Climate Central examined historical trends in fire weather — a combination of hot, dry, windy conditions — across the U.S.

This analysis uses data from 476 weather stations to assess fire weather trends in 245 climate divisions spanning the contiguous U.S. from 1973 to 2025.

On average, climate divisions in the western U.S. experience 32 fire weather days annually. That’s four times more than in the eastern U.S.

Wildfire seasons are lengthening and intensifying, particularly in the western U.S. Parts of the eastern U.S. have seen smaller but impactful increases in fire weather days.

Much of the country has seen fire weather increase the most during spring. The Southwest is also seeing more fire weather during summer.

Climate Central analyzed average annual temperature trends since 1970 in 49 states and 242 U.S. cities to understand how temperatures across the country have changed as heat-trapping pollution has continued to climb.

The fastest-warming U.S. states from 1970 to 2025 are:

• Alaska
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• Delaware
• Massachusetts
• Vermont

The fastest-warming U.S. cities are:

• Reno, NV
• Las Vegas, NV
• El Paso, TX
• Burlington, VT
• Tyler, TX

This Climate Matters analysis is based on open-access data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). See Methodology for details.

Resilience applies to systems at every scale; from our cells and bodies to our families, friends, cities, and nations, all the way up to our global civilization and biosphere. Each of these is facing threats from climate change; as conscious individuals, we have the ability to direct our time, energy, and resources towards strengthening these systems.

The world needs resilient individuals to weather the challenges of the coming years, whether that’s helping to lower our ecological footprint, developing sustainable ways of meeting our needs, building lifeboat communities, or spearheading shifts in our governments and economies.

Since it’s such a central concept, it’s important to get clear on what resilience means. We like this simple definition from the Stockholm Resilience Centre:

Resilience is the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop.

So how can we work to build climate resilience, both personally and collectively? In this post, we’ve identified 7 principles which expand our ability to weather crises:

• Decentralization
• Diversity
• Redundancy
• Capacity
• Elasticity
• Feedback
• Transformation

For each principle we’ll explore the definition and theory, along with real-world examples so you can integrate them into your life. We hope these keys help you cultivate more resilience in your life, and that this in turn steers us towards a more sustainable future.

In the 1980s and 1990s, climate change was a threat, not a reality. Back then, climate leaders hoped to slow or stop warming before our civilization would see material weather-related effects or reach levels of warming that would risk irreversible changes. Those leaders—people like George Woodwell, who created the institution that brought me into this work—achieved admirable results, building the infrastructure, frameworks, and culture that came to define the climate action community.

In 2026, what the climate leaders of the previous era hoped to prevent is now here. Global temperatures from the past three years (2023-2025) averaged more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level for the first time. Climate models project that we could reach 2°C of warming as early as the 2030s.

And yet, public acknowledgement and discussion of this physical reality remain confined to specialists. It has not penetrated mainstream climate messaging, media coverage, or public discourse anywhere near the scale its consequences demand. Some thought leaders even celebrate the current trajectory as a win compared to the much higher warming that once seemed likely.

The climate community is not a monolith, but having tracked climate messaging closely for over a decade, I believe the prevailing narratives are not keeping pace with the science. Terms like “doomerism” have discouraged realism, leading many to mistake clear-eyed risk assessment for defeatism or alarmism. The climate movement needs a shared narrative focused on what outcomes are inevitable, what we can still prevent, and what choices remain available. In other words: What futures can humanity still hope for?

As the effects of climate change worsen, more people are wondering how it’s going to affect them personally. How is temperature and weather changing where you live? Is your home at risk from natural disasters, like wildfires and floods? And how will warming affect things like the economy, energy, health, and population trends?

We’ve gone through dozens of climate risk maps to identify the 5 regions of America which are facing the most overall risk. This is a quick way to check whether you’re sitting in the line of fire, so you can take steps to mitigate (or avoid) those threats.

