The public voices serious concern about climate change impacts and the failure of disaster management policies, demanding stronger government action and sustainable solutions. There's frustration with insurance companies and acknowledgment of socioeconomic inequalities exacerbated by environmental challenges, leading to fears about future crises.

Government

Insurance Companies

Environmental Organizations

I am a second-year student in the program now. Plenty of people are in the program without relevant work experience, some even without work experience. I would focus on the personal letter and state why your bachelor's degree prepared you for a master's in this field.  The field and the program are very diverse and multidisciplinary!

Zealousideal_Bad_694

I am in the same boat! Would love any advice on how to make the personal statement strong without much relevant work experience!

Otherwise_Grade9225

_Master of Disaster_ has a certain ring to it.

:D

furry_cat

Upper midwest.  Insurance increased last year by 35%.




This year it is another 25% increase.  These increases are beyond any raise either of us got at work.  We already cut the budget.  No streaming services, no subscriptions, no alcohol, no drugs or smoking.




We pay for car, car insurance on one vehicle (thank god for good quality ebike), our house and our healthcare.  We grow veggies to cover costs and cook at home.




Our budget is getting tighter and tigher.  We both work.  We are in decent heallth, a few small things here and there but both able to work and do so full-time.  And now this.




I do not write this to complain.  Just to say, we are really good with living pretty cheap and this hits hard year after year and we are really far away from the catastrophic events.


Yes, our area has had tornadoes and lots of hail.  But we also have a waiver on our roof as it is metal and carries a lifetime manufacturer warranty and we have not had an insurance claim on our house so.....

PrairieFire_withwind

SS: This is my attempt to explain the current situation of the US insurance and financial system in the face of massively accelerating climate change and natural disasters. Bluelining via 'climate risk management' systems, exploding risk of fixed assets such as real estate and other property, and expansion of state insurance systems are posing an existential challenge to the capitalist system. It will lead to mass impoverishment of the everyman as they're locked out of their home equity and insurance retreats from every corner of the county.

It's likely 'climate risk management' will be the solution that Wall Street firms such as Moody's propose, and it will cause mass impoverishment. Collapse related due to the proposed risk management systems being entirely unethical and information asymmetric. It could reshape cities, the economy and society entirely into an even more unequal system than today as the system of capital begins to digest the new reality of an unstable climate everywhere.

I will say this is a bit of a US-centric post, but expect this same system to be implemented in different parts of the world if it proves successful here.

Suspicious-Bad4703

I live in Eastern Canada. Our insurance shot up over the past few years due to the claims from the fires in Western Canada apparently... I suspect it was mainly due to corporate profiteering, but they did use the climate related disasters as an excuse... 

That said, in much of the USA the economics of insurance are going to make it unaffordable regardless of the profiteering.

shapeofthings

As a life-long Minnesotan, climate relislience isn't just about being "free from disasters" because no area is free from risk. But there is a big difference between things like Hurricane Helene hitting mountain/valley communities and hail storms in Minnesota. Areas with hills and valleys will always be high risk for floods because of the nature of water, along with the tendency for humans to dam up the mountains like crazy and associated risks for dam failures. 

But anyhow, it's also about resource access, and that is a big part of why MN is on the list. We have a lot of fresh water and other well-managed natural resources. But winters are hard to survive outside of our modern lives. And of course, those resources won't last long if throngs of people move to any of those areas. I think the people living in those areas are going to defend them to the death if they feel the need. It'll turn into scenes where communities gate themselves off and refuse to let people in to protect their resources. It's going to get ugly all around. It's kind of "funny" how many people seem to think that people who live in the somewhat less risky areas will just open the doors for others to move in. They won't. They will try to wall off their communities, they'll end up in fights with government/military about refusing to let people in. Those lovely scenes in movies like Day After Tomorrow where Mexico happily opens its borders to all the US refugees? 😂 That is not human nature.

KimBrrr1975

A hurricane worse than Sandy hitting NYC will probably be the black swan to trigger the insurance market demise. Or a big one destroying large swaths of Miami. Aka commercial real estate insurance.

[deleted]

&gt; This isn’t going to create a more equitable or even a stable socio-economic system in the face of advancing climate change, instead it will create fiefdoms and enclaves of climate 'safety' which will be insured, while the rest will be left in bluelined ghettos.

