
we start to see how different regions will fare.
And the Southeast will pretty clearly bear the brunt
of climate change.
And now let's add back in the data we looked at earlier,
but this time for the riskiest 10% of counties.
At this point, we're beginning to get a clearer picture
of some places you might wanna think twice
about before moving.
But are we really any closer
to determining the single riskiest place in the country?
Perhaps we need to take a look at this issue
from a different angle.
We reached out to Hannah Hess
from the Rhodium Group's Climate Impact Lab,
where they study how climate change will affect humans
across a variety of categories,
including death rates
and the amount of time someone can spend
on the job working due to temperature.
- So what we're looking at on this map is how workers
in high risk industries like construction, or agriculture,
or manufacturing, being exposed to higher temperatures
during the workday causes them to have to shift their time.
- This might mean starting their workday later
or ending it earlier,
or taking more frequent breaks to cool off
and protect themselves from the heat.
One thing their research shows is that certain places
that already see these temperature extremes more frequently
are better adapted and more equipped
to deal with elevated temperatures in the future.
- In a place like, for instance, Florida is a good example,
workers are already relatively well adapted to this heat.
A lot of people have air conditioning.
A lot of people have figured out ways to cope
with extreme heat.
- And even though Florida tops the list for hurricanes,
these disastrous storms are actually pretty rare
in any given location.
So maybe we can find an even riskier place.
- In contrast, Southern California,
Southern Arizona, Texas,
a lot of those areas get really, really hot.
And one of the highest risk places
in this data set is Phoenix, Arizona.
- And you might be surprised
by just how much the heat there is projected
to impact people's ability to work,
damaging the city's economy.
- An individual worker by the end of the century
is projected to spend 78 hours less on the job each year.
- So if you put that in the context of a company
with, say, 200 full-time workers,
that would mean 15,600 lost hours each year.
But working hours lost isn't the only important metric
for Phoenix to consider.
According to the UNDP website,
under a moderate greenhouse gas scenario,
Phoenix would see an increased death rate
of 79 mortalities per 100,000 people
from climate change by the end of the century.
And to put this into perspective,
traffic accidents cause 15 deaths per 100,000 people.
So we're talking about 1/5 the number of deaths.
And under a high emission scenario,
the number of deaths that Phoenix would see
is projected to be nearly twice that number, at 148.
And the ProPublica study from earlier also projects
that under that same high emission scenario,
by mid-century, Phoenix could see temperatures
in excess of 95 degrees for around half the year.
So when you add
up all of Phoenix's different vulnerabilities
to extreme heat that we've discussed so far,
it begins to sound like
it might just be the most hazardous place to live
in the United States due to climate change,
or at least near the top of the list.
And another interesting thing about Phoenix
and the surrounding county of Maricopa
is that it's also one of the fastest growing places
in the country.
And this means even more people in harm's way
and more difficulty adapting
to the growing challenges of climate change.
But as we mentioned back in the beginning of this episode,
when you look at moving trends across the US,
the weird thing is, Phoenix isn't that weird.
Among the 20 fastest growing US metropolitan areas,
you'll recognize many of the places we've already discussed
because of their climate risks,
and almost none of them are in the least risky regions.
But to figure out why people are moving
to the most hazardous locations,
let's start by taking a closer look
at why they're choosing to leave the safest ones.
- People are leaving these climate resilient areas
for economic reasons.
On the one hand, you have people leaving
because of affordability.
They're leaving the West Coast or the East Coast,
these coastal markets
where home prices have gone up very dramatically.
People would love to live
in the most climate resilient areas.
Like San Francisco, for example,
has a very moderate temperature,
it doesn't really have risks of hurricanes
or drought or anything like that.
But people are being forced out of that area
into more wildfire risky areas in inland California
because of the lack of housing.
So yeah, people care about it,
but money, ultimately, is the number one motivator,
just being able to afford a home in the first place.
- In fact, the top five cities in population outflow
are all extremely expensive coastal towns.
Another especially safe region is the Midwest, or Rust Belt.
But people are leaving there for a totally different reason.
- It's not because housing isn't affordable there.
People in the Midwest are leaving
due to a lack of economic opportunity,
because they can't find jobs that pay enough
for them to have the standard of living that they want.
So they go to places with more economic prosperity.
- And what does it say about our country
that people are having to move
to riskier and riskier places instead of away from them?
Jesse Keenan focuses on finding answers
to problems like these, and his research shows
that a big part of the solution comes down to information.
- Our brains are there to run out of the way
when a bus is heading our direction,
or a tiger is running to eat us, right?
We're not physiologically oriented
for slow violence and incremental notions of risk.
So we're just, from the get go, impaired
in our ability to understand the accumulation of risk.
The more information that consumers have access to,
the greater likelihood it is going to have
that they are going to shift their behavior accordingly.
- The availability of this kind
of long-term hazard information is crucial.
And according to Redfin's data, it is making a difference.
- We did find an effect, that people
who were previously viewing extremely risky homes
in terms of flood risk,
went on to make offers on homes with half the risk
once they saw that information.
So it seems like
it is having a tangible impact on customers.
The most important thing we can tell people
is just to prepare.
And by preparing, we may be able to avoid a lot
of the damage, because if a lot of homeowners see
that they have really high flood risk,
maybe they'll start to mitigate ahead of time,
or they'll even band together
and ask their local government to do something
about preparing for climate change.
- So now that we've really dug into the data
on different climate risks across the country,
what can we say about the riskiest place of all?
Well, when you factor in all of the risks
that we've talked about, Florida, Louisiana, Texas,
and the California-Arizona border look
like places you should think twice about before moving to.
But according to the ProPublica study,
there is one county that comes out on top.
Beaufort County, South Carolina.
This county is at risk of nearly all of the natural hazards,
including a couple that we didn't talk about,
impacts to crops and wet bulb temperatures.
Wet bulb is a big topic to explain here.
But for now, I can tell you
that it refers to the dangerous combination
of heat and humidity,
where the human body becomes essentially unable
to cool itself down.
But that's a topic for a future episode.
For now, we'd like to hear what you think.
Are you planning on moving,
or have you made a move recently?
Has this episode changed the way you think
about your decision?
Let us know in the comments.