{"id":249998,"date":"2025-07-09T06:07:24","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T06:07:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/249998\/"},"modified":"2025-07-09T06:07:24","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T06:07:24","slug":"the-hidden-costs-of-disaster-response-failures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/249998\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hidden Costs of Disaster Response Failures"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dramatic scenes of wildfires<\/a>\u00a0around Los Angeles, with entire neighborhoods burned to the ground, dominated global media for weeks earlier this year.<\/p>\n

In the immediate aftermath of the fires, the\u00a0hotel industry<\/a>,\u00a0automakers<\/a>, national and multinational\u00a0corporations<\/a> and\u00a0state agencies<\/a>\u00a0announced support for the affected communities.<\/p>\n

Yet, now that media attention has faded, the affected homeowners are\u00a0stuck<\/a>\u00a0in a \u201cRing Around the Rosie game of bureaucracy\u201d between insurance companies, state agencies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).<\/p>\n

The tendency among various agencies and actors to pass the buck is a symptom of the failure to reassess the relationship between public and private responses to the climate crisis. The author\u2019s\u00a0recently published book<\/a>\u00a0shows how the climate crisis demands a rethinking of the fundamental precepts of modernity, including the larger-than-life role played by private property and capitalism.<\/p>\n

As another\u00a0potentially devastating fire season<\/a>\u00a0looms over the\u00a0United States west<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0across the world<\/a>, lessons from LA \u2014 where local, state and federal policymakers got it wrong \u2014 can help improve responses to climate-related disasters.<\/p>\n

Climate change has upended housing insurance markets in\u00a0California<\/a>,\u00a0nationally<\/a> and\u00a0globally<\/a>. Most policy solutions aim to steer individuals toward\u00a0incorporating\u00a0<\/a>climate risks in home purchasing and ownership decisions \u2014 developments that privatise the risks of climate change.<\/p>\n

For example, some\u00a0state laws<\/a>\u00a0in the US require disclosing a home\u2019s flood history or wildfire risks to potential buyers or making insurance policies conditional on homeowners taking specific risk reduction\u00a0measures<\/a>, such as raising a home\u2019s mechanical systems above the base flood elevation, creating five-foot ember-resistant zones around homes or clearing fire-fueling vegetation from around a house.<\/p>\n

Embedded in such policies is the argument that internalising the risks related to climate change impacts will incentivise buyers and owners to support measures for addressing the climate crisis. Thus, the Federal National Mortgage Association (also known as Fannie Mae), which backs more than 40 per cent of all residential mortgages in the US, seeks to incorporate climate change risk into its mortgage underwriting.<\/p>\n

But privatising climate risks may backfire as people may resent bearing the costs of the collective failure to address the climate crisis. And privatising these risks spells trouble for public entities.<\/p>\n

First, privatising climate risk may make it difficult for a large majority of Americans to gain or retain home ownership. Some analysts\u00a0suggest<\/a>\u00a0that one in ten properties insured by the US\u2019s National Flood Insurance Program will eventually require a rate hike of at least 300 per cent. Flood insurance in the worst-affected areas in Florida and Louisiana could increase so dramatically for some properties that they \u201ceffectively become worthless<\/a>\u201c.<\/p>\n

Second, privatising responses to climate risks \u2014 either through policy or the uncoordinated actions of individuals and households \u2014 may also affect public responses to climate-related disasters. In the wake of the LA fires, the wealthiest households hired\u00a0concierge firefighting services<\/a>\u00a0to protect their properties while the rapidly moving wildfires scorched entire neighborhoods around them.<\/p>\n

Such measures can interfere with public responses to wildfires, as these private responses are often not part of the streamlined\u00a0chain of command<\/a>\u00a0between state, county and local firefighters.<\/p>\n

Third, privatising risk is unlikely to address the systemic effects of the climate crisis. For example, one of the most important and often neglected, questions is the role that property taxes play in the provision of services by local governments.<\/p>\n

Raising alarm over wildfire or flood-related risks could bring down property prices and, in turn,\u00a0reduce property taxes<\/a>, which local governments rely on for providing public education, firefighting and other vital services. At the same time, the worsening climate crisis imposes new costs on local governments.<\/p>\n

Despite support from state and federal agencies, local governments are left to bear significant portions of post-disaster costs, including cleaning up and rebuilding public infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, power lines, streetlights and sewage systems. An early estimate suggested that wildfires in Pacific Palisades and parts of Los Angeles in January 2025 damaged or destroyed about $350 million<\/a>\u00a0in public infrastructure. This estimate did not include the damage from the Eaton fire, which burned in Altadena and Pasadena.<\/p>\n

As a result of these pressures, privatisation of climate risks presents formidable challenges that local governments cannot resolve on their own. Private insurers, whose business model gave rise to the\u00a0controversial<\/a>\u00a0concierge firefighting services, cannot address these problems on their own.<\/p>\n

The scale of the climate crisis upends the long-established principles of\u00a0risk pooling<\/a>\u00a0that are central to the insurance market. Random distribution of risks across space, time and policyholders is crucial for the viability of insurance providers\u2019 business models and keeping insurance premiums affordable. A significant spike in the frequency and scope of climate change-related disasters, such as wildfires, goes against the assumption of risk pooling, making the worst-affected states or regions\u00a0uninsurable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The need to address these gaps has become more salient in the context of the proposals for \u201cmanaged retreat<\/a>\u201d from areas that the climate crisis is likely to render uninhabitable.<\/p>\n

Long-term solutions to these challenges require a fundamental\u00a0restructuring<\/a>\u00a0of the state, society and the economy, such as reducing the\u00a0dependence<\/a>\u00a0of local governments on property taxes. These increasingly unavoidable transformative changes can be realized only under a broad-based public mandate for managing risks and protecting the most vulnerable groups.<\/p>\n

Public deliberations about the links between private interests and public policies and institutions will be crucial for adapting to a climate-changed world.<\/p>\n

Prakash Kashwan\u00a0is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Brandeis University. He also holds a faculty affiliation with the Heller School of Social Policy & Management at Brandeis, with ongoing research comparing climate policy wins in Maine, New York and California. He is the lead author of Decolonizing Environmentalism (Bloomsbury 2025).<\/p>\n

Originally published under\u00a0<\/a>Creative Commons<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0<\/a>360info<\/a>\u2122.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dramatic scenes of wildfires\u00a0around Los Angeles, with entire neighborhoods burned to the ground, dominated global media for weeks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3843],"tags":[96526,96527,96528,728,96530,96529,61748,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-249998","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-climate-disasters","9":"tag-climate-insurance","10":"tag-climate-insurance-protection","11":"tag-environment","12":"tag-housing-insurance-market","13":"tag-policy-solution","14":"tag-private-insurance","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114821781471320713","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}