The insurance industry is the climate crisis’s canary in the coal mine. As disasters become more frequent and intense, insurers have responded by increasing prices, dropping policies, and withdrawing from states and regions entirely. State-funded insurance programs have been created to cover the gap, but mounting losses threaten their viability as well. Insurance commissioner Dave Jones puts it bluntly:

Insurers in all states will be overrun by the increased risk and losses resulting from rising global temperatures. Unless we transition away from fossil fuels that continue to drive up global temperatures, we will continue to march - at an increasing pace - toward an uninsurable future.

In this post, we’ll be taking a look at insurance nonrenewals, or instances of insurers refusing to renew home insurance policies. This is a critical factor, as insurance is a requirement for a mortgage; when insurers withdraw, vulnerable regions may experience a mass exodus as homeowners sell or default on their loans.

In 2024, the Senate Budget Committee released a report titled Next to Fall: The Climate-Driven Insurance Crisis is Here – And Getting Worse. The report analyzed 249 million insurance policies from 2018 through 2023, and found that over 1.9 million homeowners have been dropped from their policies over that time period.

“The climate crisis is not just about polar bears, and it’s not just about green jobs,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said during a hearing on the investigation’s findings. “It actually is coming through your mail slot, in the form of insurance cancellations, insurance nonrenewals and dramatic increases in insurance costs.”

We’ve mapped that data so you can see which parts of America have been most affected.

The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is expected on Thursday to repeal a scientific finding that requires the federal government to fight global warming. The move is the latest push by the Trump administration to wipe out climate regulations in the United States.

Lisa Friedman, a New York Times reporter who covers climate policy, has spent the past few weeks piecing together the inside story of how a small group of activists turned its goal of rolling back environmental protections into reality.

We have an urgent responsibility. Our existing economic system is incapable of addressing the social and ecological crises we face in the 21st century. When we look around we see an extraordinary paradox. On the one hand, we have access to remarkable new technologies and a collective capacity to produce more food, more stuff than we need or that the planet can afford. Yet at the same time, millions of people suffer in conditions of severe deprivation.

What explains this paradox? Capitalism. By capitalism we do not mean markets, trade and entrepreneurship, which have been around for thousands of years before the rise of capitalism. By capitalism we mean something very odd and very specific: an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. Even if we live in a democracy and have a choice in our political system, our choices never seem to change the economic system. Capitalists are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit. The rest of us – the people who are actually doing the production – do not get a say.

So we end up with irrational forms of production as a result: we get massive production of things such as SUVs, mansions and fast fashion, because these things are highly profitable to capital, but chronic underproduction of obviously necessary things like affordable housing and public transit, because these are much less profitable to capital, or not profitable at all.

The solution is staring us in the face. We urgently need to overcome the capitalist law of value and democratise our economy, so that we can organise production around urgent social and ecological priorities. After all, we are the producers of the goods, the services, the technologies. It is our labour and our planet’s resources that are at stake. And so we must claim the right to decide what is produced, how, and for what purpose.

Climate change is throwing a snag in one of the most important considerations during the home-buying process—location. With catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes and sea-level rise climbing, experts are urging prospective homebuyers to take regional climate risks into account before settling down somewhere with a 30-year mortgage.

In recent years, real estate and rental marketplaces have started to show these dangers on home listings to equip buyers with basic climate-threat information. However, one of the most popular marketplaces recently took down its climate scores following pushback from the housing industry, which claims the data is unreliable and negatively impacts the market, as Inside Climate News fellow Claire Barber reported.

Now companies, researchers and some states are stepping in to fill gaps. A slew of resources remain available for people to tap as they try to avoid the worst of future climate impacts.

One of the hard truths to accept early on in the search for a new home is that there are no climate havens, experts say. Research shows that climate impacts touch every corner of the world, from the remote Arctic to the bustling streets of New York City.