I'd been imagining uninsurable homes would be bought up by the rich with cash for pennies on the dollar, but while I'm sure that will happen in many places the other people who will buy them up are slum lords like the folks using apps to buy properties and rent them out. Buy up properties and then spend the bare  minimum (or less) on maintenance, hoping that by the time they finally get condemned or destroyed you'll have made back several times what you spent on them. Then when they do get destroyed demand the government bail you out because you were "generously" providing housing to low income people.

Everywhere is safe haven if you are rich. Nowhere is safe haven if you are poor.

NyriasNeo

I'd rather live in a climate risk uninsurable house that I can pay off and self-insure then pay 800K and have to work a high stress job to afford it for the rest of my life.  If only asking prices would reflect the coming reality...

collapsis_vulgaris

So realistically, the only viable solution on the table would be to nationalize insurance and spread the risk across the entire population. Probably wouldn't cost anymore than it already does to be sustainable since the profit element would be eliminated.

bladearrowney

People hit hardest by this will also lack the means to move to a cheaper location, one where insurance premiums are lower. It is a double whammy because those who will be unable to afford insurance in the long term are going to be those who need it most. People could end up homeless come the next disaster because their house is destroyed and they have no way to rebuild.

pajamakitten

We really are living through something that feels like the opening chapters of some horrific dystopian novel.

"It is the future, and humanity has gone nearly extinct due to climate change. The world's governments failed to reach any consensus on dealing with the problem, and ultimately, proved useless. Now the few remaining humans fight viciously for what remains of the food, water, and air still available on this dying planet..."

DreamHollow4219

I live in south central Kentucky. Seeing this happen at the elevation of Asheville is just mind blowing and scary. I thought all of us in the Appalachians might have a chance. I used to go to camp in Black Rock, outside Asheville, and I have friends in the area. It is terrifying.

cozycorner

Government needs to come in, eliminate private insurance, and make it a public socialized system.

In the era of collapse profit mindset is sociopathic.

Cereal_Ki11er

Insurance is at the front lines of the climate crisis. Probably one of the few areas of the corporate world to properly recognize and evaluate the unfolding situation. 

[Collapse of the US home Insurance System](https://www.collapse2050.com/collapse-of-the-u-s-home-insurance-system/)

idreamofkitty

I can understand bluelining in areas where climate related disasters are precedented. Areas in Florida with hurricanes and flooding, Iowa’s tornadoes and severe storms, fire risk in California. But what will the industry do in places where some sections of a region might be at risk of flooding but other sections are on hills and not at risk of floods. Is it granular enough to differentiate? And if insurance to private owners is disappearing then I suppose it opens the door to corporate buyers who can self insure?

Lord_Vesuvius2020

You touche on the government subsidizing insurance.


FL is already doing this.  At some point the beds will step in and subsidize, still allowing the connected insurance companies to take off the top. At a certain point the feds will not be able to meet all of their obligations and that will fall off. 


A continued acceleration of climate change could make that day come sooner than later, as does our ever declining political system that could become radically worse than our current plutocratic rot, monetarily the feds will spend more and more while cratering the economy and businesses and wages leading to Less in flows and the FEDS will not be able to keep up without printing enough money to devalue the currency.


Sooner than forecast I bet.

hectorxander

This is true collapse unfolding nice a slow before our eyes! Hold on to your butts! My stomach is in knots now with almost every storm. My state is no stranger to disaster but doesn’t mean I want to endure it again and again. And poor Asheville! That place will never be the same. Most people had no idea their area could be such victim to climate collapse. 😔

nessarocks28

60 Minutes did a story tonight, specific to Hurricane Ian. [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-whistleblowers-hurricane-ian-insurance-60-minutes-transcript/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-whistleblowers-hurricane-ian-insurance-60-minutes-transcript/)

therobz

You know what they say:

 _follow the money_

cool_side_of_pillow

itll be a nice way to create petri dish communities for organised crime to grow. 

Zestyclose-Ad-9420

Meanwhile the only political hope we have isn’t even mentioning climate change 🙄

Fatticusss

Of course there is no such thing as a "safe haven". The moment a place becomes known as a "safe haven", thousands of people move there, straining resources and local services, meaning it is no longer safe.

