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.