But that doesn’t mean every region faces the same type or degree of risk, so it is possible to find areas that are less likely to be pummeled by a hurricane or scorched by a wildfire, said Jesse Gourevitch, an economist at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.

“As a homebuyer, the key is trying to access information about those relative risks and then decide how to make trade-offs with that information relative to all the other criteria that a homebuyer might be considering,” he told me.

During Cop30 negotiations in Brazil last year, delegates heard a familiar argument: rising emissions are unavoidable for countries pursuing growth.

This week, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, called for economies to “move beyond GDP” as a measure of progress, warning that the world’s “existing accounting systems” were driving the planet towards disaster.

His remarks echo an increasingly influential school of economics, known broadly as “post-growth”, that asks what was once unthinkable: will solving the climate crisis mean learning to live without constant expansion?

Post-growth economists often reject GDP in favour of new frameworks that account for environmental damage – such as the “doughnut economics” adopted recently by Amsterdam, or New Zealand’s attempt at a “wellbeing budget”.

The field has its disagreements, particularly over the extent to which countries should actively pursue de-growth measures to scale down their economies. But proponents agree that with the planet pushed to the limit, a radical rethink is needed.

“Economic growth has a near mythical status in the affections of economists and politicians. But wishful thinking won’t solve the climate crisis,” said Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey and a leading post-growth economist. “Post-growth economics offers us more choice, more realism and more insight into the possibilities for human prosperity. It’s not about returning to the cave but about breaking free from our intellectual prisons.”

Picture the bucolic little town of a fairy tale. At its core stand medieval buildings, a square where folks hawk their goods, and perhaps a well to provide water. Beyond the defensive wall radiate agricultural fields, where people toil to bring grains, fruits, and vegetables to market.

Invert that for modern times and you’ve got the idea behind “agrihoods,” communities designed around a central farm. Like a garden in a big city, agrihoods promise to boost food security, reduce temperatures, capture rainwater, and increase biodiversity. As climate change intensifies heat, flooding, and pressure on food systems, agrihoods could be a way to make urban living more resilient — not just more picturesque.

Developers have a hard time offering open space, because they would like to build more housing,” said Vincent Mudd, a partner at the architectural firm Steinberg Hart, which designs agrihoods. “One of the few ways to kind of bridge that gap is to be able to use active open space that actually generates commerce.”

On paper, an agrihood is a simple concept: a working farm surrounded by single- or multifamily housing.

Steinberg Hart recently finished two of them in California — one in Santa Clara and another, called Fox Point Farms, in Encinitas. The former, south of San Francisco, features townhouses, market-rate units, and affordable housing, plus a community center and retail shops. The latter, north of San Diego, adds a farm-to-table restaurant, an event venue, and a grocery store, but its housing is primarily for sale instead of rent. “Two different housing programs for two different communities, but built around the sustainability of urban farming,” Mudd said.

A rising number of American homeowners are ready relocate this year due to extreme weather events and other climate-related concerns.

Some 49 percent of those who own a house are considering moving in 2026 due to climate events, according to a survey of 1,000 American adults by insurance provider Kin Insurance. Also a concern among homeowners is the rising cost of homeownership, the study noted.

“Kin uncovered that climate is driving decisions about where people live and the rising costs of homeownership are changing when and how people buy homes,” the study noted. The study also found that nearly all homeowners are concerned about severe weather damaging their homes.

Kin’s survey found that within the 49 percent of homeowners who want to move, 19 percent “definitely” are considering it, while 30 percent are “somewhat” considering it. Some 45 percent said they were not considering a move.

As for how far away they want to move, Kin broke up respondents’ intentions into three groups:

• Moving within their current city or community: 41 percent
• Moving to a different city or community in their state: 35 percent
• Moving to another state: 25 percent.

For those considering a move to another state, more than half of respondents wanted to avoid disaster-prone states like Florida and California and preferred to move to what they perceived as low-risk states, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Connecticut.