Individual-Deer-7384

Bluelining is fine.  We need governments to openly recognize these areas as sacrifice zones, and provide relocation assistance to the people that live within them.  People with means will liquidate their holdings there, and move themselves to higher ground.

If we keep dumping funds into subsidizing or developing high risk areas, the costs will be even higher later on.

lowrads

Also insurance companies realizing they have inelastic demand and they can raise prices as much as they want

fencerman

It's time to start thinking of a better system to deal with the developing challenges of our world...

Here, some nice history to read: 

[Resilient Societies, Vulnerable People: Coping with North Sea Floods Before 1800* | Past &amp; Present | Oxford Academic](https://academic.oup.com/past/article/241/1/143/5049207)

&gt;On Christmas Day 1717 the North Sea area was hit by the most deadly flood disaster in its entire history, which took the life of more than 10,000 people. Present-day concerns over climate change and the recurrence of extreme weather conditions might tempt historians to discuss floods like 1717 in terms of the overall vulnerability and resilience of societies or ‘socio-environmental systems’. However, in medieval and early modern Europe it is hard to find examples of societies which did not prove resilient in the face of flooding: through absorption or adaptation, coastal society as a whole was perfectly able to overcome periodic episodes of flooding even when such episodes were sometimes perceived as real catastrophes. At the same time, however, coastal societies differed greatly in the number of people exposed to harm and suffering. Processes of political and economic marginalization, as well as unsustainable forms of land-use, turned some people into victims of flood disasters, while others escaped. Hence only by moving discussions of vulnerability and resilience from the level of societies to the level of people, can a better understanding of natural hazards and disasters in the past and at present be achieved.

dumnezero

Its actually surprising to see these companies taking more than a 1 year look-ahead.  And really, insurance is about spreading risk to make it manageable, but the risks are unmanageable, so quarantining risk could work if there were actually low risk durable human settlements... but we stopped building those because we wanted to optimize marginal profitability of cheaply constructed disposable housing and glass oven officebuildings.  We wasted the fossil fuels building a shoddy shanty town and now its flooding and on fire.  Oops.

No_Climate_-_No_Food

khoawala

Here's a person thinking they're smart saying a lot of words that are absolutely nonsense

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So is the sad opposite is also true?  People who don't believe in climate change are less likely to support climate policy, even if they *are* impacted by extreme weather?

MissionCreeper

Perhaps evidence that there is a positive correlation between intelligence and empathy.

scfoothills

This sounds like a truism. You'd have to believe in human-caused climate change to believe that extreme weather is driven by it, and if humans cause it, you may well believe that humans should do something about it. But if you don't believe in human-driven climate change, you wouldn't almost certainly NOT support a climate policy that acknowledges and tries to address it.

OlderThanMyParents

I swear 90% if this social studies papers are a joke.

ukulele87

I bet these folks also understand what happens when you put a lid on a boiling pot. There is hope for humanity after all.

So beliefs affect behaviour? Fascinating.

Falstaffe

This is interesting, because thats not something ive taken into consideration in what i say in regards to how people believe in climate change or not:  
The thing is, climate change can only really be seen globally for the most part, locally there can be extremes in either directions, but often those extremes still fall within previous records, so on a local level, there is rarely anything that says climate change is real.  
So i need to take that into consideration, when i reformulate it, because extremes are supposed to be rare, unless its recorded to be several warm years in a row, followed by several cold years, or wet years or dry years or whateverm, a very interesting read.

Hakaisha89

Even if you're not directly exposed to extreme weather there are still spill-over effects in the form of refugees and economic effects

fiendishrabbit

The benefit to mass extinctions are that new species evolve afterwards... after many existing ones die out and leave a vacuum. So that's something to look forward to, millions of years from now.

HomoColossusHumbled

More floods, droughts and hurricanes as time goes on. Have fun adapting to that.

Some plants and animals will adapt more quickly and become more widespread. We expect that to mostly be weeds, insects, and rodents.

Most plants and animals will go extinct, likely including humans eventually, too. We’ve already kicked off one of the greatest mass extinction events in the history of the planet, up there on the list with the giant meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.

So yeah, the cockroaches will probably benefit.

look

Overall Climate Change will bring negative consequences to humans and life, but it's true some particular species may have more success in a warming climate. Think for example of invasive species. The problem is that this will mean further related problems.

