Margaret Walls, Senior Fellow and Director of the Climate Risks and Resilience Program, explores how floods, wildfires, and storms are reshaping where people live and what it costs communities when disaster strikes. She explains that natural disasters are becoming a growing financial and structural burden, damaging homes, roads, and infrastructure while diverting resources from long-term community investments.
She introduces the concept of disaster risk, which depends on three key factors: the likelihood of a disaster, the number of people and buildings exposed to it, and how prepared a community is to respond. Despite growing risks, people continue to move into flood zones, coastlines, and wildfire-prone areas because they remain desirable places to live.
Ultimately, she asks whether current policies are keeping pace with increasing disaster risks or unintentionally allowing communities to become even more vulnerable over time.