As Amitav Ghosh documents in The Nutmeg’s Curse, environmental destruction has long been used as a more palatable way to achieve the same ends as overt killing, by destroying the conditions people need to survive, and then calling the outcome inevitable or natural.

That logic is still with us. When an administration dismantles a climate or environmental regulation, it does so with a clear understanding of how many people that action is projected to kill. Every major rule comes with a cost-benefit analysis that explicitly tallies how many lives it is expected to save through fewer heart attacks, asthma deaths, premature births, and heat-related illnesses.

Rolling those rules back is a decision made knowing certain lives will no longer be saved. Which is why it matters that the EPA recently announced it would stop considering the value of human life in these analyses. You don’t remove that column unless you’re trying not to look at it.

Seen this way, the connections stop being theoretical. The same state willing to criminalize dissent, erode democratic safeguards, and look away from violence in the streets is also willing to let people die slowly through pollution and heat—as long as the right industries remain protected.

The property insurance crisis is becoming a prime mover for climate migration in the US. As premiums rise and insurers drop policies, it becomes difficult (if not impossible) to buy and sell homes in risk-prone areas, or to rebuild after disaster strikes. As the New York Times reports:

Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services. As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come.

It should be clear that climate change is a major factor, and now we have the data to back it up. In 2025, a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research found a strong link between home insurance premiums and climate risk. Titled Property Insurance and Disaster Risk, authors Benjamin Keys & Philip Mulder found that premiums have risen over 30% on average since 2020, with at-risk regions seeing much larger increases.

In this post, we’ve mapped that data so you can see how and where the insurance crisis is affecting America; we’ll also be highlighting some key findings from the report, and looking at which areas of the country have been most affected.

Above-average temperatures are forecast across much of the country during the holiday, but the core of the warmth — where departures from normal will be the largest — is anticipated to extend from the Front Range of the Rockies into the Central Plains and Upper Midwest.

Over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, daily high temperatures in these regions are forecast to range between 20°F and 35°F above the 1991-2020 climate normals. Much of the western and eastern U.S. is also expected to experience unusual warmth, 5°F to 15°F above average.

Holiday high temperatures are anticipated to reach the 60s to 80s from the Plains to the Gulf Coast. For many, this warmth will challenge or break daily high temperature records. On Christmas morning, low temperatures are expected to range from 40°F to the mid-60s, or up to 25°F above average for late December.

Climate Shift Index (CSI) levels of 3 are forecast across the Central and Northern Plains, Upper Midwest, and the Southwest, meaning human-caused climate change made this warmth at least 3 times more likely. CSI levels of 5 — the highest possible — are forecast in portions of Missouri and throughout the Southwest and Mexico, signaling an exceptional climate-influenced event.

Shelton Tucker is part of a novel plan to deal with the waters that are increasingly encroaching on his neighborhood in Hampton, Virginia. Situated at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and afflicted by one of the fastest paces of sea-level rise in the U.S., Hampton has long battled flooding.

But while flood-prone coastal cities have historically defaulted to levees, pumps and miles of cement-covered storm drains, Hampton is leaning heavily on rain barrels, rain gardens, declogging creeks and fortifying shores with oyster reefs.

Hampton residents like Tucker have a part to play, too. The 67-year-old president of the Greater Aberdeen Community Coalition has a spot for a rain garden—a plot designed to collect and absorb stormwater runoff—prepared in the front yard of his father’s house. “I got it all bricked out,” Tucker said. “I just need to know the plants to put in it.”

Hampton’s rain gardens and oyster reefs are part of a flood-management strategy heavily influenced by the Netherlands, dubbed “Living With Water.” At its core is a change in mindset about how to approach a future increasingly defined by rising oceans, more intense rains and soggier ground.

Instead of fighting water, the thinking goes, let it in. Guide it to areas where it can flow and sit safely; enjoy it while it’s there. Restore natural systems that absorb, buffer and cleanse. Take steps big and small, public and private, since every little bit counts.