Same with places, overall bad climate but the human temperature niche will move polewards so previous not so nice places will have now better temperature conditions. 

Regarding agriculture, bear in mind Canada was stripped from most of its topsoil during glaciation and Russia is mainly peatlands so even tho the temperature gets warmer, the land is not as good as the current mollisols for agriculture.

Jolly_Atmosphere_951

Yeah, that’d be a resounding NO to all of that.

Kruemelmuenster

Siberia won't become habitable over night simply because the weather's a tad warmer. Farmable land requires thousands of years to form. You also need infrastructure and an incentive to build there.

In short term you might see savings on heating costs (if companies weren't increasingly charging more for less anyway), but it will swiftly be offset by climate change impact on the global economy. It really is a lose-lose situation.

ridley_reads

Lots of upside if you're a lantern fly, tree of heaven or poison ivy

SpringOld8915

The climate is warming at an unprecedented rate since the developpement of human civilization. It takes a very long time for species to adapt.

hantaanokami

Do you agree that we have to stop emitting GHG ?

In any case, the timescale is in the way of us enjoying any of this.

Yes. You need to look at the benefits too, but your list makes almost zero sense

Yes, "Earth" and its biosystems WILL adapt and regrow/recover (as much as humans permit that) EVENTUALLY (Evolution takes time, like thousands of years). But the primary question is and has always been impact on humans and our civilization (translation: how many may die). That includes extinction of iconic (or any other important) species too...

&gt; soon see Russia and Canada going forward with new agriculture idea

Maybe. Russian and Canada are the only major countries which MIGHT  get a net benefit (it's  not a given though)

&gt; maybe creating massive forests 

Forests take much longer to grow than to collapse. So almost certainly, that's a net negative for the next few decades

&gt; We, humans, will adapt too right?

Likely... But that's not a binary question at all. If a few major governments collapse we are likely talking many millions if not billions dead.

twotime

There’s not a benefit bro it’s a net negative

There's no plan. If they wait for a crisis capable of generating the political interest to address funding a solution, it will be too late. This just keeps stacking. Cascading failure of the political system to address the  cascading failure of the climate.

Nervous-Share-5873

There's no scenario where the benefits outweigh the cost. We're putting the world through a lot of stress and I'm sure there's a tipping point where we could end life on earth almost indefinitely.

traplords8n

Their strategic plan is gone as well…

https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_2022-2026-strategic-plan.pdf

No_Leg2310

Because it starts with Goal 1: Instill Equity as a foundation of Emergency Management  Goal 2: Lead whole communities in climate resilience.

I_like_the_word_MUFF

All agencies are scrubbing all of their records for anything that could be related to DEI. This is an autocracy now so anything that displeased our dear leader has to go.

NoBrainR

It’s been gone for over a week. Also, the RAPT GIS tool has had their Grant Equity Threshold Tool (GETT) removed. It used to have a prominent place on the viewer. Further, Ready.gov has been gutted.

EOCDeezNuts

Aw man, this was gonna be the one I was actually gonna try to complete lol, at least I got the Foundations of Climate Science class done.

Phandex_Smartz

EJ mapper is also gone. We used it to ensure compliance with EOs (not putting the numbers) because we should be putting Probably Harmful Projects Over There with Those People.

Agitated_Advice_3111

Individual_Wasabi_10

Fuck I’m glad I hopped across the pond. The UK’s FDGiA process may be flawed, but at least relative deprivation is included in OM2s and both academia and central government are doubling down on climate resilience, with a focus on climate vulnerability.

IndWrist2

Typical old people reaction I think this is over blown so I am going to ignore the problem until I die and then make some less have to do more to deal with it. Literally if we simply started planting 1.2 trees, shrubs, bushes, and other wild flora for every tree we cut down since the Industrial Revolution at its start then we would not be having to try to plant 1.6 billion trees in the next 10 years to try and mitigate and yes I said mitigate not recover but just mitigate the CO2 levels we are now dealing with. But no that was a problem they didn’t want to deal with that we are now having to find solutions for

ComfortableTexan

The Chamoli cloudburst disaster highlights the urgency for comprehensive climate change and disaster management strategies.

Climate Change and Disaster Management Policy

Why This Matters

Public Sentiment Summary

Highlighted Comments

Parties Involved

What the people want