‘Land politics’ are at the root of our costliest natural disasters

The disasters wreaked by Hurricanes Helene and Milton are an immense human tragedy. The years leading up to these powerful storms, as well as the responses in their aftermath, demonstrate that how we reckon and live with the environment is also rooted in politics.

Patterns of home-building in climate frontiers, and the resources provided to communities following natural disasters, are deeply rooted in the political power of land.

Americans have long settled in frontier areas that are exposed to natural disasters and climate risks. That has not diminished with the growing recognition of vulnerability to floods, fires, earthquakes and other disasters in risk-prone areas — to the contrary, such settlement has only grown.

The last decade has seen even more settlement in places like the wildfire-prone mountains outside of Los Angeles, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and in flood-prone coastal areas of Florida. The number of Americans living in flood-prone areas now exceeds 40 million. One-quarter of Californians live in high-risk wildfire areas, a number that is anticipated to grow in the coming years.

There is much to like about these beautiful areas and their pleasant climates. But that’s not the only reason people are moving there. Settlement in these places has been facilitated, and even encouraged, by insurance markets and tax breaks.

Until recently, buying insurance in environmentally risky areas of California, Florida and elsewhere has been affordable, even cheap. Insurers have used historical rather than forward-looking models to predict risk and smoothed the greater liabilities in these areas by increasing rates in places not subject to these risks. This is in part a political response to influential, wealthy constituents who buy primary or vacation homes in high-demand but environmentally risky areas like coastal Florida. Their choices are effectively subsidized by less well-off policyholders.

But as insurers have been hit by catastrophes like the Camp and Dixie fires in California and Hurricane Ian in Florida, they have wised up. Home insurance markets have seized up in both of those states and are teetering elsewhere. In their place, states have intervened to become insurers of last resort, and in most cases the states have replicated the problems of private insurers (and several federal government agencies) by effectively subsidizing insurance in the riskiest places.

It is no surprise that people take on more risk when they don’t have to pay for it. Tax incentives and the increase in housing prices in urban areas have accelerated that trend. As housing prices skyrocketed in the aftermath of the pandemic, more people began moving out of expensive cities toward southern states that promised affordable housing and low taxes.

Places like Florida now have entire communities that make little sense from a long-term climate perspective. For instance, the oceanside counties of Miami-Dade and Broward are predicted to be 60 percent submerged by 2060 and entirely submerged by 2100 by rising sea levels. Yet the demand for housing in this area has surged and many homes now fetch millions.

Hurricane Helene, on the other hand, shows that these are far from the only at-risk places. Some of the storm’s greatest damage occurred far from coastal areas, like the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, where flooding was severe. Few people there, however, had flood insurance policies through the National Flood Insurance Program, in part because of the program’s outdated models, poor outreach and greater focus on expensive coastal areas. When the program tried to increase prices in 2014 to more accurately price risk, wealthy coastal constituents complained and organized to block the plan.

Hurricane Milton puts these contradictions and political distortions in high relief. It is poised to become one of the most expensive hurricanes on record. That expectation already has the government and private insurers scrambling. The Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program, often the biggest source of federal disaster recovery funds for individual survivors, is on the brink of insolvency, and FEMA will face a funding crunch by the end of this year. The White House has petitioned Congress for more funds.

Recent experience should prompt a rethinking of how to more robustly support communities and to rebuild in a more sustainable manner. That includes reckoning with the realities of a changing climate where weather patterns have shifted, climate fluctuations have become more severe and seas are rising.

Federal agencies like the National Flood Insurance Program need to recognize a far wider range of risks beyond sea rise in coastal areas, to include inland areas that could be inundated by flash flooding from storms with more intense precipitation. Homeowners in those areas should be informed of their updated risk profiles and canvassed for insurance protection. Government-backed and private insurers alike need to take into account the latest climate forecasts in pricing risk and work with residents to protect against those hazards.

In the longer term, states and localities will have to confront the perverse political calculations that encourage risky homeowner choices. That includes possibly resettling people away from the places most vulnerable to climate disaster. Otherwise, the human costs of climate disasters are bound to rise.

Michael Albertus is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of the forthcoming book “Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies.”