In practice, that means Hampton is trying to better handle large volumes of water, dotting flood-prone areas with plant-lined storage basins, inserting low weirs in rivers to slow the flow of excess water and raising some key streets that are likely to submerge regardless.

While some nearby coastal cities are proposing billion-dollar floodwalls and surge barriers, Hampton is looking at restoring marshes and “naturalizing” miles of rock-fortified shoreline with sand and marsh grasses.

At a coastal park a few blocks from Hampton City Hall, the city is building a sandy marsh over the rocks that currently line the shore, and experimenting with new types of protective sills—including 3D-printed concrete reefs seeded with oysters.

The changes mean incoming waves will be gently buffered, rather than reflected by hard surfaces as they are now, reducing flooding and erosion, said Olivia Askew, a Hampton city resilience officer.

The water “will rise and fall in the new marsh that we’re creating, which will soften the shoreline,” she said.

The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the most beautiful and forbidding places on Earth, so dry that it’s sometimes used by scientists to test run Mars missions. Most years the area sees less than half a centimeter of rain, but this past September unusually heavy precipitation brought forth a desert bloom, blanketing the ground with delicate purple flowers that disappeared as quickly as they’d appeared.

It was a rare treat for locals used to grimmer ornamentation: Since 2001, colorful mountains of used clothing have been the main feature growing across the Atacama. By the time the largest mound was set on fire in 2022, it contained some 100,000 tons of discarded fabric, roughly the weight of an aircraft carrier. Today, piles like it continue to grow.

This fashion graveyard has become so large that some outlets have dubbed it the “great fashion garbage patch.” It owes its growth to the nearby duty-free port of Iquique, where Chile imports all manner of international goods without customs or taxes — including heaps of used clothing from the United States, Europe, and Asia. While the best items are resold to international markets, overwhelming volumes of cheap fast-fashion pieces don’t make the cut. Instead, they are dumped in the desert — an open secret that the government largely ignores. The burnings, whether they’re intended to destroy the evidence or make more space, fill nearby towns with smoky, unhealthy air.

Activists have been fighting against this desert dumping for years, documenting the burnings and suing both the federal and local governments to stop it. But the real blame for Chile’s mess lies beyond the country’s borders. From the moment these garments are spun from fibers to the time of their undignified disposal, they are part of a vast global pollution machine — one that has grown massively as the world economy has globalized and factories have begun pumping out ever-cheaper, ever-faster styles to customers half a world away.

This new hyper-vast, hyper-fast-fashion system is phenomenally destructive. Today, the clothing trade generates some 170 billion garments a year — roughly half of which wind up being thrown out within that year, and almost all of which despoil the world’s land, air, and seas. In the process, it generates as much as 10 percent of all planet-warming emissions, making it the second-largest industrial polluter, while also holding the distinction of being the world’s second-largest consumer and polluter of water. When all its many offenses are cataloged and counted, fashion is the third-most-polluting industry on the planet, after energy and food.

Tim Teichert and Jason Thornock want the sun to help them survive as ranchers in Cokeville, Wyoming. On an overcast May day, the two drove around the one-restaurant town, lamenting high electricity prices and restrictive Wyoming laws that they say have thrown an unnecessary burden onto their broad shoulders.

“I pay $90,000 in an electric bill,” Teichert said as he and Thornock made their way through fields of cattle, alfalfa and hay. “Jason’s about $150,000. If Jason had that $150,000 back, his kids could all come back to Cokeville, and work and live here, and you’d be able to raise kids here in Cokeville.”

In 2023, hoping to improve their margins, Teichert and Thornock each applied for Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) grants, which the Biden administration had infused with $2 billion to help support farmers interested in renewable energy.

While neither man was thrilled about the prospect of applying for federal funds—they prefer smaller government—they were interested in using solar to cover their own electrical demand. Teichert and Thornock say this could have saved them five or six figures annually, and made their businesses more attractive to their kids.

Across Wyoming and the U.S., Americans increasingly face skyrocketing electricity bills. In 2023, Rocky Mountain Power, Teichert and Thornock’s utility and the largest in Wyoming, asked regulators at the state’s Public Service Commission to approve a nearly 30 percent rate increase; the next year, they asked to raise rates by close to 15 percent. Though both requests were ultimately granted at lower rates, affordability concerns have sent almost every corner of Wyoming scrambling for ways to defray rising electricity costs.

A fraction of homeowners already do this in the Equality State by using credits from their utility for generating their own electricity using solar panels and sending excess amounts back to the grid, an arrangement known as net metering. But Wyoming law caps net-metering systems at 25 kilowatts, large enough to include just about any homeowner’s rooftop solar system, but too small to provide enough credits to offset all the electricity larger properties, like ranches, draw from the grid.

Earlier this year, a coalition of environmentalists, businesses and ranchers, including Teichert and Thornock, unsuccessfully supported a bill that would have raised Wyoming’s net-metering cap to 250 kilowatts.

Teichert and Thornock were initially counting on changes to the law as they eyed REAP funds. Teichert, a sturdy man with pale blue eyes and a trim Fu Manchu mustache, eventually applied and was awarded a $440,000 grant to build a ranch shed supporting around 250 kilowatts of solar panels. Today, with no ability to net meter, he fears he may never recoup his investment, which was over $500,000. Thornock, whose wide, boyish grin sits atop a hefty build, was approved for $868,000 in REAP funding to build a 648-kilowatt solar system. Concerned that his project’s viability rested on the judgment of state lawmakers, he returned the money.

In 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft hurled past Saturn at 38,000 miles per hour. Carl Sagan, who had worked on the project, made a suggestion: the probe should turn to face Earth before leaving the solar system and take one last photo of our planet.

It captured a tiny, blue-green marbled orb, suspended in pitch darkness.

It was an image that defined a generation. We had become star travellers. Hairless apes breaking free of a planet’s gravity, launching into the abyss, only to look back at where we came from as if seeing it for the first time.

Against the backdrop of a vast cosmos, this was our only habitable home. Revealed in a single frame, liberated from borders and tribal identities.

What if the next shift in planetary consciousness didn’t come from looking back at Earth from space, but from listening deeply to the voices already here?

I refer to this as the lifeworlding effect, and in this piece I’ll argue why I think it’s the overview effect of our time. I’ll take you through developments in science, technology, law, and many other disciplines which are revealing our entangled presence within a multi-species world, and how this view could radically change our future.

Lifeworlding

To understand why the lifeworlding effect matters, we can look at what role the overview effect played in the 20th century. Before the famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ photograph, pictures of Earth taken during the Apollo missions of the 1960s led to author Frank White coining the term.

He was referring to the phenomenon whereby astronauts reported experiencing significant cognitive shifts upon their return from space, such as self-transcendence, expanded identities and profound awe. “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.” - Astronaut Edgar Mitchell

The overview effect helped catalyze a new planetary awareness for many. It awakened a visceral sense of belonging to a wider whole and contextualized the preciousness of life, rippling into the first waves of the environmental movement.

In an age of AI imagery and live satellite feeds, what would be today’s equivalent of the overview effect? What image or sensation of the Earth could we experience that would change us forever?

Winter is the fastest-warming season for most of the U.S. — affecting snowfall, water supplies, winter sports, spring allergies, summer fruits, and more. In our warming world, the coldest days aren’t as cold and cold snaps are shrinking.

From 1970 to 2025, winters have warmed in 98% of 244 U.S. cities analyzed — by 3.9°F on average. Most cities (88%) now experience at least seven more warmer-than-normal winter days than they did in the early 1970s. Locations across the Northeast and the Great Lakes region have seen some of the highest rates of winter warming: