Climate

Monday’s arguments were highly technical. A decision about whether the case could move forward isn’t expected until June or July.

Well, it’s official: we’re already observing the strongest El Niño on record. The ocean surface temperature in the Niño 3.4 region, an ocean area in the eastern Tropical Pacific where we track El Niño, reached a record high anomaly compared with its 30-year average. In other words, this region has never been warmer.

On top of this record-breaking news, California declared a state of emergency in anticipation of the upcoming El Niño. The declaration directs state agencies “to begin protecting vulnerable communities, prepare roads and critical infrastructure, stage emergency supplies, and help local partners reduce flood, landslide, and coastal risks.”

This Super El Niño will no doubt significantly impact the Southwestern US this winter, with effects from record-high sea levels and coastal erosion to the potential for excessive rainfall and consequent flash flooding throughout the southern half of the country.

And remember, what happens in the ocean doesn’t stay in the ocean: we’re seeing this El Niño impact weather patterns around the world, modifying where precipitation—and lack thereof—occurs, as I’ll discuss below.

Record-breaking El Niño according to ONI

We’re now observing a record El Niño, according to the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI), which measures ocean surface temperature anomaly (with respect to the 30-year average) in the Niño 3.4 region. This record is particularly striking because it’s only September— El Niño doesn’t typically peak until November-January. It would be one thing to observe a record ONI value in December; the fact that it’s happening in September is indicative of an upcoming El Niño that is truly off the historical charts.

But there is a nuance worth mentioning: while ONI does technically remove the effects of background ocean warming from fossil fuel-driven climate change, it does so in a way that can mis-define an El Niño event. ONI is literally the 30-year average ocean temperature (“climatology”) in the Niño 3.4 region subtracted from the values observed today.

However, this climatology is continuously changing due to fossil fuel-driven climate change, so the definition of an El Niño will change based on the climatology used. For example, something that may have been considered an El Niño in the 1950s may not be considered an El Niño in today’s climate merely because of the gradual warming of the oceans due to climate change.

NOAA scientists realized this problem over the last few years as the oceans continued to warm and the climatology increased. In 2024, they introduced the Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI). The RONI gives a more accurate picture of the strength of the developing El Niño: it removes the effects of a changing climatology, allowing for El Niños from different decades to be compared more directly. RONI became NOAA-official earlier this year.

A comparison of RONI vs. ONI daily values for the 1982, 2015, and current 2026 El Niño events, the strongest El Niños in the recent historical record. The darker, thicker lines represent RONI values, while the lighter, thinner lines represent ONI values. Data from The Climate Brink and NOAA OISST.

Believe it or not, according to the RONI, we’re still near record-breaking territory, meaning that even considering the different climatologies influenced by fossil fuel-driven climate change, we are still seeing a near-unprecedented El Niño (though 2015 and 1982 RONI values still remain more intense).

In other words, putting the different El Niños (1982, 2015, and 2026) on the same playing field by removing any background influence of climate change or climatological bias, puts the 2026 El Niño as the third strongest for any time of year in recorded history. It’s also the strongest El Niño for where we are now in early October, which is no doubt manifesting in the lack of hurricane season in the Atlantic, and the record hurricane season in the East Pacific.

A reason for this is that, as I mentioned in my April blog on the developing Super El Niño, there is evidence that, while El Niño is part of a natural cycle in our climate system, climate change produces more intense El Niño events. We also see this in a paleoclimate study looking at El Niños from the past thousand years.

How El Niño impacts global weather patterns

There’s a lot of talk of record-breaking El Niño, but why does this matter for you? This is what I mean by “what happens in the ocean doesn’t stay in the ocean,” and why it’s particularly true in the Tropical Pacific right now.

Believe it or not, the location of storms and precipitation in the Pacific actually follows the warmest ocean surface temperatures. When the area of warmest ocean surface temperatures moves, so too does the main development region of storms and precipitation.

Storms in the Tropical Pacific are powerful beasts: they send up an incredible amount of energy from around the equator to the midlatitudes—the area of the Earth between the equator and the North or South Pole—which directly impacts where weather sets up here in the US.

Check out these two schematics below. In the first figure, the “1.” indicates warm ocean surface temperatures over surrounding Indonesia and Oceania, which is a typical setup. In response to this warmth, storms and precipitation develop right over Indonesia and surrounding countries (denoted by clouds). These storms then send a wave of energy (the “2.”) to the midlatitudes (in this case, I’m just showing the northern midlatitudes). The energy then affects the position of the jet stream, basically a river of fast-moving air in the upper atmosphere, that guides our weather systems.

A schematic showing the typical setup of warm ocean temperatures and precipitation in the Pacific Ocean. UCS A schematic showing the changes associated with an El Niño in the Pacific Ocean. UCS.

The second figure shows what an El Niño does: it shifts the area of warm ocean surface temperatures to the Central or Eastern Pacific (“1.”). This then shifts the area of storms and precipitation, and therefore the energy being communicated to the midlatitudes (“2.”). The jet stream also shifts (“3.”), allowing for more moisture to be transported inland and more rainfall to be observed in southern parts of the US.

And the shifts shown in the second schematic don’t just stay in the Pacific and the US. They’re communicated around the world. We often see drought in Indonesia, Caribbean, southern Brazil, Mozambique, and Botswana; a delayed monsoon in India and Southeast Asia; and increased precipitation in Uruguay and Argentina.

Regional weather impacts this winter

So, since El Niño can impact global weather patterns through a shift in how energy is sent to the midlatitudes from the tropics, what does this mean for the US? As is hinted in the schematic, the forecast for California and the Southwest US reflects this shift in precipitation patterns: the current seasonal forecast for California and the rest of the Southwest is above average precipitation expected this winter.

Forecasted winter precipitation anomaly for the US Southwest according to 6 different seasonal prediction models. Green areas are likely to see more precipitation this winter. Figure from USGS.

However, just because there’s an El Niño doesn’t mean we’ll observe more precipitation than usual in California. For example, during the last Super El Niño in 2015-2016, California saw a slightly drier-than-usual winter. Yes, El Niño shifts weather patterns, but it doesn’t always do it in anticipated or predictable ways.

For this year, seasonal weather model forecasts are generally in agreement and calling for a rainy winter, which could bring some significant drought relief to the Southwest. There is, however, a point where too much rain can fall. As the California State of Emergency notes, there is a significant threat for floods and landslides similar to those experienced during the Super El Niño of 1998.

And then there’s the threat of sea level rise. Sea levels have already risen off the California coast about 8 inches in some areas due to fossil fuel-driven climate change due to heat expansion. During an El Niño, a giant “wave” of water, called a “Kelvin wave,” typically raises sea levels in California. In fact, sea levels could rise by a foot in the next few days.

On top of the thermal expansion from climate change and the Kelvin wave, tides are expected to peak around Thanksgiving and Christmas. Throw a few storm systems on top of that, and you get significant sea level rise in California. The Kelvin wave alone could add another 6 inches of coastal sea level rise.

Across the world, a threat to human food systems

Earlier in August, the World Food Programme released an analysis highlighting how this El Niño will affect global food systems. Tens of millions of additional people could face food insecurity over the next year as regions deal with drought, including Central America, the Caribbean, and eastern and southern African countries. El Niño is also expected to significantly impact global food prices over the next year.

Furthermore, this Super El Niño will release a significant amount of heat from the oceans into the atmosphere, allowing for global heat temperature records to be shattered over the next year. In fact, a new study from University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab suggests there could be over 451,000 excess deaths this year due to heat.

The reality of the world we live in

As a climate scientist, I find it harder and harder to share this reality and close on a high note or, frankly, even on a call to action. This Super El Niño is a global force of nature, wildly exacerbated by human-caused climate change, and nothing we do today is going to contain it. But we can prepare far better than we are preparing today.

That includes making sure FEMA and NOAA are fully funded for emergency preparation/response and weather and climate forecasting, respectively. As always, it’s important to hold the bad actors accountable who have been spreading misinformation around climate change for decades —the fossil fuel industry. Check out my colleague’s blog on three ways scientists can hold Big Oil accountable.

In the final months before our last national election in 2024, a vicious lie targeting Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, raced across social media and into the presidential campaign. Donald Trump repeated it during a nationally televised debate. JD Vance amplified it. Days later, Vance told CNN that if he had to “create stories” to force media attention onto Springfield, “that’s what I’m going to do.” Springfield officials said there was no credible evidence for the lie. Social media influencers and politicians spread it anyway.

I haven’t repeated the lie here. You may already know it. If you don’t, I’m not going to help it reach you. Not knowing more might make you feel curious, and that curiosity is exactly what those who generate disinformation intend to target. Disinformation targets all of us: around elections, extreme weather, and other events when we’re paying attention. Our attention is valuable. It can generate profit, shape public opinion, and swing votes. With the 2026 midterms approaching, we’re all targets. And we can all prepare.

We know when disinformation is coming 

Climate disinformation is my beat, and extreme weather has taught us something useful: disinformation is easier to fight when we prepare for it.

Earlier this year, I wrote about an anti-disinformation “safety chain” for Danger Season, the months when North America experiences its worst climate impacts. We know Danger Season is coming. We know people will be urgently seeking information. And we know bad actors will try to exploit their attention.

My colleague Jennie King has just published an excellent toolkit for information resilience amid disasters that takes this idea much further. Jennie tells us: Don’t wait until a crisis hits and then chase lies around the internet. Build trusted networks. Make reliable information easy to find. Anticipate the ways people are likely to be manipulated.

I’ve also written about what to do—and what not to do—when you encounter disinformation. Don’t repeat false claims. Don’t send them more traffic. Do look at who is spreading them, who benefits, and what they want you to do.

Prepare before someone wants your attention

1. Warn people before the lies arrive 

Start now. Share this post—or other reliable sources about election disinformation—with your friends, family, colleagues, and communities. Tell people what to expect: between now and November, people will deliberately try to capture their attention, provoke strong emotions, deepen divisions, and influence their votes. 

This is called “prebunking”: warning people about disinformation and the techniques used to spread it before they encounter them. Research suggests that advance warnings can help people recognize and resist manipulation when they see it. 

I won’t be limiting my warnings to lies about voting. Election disinformation can come at us sideways, through subjects people already care deeply about: immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, extreme weather, public health. The point may be to make us angry or afraid, to erode our trust in institutions or other people, to make money from our attention—or to affect what we do with our votes.

2. Choose your sources before you need them 

If we see a frightening claim about voting on Election Day, that’s a bad time to start figuring out whom to trust.  

Instead, we can find our state and local election officials now and use their official websites and published election information as primary sources for rules, deadlines, and procedures. Bookmark reliable local news sources. Do the same for other subjects where bad information can cause real harm: for instance, extreme weather; civil, LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, public health, immigration. We can build ourselves a short list of places to check when something alarming appears in our feeds. 

Remember that expertise is specific. The person we trust for hurricane forecasts may know nothing about election administration. The person who understands election law may be a terrible source on climate science. Trustworthy information depends not just on who is speaking, but on whether they have a reliable way of knowing what they’re telling us. 

3. Learn the tricks, not the lies 

We don’t need to imagine every false claim we might encounter. We couldn’t if we tried. 

Instead, we can learn to notice how information is being manipulated. Sometimes evidence is fabricated. Sometimes real photographs, statistics, or events are stripped of context or given a false explanation. A genuine problem may be presented without the safeguards or remedies designed to address it. A small incident may be exaggerated into evidence of widespread failure. Intent may be invented and assigned to someone without evidence. 

And we don’t have to let spectacular AI deepfakes distract us from much cheaper tricks. A deceptively edited video, an old photograph with a new caption, or a real event presented as evidence of something it doesn’t show can work perfectly well.

4. Don’t help disinformation travel 

If something makes us instantly furious, frightened, or triumphant, let’s not immediately give it a larger audience. 

Repeating a false claim—even to debunk or ridicule it—can make it more familiar. Linking to it can send it traffic. Sharing it can expose people to a lie they hadn’t encountered before. Check first. When we do need to correct false information, lead with what is true and send people toward reliable sources.  

Remember when I didn’t tell you the lie about the Haitian immigrants? This is why I didn’t. 

The people who create disinformation don’t have to distribute every copy themselves, if they can get the rest of us to do some of the work for them.

5. Follow the money—and the power 

Your attention has value. That’s why we talk about an “attention economy,” and why corporations and political actors work so hard to capture it. 

Advertising helps finance the online information systems through which disinformation travels. In a new UN issue brief on advertising, artificial intelligence, and information integrity, my colleagues Harriet Kingaby, Charlotte Scaddan, and their coauthors point out that global advertising spending now exceeds $1 trillion a year. Advertisers’ decisions help determine what gets produced, amplified, and monetized online. AI is making it cheaper and easier to generate content at an enormous scale while becoming increasingly embedded in the systems that decide which content reaches us. 

Who makes money when we keep scrolling? Who benefits when we’re angry or afraid? Who paid to put something in front of us? Who designed the system that decided we should see it? Is what’s best for them good for us?

6. Know where the levers are 

Harriet and Charlotte make another important point: advertisers aren’t powerless passengers in this system. Their money gives them leverage. They can demand transparency from technology companies, support high-quality journalism and information, and insist on safeguards as AI becomes part of the advertising ecosystem. And we can demand the same thing of advertisers, social media platforms, and search engines. 

We have leverage too, but it looks different. We can support independent journalism, choose platforms and services with better practices where meaningful alternatives exist, pressure advertisers not to fund harmful content, and demand more transparency from the companies deciding what reaches us. 

We can also see that politicians, nations, and the fossil fuel industry work together to fund disinformation, promote authoritarianism, and fuel the climate crisis. Their lies do harm. The system that keeps producing and rewarding them harms us more. Please support UCS as we work to change that system. 

This piece originally was published by InsideSources on August 27, 2026.

Like so many others, I spent late July choking on smoke as wildfires, worsened by fossil-fueled climate change, raged across Canada and the United States, as well as France, Greece, Spain and Turkey. People, including firefighters, lost their lives.

Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes, with many losing everything. And millions of people across the United States, many living hundreds of miles from the wildfires, experienced dangerous levels of pollution from wildfire smoke.

The undeniable fingerprints of climate change are all over recent extreme wildfire seasons. Across the world, unusually hot, dry weather, punctuated by extreme heatwaves, has dried out ecosystems, priming them for fire. In the United States, the burned area in 2026 is currently 168 percent of the 10-year average, while many fires continue to burn out of control.

Globally, burned area is decreasing, but not all fires are equal. Most of the reduction in global burned area comes from savannahs and grasslands, as changes in agricultural practice and land use reduce intentional fires and burned area.

In contrast, fire activity and burned area in North America’s forests continues to intensify, burning large areas with growing severity. These fires can burn so severely that they scorch the soil deeply, and some forests cannot regrow. In Canada’s boreal forests, wildfires also generate huge amounts of heat-trapping emissions, combusting soil that took decades or centuries to accumulate. In 2023, Canada’s record-smashing fire season emitted more carbon than every country in the world except China, India and the United States.

Wildfires in forests of the western United States are some of the most well-studied, and the effects of climate change are glaring across almost every metric scientists use to characterize wildfire. Relative to the mid-1980s, more wildfires are burning larger areas, at higher severity, growing faster, at higher elevations, over longer fire seasons, and under more extreme fire weather conditions. Wildfires also are burning later into the night and ramping up earlier in the morning, meaning less rest for the wildland firefighters who put their lives on the line to protect us.

Attribution science, which isolates and quantifies the contribution of climate change to observed trends, makes this point even more clearly, showing that climate-driven increases in dryness led to a near doubling of burned area in forests of western North America between 1984 and 2015.

Climate change also limits options to use existing, science-supported tools to reduce wildfire risks, like prescribed fire, by shortening the very narrow window in which these controlled burns can safely occur. While forest management can mitigate some effects, climate-driven extreme fire behavior can overwhelm these interventions.

Climate change further drives conditions conducive to wildfire beyond changes to forests, with reductions in snowpack and earlier melt providing more time for vegetation to dry out.

These climate-fueled changes have devastated communities, destroying homes, claiming lives and ending ways of life. The damage of these wildfires is escalating too — last year’s wildfires in Los Angeles killed at least 30 people and produced estimated losses of $140 billion, while property insurance skyrocketed, if it remained accessible at all. As global temperatures continue to rise, this destruction will keep mounting.

It didn’t have to be this way.

The dangers of burning fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change, have been well known for decades, including by fossil fuel companies that publicly denied what their own research showed and deceived the public to protect their profits.

Research from the Union of Concerned Scientists has quantified how heat-trapping emissions traced to the largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, including ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and Shell, have worsened these hot, dry and fire-prone conditions. From 1986 to 2021, nearly 40 percent of the area burned in forests of western North America can be attributed to their emissions. Our newest study finds that across the western United States, emissions traced to these entities reduced annual snowpack and stream flow by 15 percent and 6 percent, respectively, equivalent to nearly six times the annual water use of all California’s cities.

Wildfires have many contributing factors. Dismissing the role of fossil-fueled climate change in driving extreme wildfires is at odds with the best available science and only serves the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Instead, communities, firefighters and first responders need policymakers to advance real solutions­ — including measures to stop corporate deception, advance a phaseout of fossil fuels, and make polluters pay their fair share — to address this wicked problem.

The impacts of climate change have been on full display this Danger Season, from record-breaking heatwaves to devastating wildfires, making evident the urgent need for accountability for the harms caused by supercharged extreme events and long-term changes. These harms have been inescapable across the western US, particularly when it comes to water.  As fossil-fueled climate change continues to harm communities, scientists—now more than ever—can play a critical role in informing accountability.  

New study links emissions from fossil fuel producers to western water crisis 

Water in the western US is defined by widespread scarcity, in part due to a timing mismatch. Most water falls as snow in the winter, is stored as snowpack, and then melts during the warm season, when it can be used, primarily for agriculture. Major feats of engineering like canals, aqueducts, and reservoirs have buffered against this mismatch, enabling industrial agriculture and rapid population growth despite dwindling and overallocated rivers.  

Climate change is adding pressure to an already precarious situation, threatening the livelihoods, ecosystems, and economy of the region. The events of 2026 show the harms that climate change is already inflicting and the threat that unchecked emissions pose to our future.  

First, an extreme March heatwave decimated snowpack, meaning that a huge amount of water melted earlier than usual, and now is not available for the growing season. Of the five major basins in the region, three saw the lowest April 1st snowpack ever recorded , the time of year when snow accumulation historically peaks.  

A recently published paper dubbed these heat events ‘snow-eaters’ because of how they decimate snowpack The study also showed that these heatwaves have increased in frequency and intensity since the mid-1880s. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global authority on consensus climate science, concluded with virtual certainty that extreme heat events are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, suggesting that heat events which pose major threats to water availability will continue to occur into the future. 

Next, the region’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead—which supplies water to more than 25 million people throughout the western United States—has also hit a new low, falling several inches below the previous record set in 2022.  

While water has always been limited in the western US, these examples highlight the ways fossil-fueled climate change is pushing the system to the brink.   

Our new peer-reviewed research, Wringing the West Dry, highlights how for snowpack, streamflow, and irrigation demand in the Western US, nearly half of the impacts due to climate change between 2014 and 2024 can be traced to emissions from the 122 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. This research adds to a growing body of evidence linking major fossil fuel companies—including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell—to the harms of climate change being experienced by communities around the world, and highlights the important role that scientists can play in informing accountability. 

1. Advance Legally-Relevant Research  

Scientific engagement is a key component of both litigation and legislation that seeks to hold major polluters accountable.  

Attribution science identifies and quantifies the contribution of climate change to global trends, extreme events, and their impacts, allowing scientists to quantify how climate change is directly shaping the lived experience of communities across the world. Source attribution, a subdiscipline and growing field that includes our newly published study, quantifies how specific sources of emissions, sectors, actors, or nations have contributed to climate change and its impacts. Research in this field has traced emissions from the Carbon Majors, the largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, to their consequences, including global temperature increase, ocean acidification, sea level rise, area burned in forests of the western US, and extreme heatwaves and their impacts.  

In pursuing accountability, attribution evidence goes hand-in-hand with social science and archival research that outlines how major fossil fuel companies deceived the public about climate change, even when their own internal research clearly showed the risks that continued use of their products posed.   

Our recent report, Research Priorities for Climate Litigation, identifies ten other types of research that lawyers need to advance litigation,  extending far beyond climate science. From public health experts to economists to stewards of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, well-communicated scientific information and insights are a critical component of ongoing and future accountability efforts.  

To learn more about how to use your expertise, sign up for the Science Hub for Climate Litigation newsletter and explore our Research on the Record toolkit. 

2. Stand up for science and democracy  

Scientists can be important advocates for evidence-based decision making, especially when it comes to accountability. Scientific research and scientists themselves have come under attack during the second Trump administration, threatening not only the advancement of critical research in the US, but also our ability to hold big polluters accountable. UCS has tracked the explosion of attacks on science, illustrating how sidelining scientists, rolling back regulations on forever chemicals, and degrading infrastructure to monitor and predict extreme weather can harm communities across the country.  

When it comes to climate accountability, the fossil fuel industry and its politically appointed allies are pulling out all the stops to intimidate scientists, manufacture controversy about widely accepted research, and block judges from accessing factual, reliable scientific information about climate change. These attacks follow the same playbook used by powerful industries for decades to distract, discredit, and deny research that threatens their bottom lines.   

In the face of this assault, scientists have stood up to these attacks and made a meaningful difference in resisting and reversing many of the anti-science actions of this administration. UCS has used the legal system to hold this administration accountable, including by securing the dissolution of the sham Climate Working Group led by well-known climate contrarians, and fighting against the administration’s goal of removing factual information from our National Parks.  

Join the movement of scientists pushing back on this administration’s anti-science agenda.  

3. Tell your Congressperson: No immunity for Big Oil  

Amidst these attacks on scientific evidence that can inform climate lawsuits, Big Oil is pursuing an even more brazen strategy to evade accountability: lobbying our elected representatives in Congress to pass immunity legislation, much like the liability waiver Congress passed to protect the gun industry in 2005. This would prevent science from being heard in court and impose barriers to justice for those harmed by the industry’s products and practices.  

Several state legislatures, including Utah, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, have already passed their own versions of liability waivers, and Representative Harriet Hageman and Senator Ted Cruz have introduced legislation on the federal level that, if passed, would eliminate pathways to accountability for the communities most harmed by the consequences of climate change.  

Scientists can reach out to their members of Congress to ensure that communities across the country have access to justice through the courts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for their deception and the harms caused by their products.  

When I was a kid, I didn’t think much about where our water came from. I’d turn the tap on and fill up to my heart’s content. Later, I learned that the water which flowed so reliably through my tap was thanks to one of the most intricately engineered water systems in the US, capturing snowmelt in our mountainous regions and rerouting rivers into concrete canals and aqueducts. Water in the Bay Area? That’s from snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada. In LA? That water made its way from the snowmelt of the Rockies into the Colorado River, to then be pumped nearly 250 miles in the Colorado River Aqueduct to reach the thirsty Southern California fields and the sprawling city of Los Angeles.

Water defines so much of our lives: what we plant, where we build, how we spend our leisure time. Here in the Western US, water is precious, as its supply has always been limited. Because of this, huge amounts of time, money, and labor have been poured into increasing water availability, resulting in aqueducts and canals that bring water from mountainous regions to otherwise dry regions for agriculture or cities, and massive dams that store water for the hot and dry months.

The often dramatic history of water management in the Western US has been a central part of our story, inspiring stories like the film Chinatown. But just like the movie, our waterways have aged, and perhaps not aged well. They were designed in an era of more plentiful water. Today, we face a very different reality. In recent decades, due to increasingly warmer temperatures leading to drier years, fossil-fueled climate change has brought in an era of even greater limitations to our water.

Our biggest reservoir: the mountain snowpack

While we do get water from some local sources in the western US (e.g. local groundwater or reservoirs), around half of runoff comes from winter snowpack. In mountainous regions like the Sierra Nevada or Cascades, it can be up to 75%. Except for the US Southwest—which gets summer rains carried in by the North American Monsoon—most of our precipitation comes in the cold, winter months. In California, most of our precipitation has historically come in just a handful of winter storms, some of which carry so much water that they can act as ‘drought busters.’

This fact is crucial to understanding our water supply: when that precipitation falls in our high mountain regions, it’s cold enough that it falls as snow. As such, our winter snowpack functions as our largest reservoir. Whereas rain requires an actual reservoir to hold that water for summer months, snowpack holds onto its water content until it gets warm enough to melt. That water content, or Snow Water Equivalent (SWE), generally peaks around April 1, after which, as winter gives way to spring, snow begins to melt, running off into our rivers and streams, meaning snowpack acts as a bridge between when the moisture comes in (winter), holding onto water until it’s needed (spring-summer).

We get in trouble when our snowpack fails, as we saw this year. Across much of the western US, our snowpack was abysmal—from California to the Colorado Basin to the Pacific Northwest, we experienced our lowest to second-lowest April 1 snowpack on record. This record-low snow drought was made 4 times more likely by climate change. Our warm winter meant that precipitation came in heavy and warm, at times falling as rain on top of the snowpack. This was followed by a warmer-than-average spring, including a record-breaking heatwave, leading to the rapid melt of the already small snowpack. While this year was remarkable, spring temperatures have been warming significantly over the past two decades, with an increase in these types of ‘snow eater’ heatwaves.

Dramatic reductions in snowpack mean we have a longer window of dry conditions, with huge implications for the health and wellbeing of our ecosystems, human health, and infrastructure. We’ve seen what this means when it comes to fire. Our forests are historically adapted to plentiful water supplied by a late-melting snowpack. When the snowpack fails to accumulate, or melts early, forests can become bone-dry, ready to burn on a hot windy day. Moreover, when wet winters are followed by hot summers, dry grasses become tinder. We saw how this can play out in Spokane, Washington, earlier this month.

And a low snowpack, crucially, spells trouble for water resources. Lake Mead just broke records by reaching its lowest level ever recorded. And the hot, dry season is when agriculture, which sucks up the most water, comes online.

Our biggest water user: agriculture

I learned from a young age to conserve water by taking shorter showers and turning off the tap while brushing my teeth. While these things matter, they are such a small slice of the (water) pie: Western US water is mostly used for industrialized, irrigated agriculture, ranging from 74% of developed water in the Colorado Basin to 80% in Washington to more than 90% in California’s San Joaquin Valley. This multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry produces crops consumed from the East Coast to China to Saudi Arabia.

In fact, much of the water infrastructure across the Western US was designed to bring agriculture to regions that were historically water-poor but have plenty of sun and fertile soils. Today, however, many basins in the western US are already overallocated, operating at the tail end of what they were designed for. And when those surface water supplies fail to materialize or when local demand surges, groundwater has been used to fill the gap.

In the agricultural-intensive San Joaquin Valley, so much groundwater has been used for the past century that groundwater declined by ~12mm/year during 1962-2021, leading to dramatic land subsidence (or sinking) of up to 30 feet in some regions.

Since the onset of the megadrought in the 2000s, groundwater decline in California has accelerated. This has been in part due to lower snowpack, and in part due to greater water demand from irrigation due to warmer temperatures from climate change.

Irrigation comes online in spring with the start of the growing season, and extends into summer until harvest time. As you may remember from biology class, plants need water to photosynthesize. They ‘breathe’ in carbon dioxide, then store that carbon and emit oxygen. As part of this process, plants move water up from the soil then out through their leaves through tiny pores called stomata. On a hot, dry day (i.e. low humidity), more water evaporates into the air due to a strong difference, or gradient, between the water content on the leaf and the water content in the air. This process—evapotranspiration—is strongly related to the temperature and water content of the atmosphere. The problem is that this demand for water or ‘thirstiness’ of the atmosphere rises exponentially with temperature, in fact by 7% per degree Celsius.

To visualize this process, think of the air as a giant sponge. When the sponge is dry (i.e. the humidity is low), it sucks up water from the ground below. Warmer air can hold more water, so as temperatures increase due to climate change, that sponge gets bigger and can draw even more water out of the land surface—including plants.

Therefore, as climate change increases temperatures—especially in the warmer spring and summer months—it also increases that thirstiness, which translates to greater demand for crop irrigation. That water has to come from somewhere, and if there isn’t enough surface water being delivered from snowmelt, farmers turn to groundwater.

Climate change is largely due to the combustion of fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and gas. Ironically, in places like the San Joaquin Valley, there are oil wells peppered throughout agricultural fields. In these places, the two industries compete for water: agriculture pumps water for irrigation while oil pumps use water to extract even more oil. Rural communities bear the brunt of these impacts since residential wells are shallower than industry’s wells and hence dry up first, and these communities then breathe in and drink up polluted air and water.

The full picture

This all adds up to a water system pushed to the brink. Declining snowpack means less water is available while a thirstier atmosphere means water demand will only increase. So what do we do? This is a problem with no easy fixes.

California Governor Newsom’s proposed to expand the state’s reservoirs, but reservoirs can increase downstream flood risk during wet years, which we expect to see more of with climate change, and even dispossess tribes of culturally important lands.

Other proposals tackle multiple issues at once, such as placing solar panels over canals or in agricultural fields (“agrivoltaics”), which both reduce evaporation of water by shading the area as well as help move us away from greenhouse-gas emitting energy sources.

Efforts to pursue climate accountability from major emitters, through litigation or climate superfund laws, also play an important role in ensuring that companies that have contributed the most to climate change pay their fair share.

Any effective measures to protect our water will require systemic changes and cooperation that aim much higher than our individual efforts to take shorter showers. However, water conservation on its own isn’t going to cut it if we don’t address climate change. It’s past time for our decisionmakers to be realistic about what our changing climate means for equitable management of and access to water.

Even if you have never been to L.A., you probably have seen the L.A. River. It is that wide concrete trench that Hollywood loves to film: drag races, chase scenes, countless commercials shot on the bare slab… But it’s strange. This river doesn’t look like a river.

After catastrophic floods about one century ago, the river started to be lined with concrete for most of its 51 miles. The river became a single-purpose concrete channel to flush stormwater from the mountains to the sea as fast as possible.

The Los Angeles River in its concrete-channel form, looking from downtown toward the south of the city over the bridges on 4th St and 6th St. After deadly floods in the 1930s, the river was lined with concrete designed to flush stormwater out of the city as fast as possible. Sean Pierce/Unsplash.

But in three stretches, the river couldn’t be lined with concrete. And in those stretches, something happened that no one had planned. Cottonwoods and willows came back. Herons, egrets, and the Santa Ana sucker (an endangered fish species) came back. And people came back too to enjoy the river that had become their neighborhood park, to ride their bikes or to use their kayaks.

A soft-bottom stretch of the Los Angeles River in Glendale Narrows, with riparian vegetation and the river flowing across a natural channel bottom. MattGush/Getty

Same river, two realities. Gray concrete infrastructure does one job at a very steep price. The soft-bottom stretches do multiple things at once: flood protection, habitat, public health, recreation, urban cooling, water quality… And the river runs through neighborhoods where nearly a million Angelenos live within a single mile. Luckily for our L.A. friends, the L.A. River is undergoing a restoration that will bring back many of the multiple benefits of the river such as habitat, cleaner air, and green areas in the city while improving water quality, reducing erosion, and of course, maintaining (or even improving) the much-needed flood risk control.

This restoration project in the L.A. River is an example of a nature-based solution. Nature-based solutions are approaches to adapt to challenging environmental conditions in ways that work with nature, not against it. Traditional infrastructure is often more expensive and provides fewer benefits with more negative impacts. Nature-based solutions are often cheaper and always more natural than concrete infrastructure to tackle the same problems but with many more benefits and positive side effects.

This is the first post in a series about what using nature-based solutions looks like in California. You can read our guide Working with Nature to Protect California’s Agricultural Regions: How Nature-Based Solutions Can Build Resilience, and you can also see our related first Instagram video below.

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A whiplash climate

Many public health and environmental problems we experience in California and in other parts of the world come from a legacy of unsustainable land management exacerbated by climate change. Extreme events that swing from one end to the other like a whiplash are now the new normal.

Effects of climate change on the water cycle in California. Source: Climate Change in the San Joaquin Valley: A Household and Community Guide to Taking Action. UCS.

Gray infrastructure was originally designed to control nature instead of working sustainably with the environment, as most Indigenous communities do. Climate change is making destruction more frequent and more expensive, and gray infrastructure cannot adapt to the new conditions in many cases. And our traditional response has been to react rather than prevent. California spends billions on fires, floods, and droughts after they happen, which is far more expensive than preventing them in the first place. Every dollar we do not invest in resilience today, we end up paying many times over in the near future.

And those costs are not paid equally. All Californians pay them through taxpayers’ money in disaster relief and emergency response. But frontline communities with limited infrastructure pay also with their health, their wellbeing, and the quality of their daily lives.

We need to prepare California for what is coming, but the answer is not just more gray infrastructure. Concrete dams, levees, and storm drains are expensive, brittle, and built to fight nature instead of working with it.

Nature-based solutions are a better (and cheaper) way.

Nature-based solutions and cropland repurposing in agricultural regions

Here where I live in Merced, in the middle of California’s San Joaquin Valley, agriculture is one of the main economic engines and represents the identity of a lot of people. But agriculture in California hasn’t been sustainable for more than a century, especially because of an inadequate water management and inadequate agricultural practices (like dry tillage of idle land, excessive pesticide use, monoculture, or irrigation of marginal lands), problems aggravated by climate change. Part of my work is to understand this system and find solutions that don’t create new problems. And since I love agriculture and the environment, and I have many friends who live in farmworker communities, I have been thinking of nature-based solutions for agricultural regions since years ago.

My work orbits around cropland repurposing to achieve a just land transition. Current water law in California requires local agencies to sustainably manage groundwater and avoid what the law defines as “undesirable results,” such as dry wells, soil sinking, and seawater intrusion. This legal framework has the potential to become a transformative power to change a system that wasn’t working. And to achieve water sustainability, California may need to repurpose about one million acres of irrigated agriculture to decrease our water footprint.

While this is a huge task, it is also a huge opportunity to correct a legacy of problems that started more than a century ago while adapting to climate change, adopting sustainable agricultural practices, and managing public resources sustainably. Nature-based solutions can tackle water sustainability in multiple ways, including aquifer recharge, floodplain restoration, and sustainable agricultural practices. And they can also take care of public health issues, such as flood prevention, erosion, dust prevention, pollution reduction, lack of green areas, and extreme heat. Nature-based solutions can also create local employment during the construction, for maintenance, or even tourism and other new, out-of-the-box ideas. However, Nature-based solutions are not a solution for everything, and we will need to create pathways to foster local, non-extractive economies to bring complete sustainability to agricultural regions. We call this a Just Land Transition, and along with on-the-ground grassroots partners like Allensworth Progressive Association, with nonprofits like Community Water Center and Environmental Defense Fund, and with agencies like the California Department of Conservation, we are supporting science-based policy and science-driven actions to bring sustainability to agricultural regions in California.

In this blog series, we will show the potential of nature-based solutions to become the best to-go tools to address cropland repurposing and to tackle climate justice in agricultural areas.

If you want to know more, you can read our guide: Working with Nature to Protect California’s Agricultural Regions: How Nature-Based Solutions Can Build Resilience. And if you want to know more about best practices in land repurposing for a just land transition beyond nature-based solutions, you can check UCS’s webpage Guiding California’s Land Transitions Toward Justice and Equity.

California has the tools, intellectual knowledge, and the funding to make this better choice happen. Proposition 4, the Climate Bond, has provided billions of dollars to use in climate resilience and land repurposing, and nature-based solutions can be one of the best ways to invest our taxpayer’s money to create sustainability and transform the system to work for everyone.

Tal vez nunca hayas estado en Los Ángeles, pero seguro que has visto el Río de Los Ángeles sin darte cuenta. Es esa zanja de concreto gigantesca que tanto le gusta filmar a Hollywood: carreras de autos, escenas de persecuciones, e incontables comerciales grabados sobre su superficie gris. Pero es extraño. Este río no parece un río.

Después de inundaciones catastróficas hace casi un siglo, el río comenzó a ser revestido con concreto en la mayor parte de sus 51 millas (82 kilómetros). El río se convirtió en un canal gris con un solo propósito: desalojar el agua de lluvia desde las montañas hasta el mar lo más rápido posible.

El Río de Los Ángeles en su forma de canal de concreto cerca del puente de la Calle 6, mirando hacia el sur. Después de inundaciones mortales en la década de 1930, el río fue revestido con concreto diseñado para desalojar el agua de lluvia de la ciudad lo más rápido posible. Sean Pierce/Unsplash

Pero en tres tramos, el río no pudo ser revestido con concreto. Y en esos tramos, ocurrió algo que nadie había planeado. Los álamos y los sauces regresaron. Las garzas, las garcetas y el matalote de Santa Ana (una especie de pez en peligro de extinción) también volvieron. Y la gente regresó también, para disfrutar del río que se había convertido en el parque de su vecindario, para andar en bicicleta o para usar sus kayaks.

Un tramo de fondo natural del Río de Los Ángeles en Glendale Narrows, con vegetación ribereña y el río fluyendo sobre un lecho natural. MattGush/Getty.

El mismo río, dos realidades. El concreto cumple una sola función a un precio muy alto. Los tramos naturales cumplen múltiples funciones a la vez: protegen contra inundaciones, mejoran el hábitat, la salud pública, la recreación, la calidad del agua, bajan las temperaturas locales … Y el río atraviesa vecindarios donde casi un millón de personas viven a menos de una milla (1,6 kilómetros) de distancia. Por suerte para nuestras amistades de Los Ángeles, el Río de Los Ángeles está en proceso de restauración que traerá de vuelta muchos de los múltiples beneficios del río, como hábitat, aire más limpio y áreas verdes en la ciudad, además de mejorar la calidad del agua, reducir la erosión y, por supuesto, mantener (o incluso mejorar) el tan necesario control del riesgo de inundaciones.

Este proyecto de restauración en el Río de Los Ángeles es un ejemplo de una solución basada en la naturaleza. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza ayudan a adaptarnos a condiciones ambientales difíciles trabajando con la naturaleza, no en contra de ella. La infraestructura gris (de concreto) suele ser más costosa y ofrece menos beneficios con más impactos negativos. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza suelen ser más económicas y pueden abordar los mismos problemas de manera más natural que la infraestructura de concreto y con muchos más beneficios y efectos secundarios positivos.

Esta es la primera publicación de una serie sobre cómo las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden ayudar a California. Puedes leer nuestra Guía sobre soluciones-basadas en la naturaleza aquí. También puedes ver nuestro primer video en Instagram:

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Latigazos climáticos

Muchos de los problemas de salud pública y ambientales que experimentamos en California y en otras partes del mundo provienen de un legado de manejo insostenible de los recursos naturales, agravado por el cambio climático. Los eventos extremos que oscilan de un extremo a otro como un latigazo son ahora la nueva normalidad.

Efectos del cambio climático en el ciclo del agua en California. Fuente: Cambio climático en el Valle de San Joaquín: una guía para tomar medidas en el hogar y las comunidades. Crédito: Nick Iannaco/UCS.

La infraestructura gris fue originalmente diseñada para controlar la naturaleza en lugar de entender cómo trabajar sosteniblemente con el medio ambiente, como hacen muchas comunidades Indígenas alrededor del mundo. Y ahora que el clima y las condiciones están cambiando, la infraestructura rígida de concreto no consigue adaptarse en muchos casos. Su baja capacidad de adaptación y el cambio climático están haciendo que la destrucción sea más frecuente y más costosa, y nuestra respuesta tradicional ha sido reaccionar en lugar de prevenir. California gasta miles de millones de dólares en impactos de incendios, inundaciones y sequías después de que ocurren, lo cual es mucho más costoso que prevenirlos desde un principio. Cada dólar que no invertimos hoy en resiliencia termina costándonos unas seis veces más en el futuro cercano.

Y esos costos no se pagan de manera equitativa. Todas las personas pagamos con nuestros impuestos la ayuda para desastres y emergencias. Pero las comunidades en primera línea con infraestructura limitada además pagan con su salud, su bienestar y su calidad de vida.

Necesitamos preparar a California para lo que viene, pero la respuesta no es simplemente más infraestructura gris. Las presas, los diques y los drenajes pluviales de concreto son costosos, frágiles y están construidos para luchar contra la naturaleza en lugar de trabajar con ella.

Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza son una manera mejor (y más económica) de enfrentarnos a estos desafíos.

Soluciones basadas en la naturaleza y el reúso de tierras de cultivo en regiones agrícolas

Aquí donde vivo, en Merced, California, en medio del Valle de San Joaquín, la agricultura es uno de los principales motores económicos y representa la identidad de mucha gente. Pero la agricultura en California no ha sido sostenible durante más de un siglo, sobre todo por un manejo inadecuado del agua y por prácticas agrícolas inadecuadas (como arar tierra seca, el uso excesivo de pesticidas, el monocultivo o el riego de tierras marginales), problemas que son agravados por el cambio climático. Parte de mi trabajo consiste en entender este sistema y encontrar soluciones que no generen nuevos problemas. Y como me encanta la agricultura y el medio ambiente, y tengo muchos amigos que viven en comunidades de campesinos, llevo pensando en soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para regiones agrícolas desde hace años.

Mi trabajo gira en torno al reúso de tierras de cultivo para lograr una transición justa de la tierra. La ley de agua vigente en California exige que las agencias locales gestionen el agua subterránea de manera sostenible y eviten lo que la ley llama “resultados no deseados”, tales como pozos secos, subsidencia del terreno e intrusión de agua de mar. Este marco legal tiene el potencial de convertirse en un poder transformador capaz de cambiar un sistema que no funciona para todos. Y para lograr la sostenibilidad del agua, California podría necesitar reusar cerca de un millón de acres (unas 400.000 hectáreas) de agricultura irrigada para reducir nuestra huella hídrica.

Aunque esta es una tarea enorme, también es una gran oportunidad para corregir un legado de problemas que comenzó hace más de un siglo, y a la vez adaptarnos al cambio climático, adoptar prácticas agrícolas sostenibles y gestionar los recursos públicos de manera sostenible. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden abordar la sostenibilidad del agua de múltiples maneras, incluyendo la recarga de acuíferos, la restauración de llanuras de inundación y las prácticas agrícolas sostenibles. Y también pueden atender problemas de salud pública, como la prevención de inundaciones, la erosión, la prevención de polvo, la reducción de la contaminación, la falta de áreas verdes y el calor extremo. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza también pueden generar empleo local durante su construcción, mantenimiento, o incluso para el turismo y otras ideas nuevas. Sin embargo, las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza no son una solución para todo, y necesitaremos crear caminos para fomentar economías locales no extractivas que traigan sostenibilidad completa a las regiones agrícolas. A esto le llamamos una Transición Justa de la Tierra, y junto con aliados como Allensworth Progressive Association, Community Water Center y Environmental Defense Fund, y con agencias como el Departamento de Conservación de California, estamos apoyando políticas y acciones basadas en ciencia para traer sostenibilidad a las regiones agrícolas de California.

En esta serie mostraremos el potencial de las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para convertirse en las mejores herramientas para abordar el reúso de tierras de cultivo y para enfrentar la justicia climática en las áreas agrícolas.

Si quieres saber más, puedes leer nuestra guía: Soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para crear resiliencia en regiones agrícolas de California. Y si quieres saber más sobre las buenas prácticas en el reúso de tierras para una transición justa de la tierra más allá de las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza, puedes visitar la página web de UCS (en inglés pero con multiples recursos en español) Guiando las transiciones de tierras de California hacia la justicia y la equidad.

California tiene las herramientas, el conocimiento intelectual y el financiamiento para hacer realidad esta mejor decisión. La Proposición 4, el Bono Climático, va a dedicar miles de millones de dólares a la resiliencia climática y al reúso de tierras, y las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden ser una de las mejores formas de invertir el dinero de quienes pagamos impuestos para crear sostenibilidad y transformar el sistema para que funcione para todas las personas.

Earlier this summer, after a year of negotiation, a massive, bipartisan, bicameral package of federal housing legislation became law (despite President Trump’s refusal to sign it). At a time when housing affordability is top-of-mind for many people, this bill is a sign that progress is possible. Much more is needed—including investments in making homes more resilient to extreme weather and climate-fueled disasters—but this is an important step forward.  

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is the biggest package of housing legislation passed since the Cranston-Gonzalez Affordable Housing Act became law in 1990. It sets the stage for more housing to be built by working across a suite of federal agencies: to change federal housing programs to enhance financing for housing production; support state and local governments’ initiatives to plan for more housing; and encourage states to re-think their approach to land use. Although resilience to climate impacts was not the primary focus of this legislative package, some important progress was made on improving the resilience of manufactured housing, expanding repair programs for homeowners and landlords of existing housing, and speeding up funding for disaster recovery efforts in low-income communities for the next three years.    

A package combining 60 bills, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing now requires dozens of next steps for the implementation of its provisions, which you can find in a section-by-section summary. In this post, I’ll unpack two federal processes—appropriations and rulemaking—which, together with actions taken at the state and local level, will shape the outcomes of this legislation for communities across the nation in the years to come.  

Appropriations shape impact

As passed, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing funded a few pilot programs but was budget-deficit neutral. Instead, this legislation overwhelmingly focused on policies that encouraged the private market to put more homes on the ground. This will certainly have an impact on the number of homes in a nationwide housing shortage, but the resilience of those homes and the impact on overall affordability for lower and fixed income households is still unknown.   

For this legislation to have maximum impact, federal lawmakers must demonstrate continued bipartisan commitment to addressing the housing crisis through the annual appropriations process. Subcommittees in the House and Senate authorize federal funding through the appropriations process each year by setting funding levels, rescinding previous appropriations or transferring unspent balances. Unless a meaningful level of funding is provided during the appropriations process, programs authorized by the legislation—such expanded home repairs, studying the impact of deadly residential extreme heat in public and subsidized housing, and planning grants to state and local governments to support housing development—will lack the resources needed to preserve and expand our housing supply.

Rulemaking amidst rollbacks  

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act will kick off several rule-making processes managed by different federal agencies, including several branches of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Rulemaking involves substantive public engagement and can have an important impact on policy implementation, grounding government action in the public interest, fairness, and the best available science. Rules that guide where and how housing is built will last far beyond any presidential administration or Congress, and this process will be an opportunity to enshrine climate resilience policies and standards for the long term—instead of rushing to build without accounting for the risks of mounting climate extremes. Any new rules also need to rely on the best available climate science, and account for the myriad ways fossil fuel-driven climate change will re-shape our natural resources and built environment in the years to come. 

A few of the rule-making processes detailed below will be particularly important in shaping the climate resilience and energy efficiency of the new housing that this legislation will spur. One of the rules that will be developed pursuant to the new law will identify circumstances under which federally-funded housing projects will be excluded from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Changes to NEPA have long been suggested to speed up the construction of housing. The final rule must ensure that these exceptions, known as categorical exclusions, made today don’t exacerbate the harms of the past—a concern made all the more urgent given the attacks of the second Trump administration on federal environmental justice commitments. 

Another new rulemaking requires new energy efficiency standards for manufactured housing to be developed by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Unlike other types of housing for which building standards are set by state and local governments, the code for manufactured homes is set by the federal government.  This process could shape the long-term affordability of manufactured housing amidst volatile energy prices and worsening heatwaves. For this sector of the housing market to be deployed at scale to fulfill its potential to provide safe and affordable housing, HUD must develop a rigorous standard that reflects the long-term benefits of energy efficiency for residents of manufactured housing.

The three-year authorization of HUD’s Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program, intended to speed up and reform long-term funding to low- and moderate-income communities, after disasters occur, will also require a rule-making process by next summer. It’s an important step forward, and Congress should go further and permanently authorize this crucial program. As disasters grow in frequency and complexity, rules developed by the federal government must also require programs to address the long-term harms of disasters and use rigorous data to incorporate future conditions into their recovery programs.  

These and other rulemaking processes kickstarted by 21st Century ROAD to Housing are occurring at the same time as the federal government pursues repeal of the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard (FFRMS) across agencies. As my colleague Shana Udvardy has previously detailed, the HUD version of these standards ensured that HUD’s federally funded projects would be built to withstand current and future flood risks. The repeal of HUD’s FFRMS rule will mean that new buildings, facilities and homes could be at an increased risk of flooding from hurricanes and sea level rise: increasingly severe weather that is supercharged by climate change.  

Much of the rulemaking required by 21st Century ROAD to Housing will be spearheaded by HUD, an agency besieged by staffing cuts and struggling with capacity as it operates billions of dollars of critical programs.  The rulemaking process requires a well-resourced  and accountable federal agency to ensure that programs serve the public interest. HUD and other agencies must be funded not only to support their core mission and programs, but to shape much-needed new policy and programs such as those in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.

Congressional leaders must act to ensure this legislation benefits us

After decades of neglecting our housing crisis and ignoring clear warnings from climate science, no single legislative package from one level of government could have addressed our many needs.  As communities, policymakers, and advocates begin to make the most of this historic legislation, we must also fundamentally shift how we approach housing policy. We can’t afford to wait decades for the next major housing legislation and public investment. The climate crisis will increasingly require leaders to fund transformations in the built environment and social safety net to keep communities safe and manage the growing economic risk of climate change on our housing market.

We should consider the implementation of the ROAD to 21st Century Housing an essential and welcome opportunity for laying the groundwork for further progress. That this legislation was passed in the current political environment—despite the many threats to climate science,  resilience programs,  and a growing effort by the fossil fuel industry to avoid any accountability for its role in a climate crisis that destroys homes, contributes to homelessness, and decimates communities—demonstrates the necessity of climate resilient housing for all.

We’re in the middle of Danger Season, a time that spans May through October, when the worst extreme weather events and fossil-fueled disasters happen in a concentrated period. There are currently 86 large wildfires burning across 14 states, large swaths of the United States are experiencing another heat dome, and heavy rains have flooded multiple locations. Last week, Climate Central announced that the nation has already experienced 12 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters during the first half of 2026, which have caused $32 billion in damages and a loss of 183 lives—ranking fifth for the number of such events during this time frame since recordkeeping began in 1980. 

The nation has also gone the entire 18 months of the second Trump administration without a permanent administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and with major chaos plaguing the agency thanks to President Trump. The president failed to appoint an administrator, instead leaning on four plainly unqualified “senior officials performing the duties of the administrator” (SOPDA), one of whom was Cameron Hamilton, until he was fired on May 8, 2025. In the chaotic fashion typical of this administration, he was renominated to lead the agency a year after being fired. This week, the Senate voted to confirm him as the first permanent FEMA administrator under this administration.

Hamilton’s rocky road to permanently leading FEMA

Hamilton worked as FEMA’s SOPDA for roughly 3.5 months at the start of the second Trump administration until he was fired for supporting the existence of the agency during a congressional hearing a year ago (instead of calling for its elimination, which was the Trump administration’s preferred stance at the time).

While his tenure was brief, Hamilton implemented several controversial policies at FEMA including:

• Increasing the threshold by which the federal government would declare a disaster, meaning a reduction in critical federal assistance that states rely on for disaster response
• Halting the automatic approval of funds under the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, limiting crucial funding that would help communities prepare for extreme events
• Canceling funding for the incredibly popular Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program. A FEMA statement called the program “another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with climate change than helping Americans effected [sic] by natural disasters.” After multiple court orders, FEMA reversed this decision and BRIC was reinstated on March 25. However, the program hasn’t been fully reinstated; grant awards that had funds already allocated to them can expend those funds, but grants that were selected but did not have funds allocated prior to the cancelation of the program have not seen those funds restored.

Since his nomination in May, Hamilton has been working at FEMA as a senior adviser. This allows the Trump administration to sidestep the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which in most cases prohibits a nominee from serving in an acting role for the same position for which they’ve been nominated. This law is why the Trump administration created the SOPDA role.

Hamilton’s Senate testimony was short on substance

We’re dealing with a low bar when it comes to President Trump’s agency nominees. Even though it could be worse when it comes to Hamilton as FEMA administrator (think back to missing-in-action David Richardson and “the enforcer” Karen Evans), he will be the first FEMA administrator who lacks the qualifications and the five years of experience required by the Post Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006. Since that law was enacted, all five former FEMA administrators, including David Paulison, Craig Fugate, Brock Long, Peter Gaynor, and Deanne Criswell, had years or even decades of emergency management experience.

During the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs hearing on June 17, Democrats grilled Hamilton on multiple issues and Hamilton promised to conduct a review within the first 30 days on “areas where FEMA can reform.” Unsurprisingly, the committee voted largely along party lines to advance his nomination to the full Senate, with the exception of Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who joined the Republicans.

Hamilton was well coached by two former FEMA administrators, Brock Long and Peter Gaynor, in preparation for his nomination hearing. His responses to senators’ questions, while respectful, were vague and noncommittal. Although Hamilton expressed his commitment to FEMA’s mission, it’s unlikely he’ll defy the vision of his bosses, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and President Trump.

There are several points to highlight from the nomination hearing, including the objections raised on process, Hamilton’s brief and inadequate written testimony, and his noncommittal answers to the senators’ questions.

Hamilton’s written testimony is brief—a total of two pages. The first page expresses his gratitude for his family, President Trump, and the two former FEMA administrators who provided him with support and counsel. On page two, Hamilton outlines what he’ll accomplish in his role as FEMA administrator. He echoes the tired mantra of the Trump administration: “We must return to our roots where disaster response is locally executed, state led and federally supported.” As has been pointed out by emergency managers, this is what FEMA already does.

He also promises to “deliver assistance to survivors rapidly” with the caveat “when Federal assistance is warranted.” These two statements conveniently balanced Hamilton’s need to appease senators on the committee but also show allegiance to President Trump’s politicization of disaster aid and his campaign to push more of the disaster response and recovery burden onto local, state, Tribal, and territorial governments.

Democrats highlight broken process leading to a “rubber-stamped” nominee

In the first opening remarks of the nomination hearing that included 11 nominees, Committee Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI) spoke powerfully on the many problems with the hearing, including a rushed process, overcrowded panel, and harmful lack of transparency. Senator Peters pointed out that the chairman did not allow each nominee to make a public statement, and that the ranking member had not received the nominees’ written testimonies prior to the hearing.

Senator Peters also noted that Hamilton had not completed his FBI background investigation, calling it “unprecedented” that nominees were advancing without meeting the minimum requirements of a typical vetting process. Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) promised that the committee would vote on the nominees only after the ethics and FBI review were complete, but it is not clear if that promise has been kept.

During the hearing, Democrats focused on several important concerns with the administration’s handling of FEMA and Hamilton’s past decisions.

• The politicization of disaster assistance. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), among other Democratic senators, asked whether disaster survivors from blue states should be treated differently and receive less help than red-state survivors. She called the politicization of disaster assistance “shameful and unamerican.” Senator Hassan pressed Hamilton on what he would do if the president ordered him to withhold assistance to blue states. Hamilton replied that he would be sure that FEMA is “objective,” “fair and reasonable,” that he would “follow the law,” and would be “consistent in how [FEMA] adjudicates claims.” Senator Hassan closed her questioning by challenging Hamilton, noting that he was going “to have to think about what you are going to do when he (President Trump) reverses your recommendations.” Hamilton, however, did promise to speed up answers to disaster declaration decisions and reimbursements with the caveat of keeping a “close eye” on how states spend the assistance. The Trump administration has brazenly denied FEMA assistance to blue states and is continuing to do so.
• Hamilton’s April memo. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) addressed an April memo in which Hamilton recommended raising the threshold for disaster assistance. Senator Blumenthal spoke to how this change would disqualify a lot of families in Connecticut and asked him whether he still supported this policy. Hamilton responded that the memo reflected a “pre-deliberative” and “pre-decisional” process for areas where disaster assistance could be reformed and that it was not ready for adoption. Hamilton’s evasive answer ignores the fact that the Trump administration has been advancing both unwritten and written policies that reduce disaster assistance to communities, including Trump’s preparedness executive order and the final report by Trump’s FEMA Review Council.
• FEMA staffing cuts. Senators also asked Hamilton about staffing cuts at FEMA and FEMA’s readiness. Hamilton’s response was noncommittal, stating he had “full faith and confidence in the FEMA workforce” but that “we can do better.” Missing from the answer was a commitment to fully staff up the agency in a timely manner.

Unfortunately, additional important issues, such as Hamilton’s position on climate change (which is directly contributing to worsening disasters), and his lack of qualifications for the job were not adequately explored by the committee.

Actions Administrator Hamilton must take in his first month in office

In January 2025 I wrote about the five things the nation needs from the next FEMA administrator, and these remain true today. While Hamilton’s pledge to update FEMA’s antiquated IT system is important, this will take time and there are other pressing needs. In the immediate future, here are the top five actions he must take in his first month in office:

1. Advance a robust hiring process to shore up the agency’s ability to deliver for the public and disaster survivors. Unfortunately, during the nomination hearing Hamilton praised the opening of 350 FEMA positions but did not commit to a more robust hiring effort as was outlined in a recent Government Accountability Office report. The GAO found that FEMA reduced more than 4,300 employees in fiscal year 2025, causing a loss in institutional knowledge and experienced personnel, and was told by FEMA officials that “they have been operating in uncertainty and confusion while still trying to meet the mission with the staff they have.” The GAO raises serious concerns about FEMA’s ability to meet its mission in the case of a catastrophe such as the back-to-back hurricanes in 2024, Helene and Milton.
2. Stop President Trump’s politicization of disaster assistance and ensure disaster relief is equitable and nonpartisan.
3. Ignore the Trump administration’s biased FEMA Review Council report recommendations and instead develop a strategic plan based on the latest science and staffing analysis, and work with members of Congress on bipartisan policies that can actually improve FEMA.
4. Reinstate FEMA advisory committees, including its National Advisory Council, Technical Mapping Advisory Council, and National Dam Safety Review Board, so the agency’s work will be informed by the best available science and expertise.
5. Defend against mis- and disinformation about disasters and advocate for robust funding for FEMA, the Disaster Relief Fund, and preparedness programs that will help communities get back on their feet in more resilient ways.

Cameron Hamilton is expected to bring stability to FEMA. But the nation deserves and needs more than just the bare minimum of bringing stability to a broken agency. We’re witnessing back-to-back fossil-fueled disasters on top of the affordability crisis. Communities that are still recovering from last year’s disasters—like the tragic Texas Hill Country floods—are being hit again this Danger Season.

Congress must continue its oversight of FEMA and press Administrator Hamilton to implement immediate actions that ensure FEMA is ready to serve people across the nation this Danger Season, and in the months and years ahead.

Unusually hot, dry conditions across many parts of the world—including in Algeria, Canada, France, Greece, Morocco, Spain, Tunisia, and the western United States—have set the stage for the catastrophic wildfire season underway now. Just over this weekend, rapidly spreading wildfires have exploded around Spokane, Washington, forcing nearly 65,000 people to evacuate thus far. Unrelenting hot dry weather, supercharged by climate change, is contributing to the dangerous conditions causing these fires.

The images of these fires are stunning, their scale terrifying, the human toll enormous already and mounting. And while the proximate causes of the fires, the types of vegetation burning, and nearby settlements differ greatly, the abnormal climatic conditions looming in the background everywhere are unmistakably clear.

Many lives have been lost, and precious communities razed to the ground. Hundreds of thousands of people have had to evacuate from fire zones and millions more have experienced dangerous levels of exposure to wildfire smoke. And, unfortunately, more heat is on the way—a deadly hazard on its own, and one that will also continue to fan the flames of this extraordinarily destructive wildfire season.

If these infernos don’t bring policymakers to their senses and force necessary changes to grapple with the fossil fueled climate crisis, what will?

Wildfire conditions in the United States

The 2026 wildfire season got off to an early above-normal start in the U.S. Thus far this year, nearly 5.3 million acres of land have burned across the country, well above the 10-year average of 3.7 million acres for this time of year. On July 18, the National Preparedness Level was raised to 5, the highest level, a sign of the extreme fire dangers and high level of resources committed to fight fires.

Colorado, Nebraska, and Utah are among the states that have experienced an incredibly challenging wildfire season this year. The Aspen Acres fire, covering nearly 102,000 acres in Colorado, has been burning for over a month now. And recent rains have led to heavy flash flooding in the burned areas, carrying ash and debris across roads and into waterways.

As of last week, Oregon had 31 large fires burning, across 1.6 million acres. They include the Rowe Creek Complex fire currently covering over 320,000 acres, the Big Grass fire with over 337,000 acres and the Coleman Creek fire covering over 251,000 acres. Despite the state being in such a dire situation, the Trump administration has denied FEMA Fire Management Assistance Grants (FMAGs) for two wildfires: the East Evans Creek Fire and Rowe Creek Fire Complex. State Senators Merkley and Wyden have strongly criticized the action and demanded answers from the agency.

Washington had 13 large fires burning over nearly 204,000 acres as of last week, including the Kaiser Canyon fire, which has burned over 128,000 acres.

The latest fuels and fire advisory for the Pacific Northwest notes that low snowpack and drought conditions in the region have led to fuels (i.e. vegetation) drying out much earlier than usual—all of which is ‘producing extreme fire behavior.’ This means intense fires that spread rapidly and are hard to control, putting people and infrastructure in danger.

And the most recent wildfire outlook for August shows continued elevated fire risks in the Northwest, the upper Midwest, as well as Texas, and southern Florida.

The world in flames

Numerous large wildfires (nearly 900) are also burning across Canada. Over 9 million acres (3.76 million hectares) have burned thus far this year as the nation experiences one of its worst seasons (with the province of Ontario experiencing its worst-ever season).

France and Spain are also in the throes of their worst wildfire seasons on record, with little let-up in sight as yet another intense heatwave rolls through Europe, the fastest-warming continent globally. Approximately 300,000 people have been displaced by the fires thus far, which are now approaching major cities. Firefighters have lost their lives. Homes and livelihoods are going up in smoke. New research from World Weather Attribution shows that climate change is increasing the likelihood of the kind of hot, dry conditions preceding the extreme fire weather that led to the wildfires in France and Spain.

Northern Africa, which has received far less attention, is also seeing major wildfires which have caused deaths, prompted evacuations, and are putting a big strain on local firefighting resources in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco.

And earlier this year, Southern hemisphere countries, including Australia, Chile, and Argentina, experienced intense wildfires during their summer season.

While year-to-date carbon emissions from biomass burning in wildfires were at record lows in the first half of the year, that could change rapidly depending on how the next couple of months of peak fire season in the northern hemisphere go (especially boreal fires).

Dangerous wildfire smoke

Repeatedly this year, smoke from wildfires in Canada and the western U.S. has blanketed areas up to hundreds of miles to the east and south, reaching as far south as Florida last week. At times, over 100 million people were under alerts for pollution from wildfire smoke. Numerous cities—including Chicago, Detroit, Toronto and Milwaukee—experienced hazardous levels of particulate matter pollution, which can cause heart and lung ailments, worsen or trigger asthma, cause cancer, and even lead to death.

Research shows that the contribution of wildfires to PM2.5 pollution has been steadily growing in the U.S. One recent research article on the health impacts of wildfire smoke, driven by climate change, estimates that cumulative excess deaths caused by PM2.5 pollution could be as high as 1.9 million between 2026 and 2055.

Firefighters who spend extended periods of time exposed to hazardous smoke, often with little to no protection, face some of the most acute health risks. A 2025 investigative series by Hannah Dreier of the New York Times showed the harrowing toll this is taking on young firefighters who are getting sick and dying from the toxic substances they’re exposed to. The Forest Service and the Department of Interior have finally been forced to respond and start providing N95 respirator masks to frontline firefighters in 2026.

Fossil fuel companies and the Trump administration: making things much worse

Even as wildfires are raging, fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits, aided by craven politicians all too eager to give them free rein to burn down the planet. Fossil fuel companies and their political allies are now pushing for legislation to grant them immunity from legal and financial accountability for the climate damages they have caused. Join us in fighting back: Tell Congress: No Immunity for Big Oil!

And the Trump administration’s cuts to the US Forest Service staffing and budget, closure of research stations, and chaotic reorganization plans for federal firefighting efforts are also hampering efforts to address wildfire threats. News stories indicate that DOGE’s destructive actions also delayed grants for forest thinning and fuels management efforts in Minnesota, in an area that has now experienced major fires.

The climate future we feared is here

Whether it’s catastrophic wildfires or unrelenting heatwaves, this year has brought home the realities of climate change in ways that are hard to comprehend. Tens of thousands of people have died from extreme heat this year alone, with the highest toll in Europe and Asia. We’ve seen searing images of people fleeing for their lives, and firefighters bravely risking theirs, in the face of towering wildfires. Otherworldly, murky yellow skies and smoke-refracted sunsets signaling dangerous air quality have become all too common.

It’s almost unbearable to think that we knew the scientific facts decades ago and policymakers could have taken action to limit the harms so evident around us today. We can’t let greedy fossil fuel companies and spineless politicians decide our future. We owe it to people reeling from climate-fueled disasters today, and to the generations to come that will live in the shadow of our choices, to do what it takes to chart a different, safer path ahead.

Welcome to Townsville, a community located in California’s Central Valley. You have been tasked with working with a few of your fellow residents to implement cropland transition projects around Townsville. There are opportunities to protect the town’s drinking water, develop renewable energy, restore the environment, and encourage your neighbors to adopt more sustainable farming practices to benefit Townsville. Along the way, you must collaborate with your fellow residents to decide which projects to pursue and negotiate with the neighboring landowners to implement a vision for the future of Townsville while facing additional hurdles from extreme weather brought on by Climate Change. You also have to consider the side effects of the current land uses that often seem invisible but have real and ongoing consequences for your community.

This is the world of ‘Common Ground,’ a video game developed by a team of students at Harvey Mudd College in partnership with UCS, to explore just land transition, climate change, and the decisions involved in transitioning cropland in California’s Central Valley.

Drought, extreme heat, and floods

Townsville is fictional, but the problems players must grapple with are based on real challenges Californians are facing today.

California is home to more than 60 thousand farms, covering more than 20 million acres of land. Unfortunately, California’s highly profitable agricultural industry comes at a cost to water security, air quality, and health for nearby residents, farmworkers and small farmers.

Agricultural water demand has taken a toll on the long-term sustainability of California’s groundwater. During the 2012-2016 drought, surface water deliveries were restricted and groundwater pumping in the Central Valley increased, in part due to agricultural demand. Heavy groundwater pumping in the San Joaquin Valley caused thousands of private domestic wells to go dry and contributed to subsidence—a phenomenon where so much groundwater is removed that the land sinks.

The San Joaquin Valley faces challenges from poor air quality, exposure to pollution from pesticides and fertilizers in the air and water, and extreme heat conditions. With climate change, these challenges are becoming more pressing. We’ve already begun to experience the weather whiplash that will become more frequent from flooding in some years to California’s snowpack at historic lows in other years.

Addressing these challenges will require fundamentally changing the systems that govern how we use natural resources and transitioning to practices that rejuvenate, rather than strain, lands and water resources.

The Opportunity—just land transition

California’s commitment to groundwater sustainability means that cropland transition is already underway in California’s Central Valley.

Following the 2012-2016 drought, California adopted new laws and incentive programs to encourage sustainable water practices. In 2014, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), was passed to regulate California’s groundwater basins and require them to be managed for long-term sustainability. California has also committed to investing roughly a quarter of a billion dollars through the Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program to assist groundwater sustainability agencies with planning and implementing groundwater resilience projects, including groundwater recharge, stormwater capture, and cropland repurposing.

To accomplish California’s groundwater sustainability goal, more than 500,000 acres of irrigated cropland may be repurposed in the San Joaquin Valley alone. Where and how this transition takes place will shape the future of California’s agricultural industry and Central Valley communities.

Instead of allowing market forces to guide where and how agricultural land is taken out of production, a just land transition ensures that communities impacted by the transition are part of the decision-making process. A just land transition based on strategic and intentional cropland repurposing can help shift from practices and systems that are unsustainable and extractive, to those that support communities and local economies. By repurposing cropland inside and around rural communities, we can also reduce public health exposures and provide public benefits. In our recent report, “Working with Nature to Protect California’s Agricultural Regions,” we offered examples of how to use nature-based solutions improve water sustainability and increase public health, climate resilience, and economic benefits.

This transition has the potential to reshape the Central Valley and help communities adapt if public investment dollars are spent on projects that center community decision-making and provide direct and meaningful benefits to frontline communities.

UCS scientists have found that repurposing cropland near communities can produce multiple benefits for communities. Reducing pesticide and fertilizer applications, dust and emissions from agricultural operations, and groundwater withdrawals in proximity to communities can reduce the public health risks faced by frontline communities.

When land is transitioned to projects that provide multiple benefits, including, for example, energy reliability, habitat restoration, flood risk reduction, and groundwater recharge, communities can benefit from land transition. There is enormous potential benefit in exploring nature-based solutions to accomplish climate adaptation and resilience, along with groundwater sustainability.

A card from the Common Ground video game. Harvey Mudd College/UCS

Welcome to Townsville

In ‘Common Ground’ players can explore these challenges as they collaborate to implement cropland transition projects in Townsville. Players make spending decisions, negotiate with landowners, and work against unpredictable extreme weather to protect their community.

Players can explore different types of cropland transition opportunities and their benefits in a conceptual way and see how the community, environment, and economy of Townsville respond to their choices.

To develop this game, UCS partnered with an incredible team of students at Harvey Mudd College. Laura, Mia, Nicole, Ria, and Vibhu, led by Professor Kirabo, worked with us over the course of the academic year. We started out with a goal of creating a fun, multiplayer cooperative game, grounded in the idea of transitioning cropland around communities to reduce the negative externalities (e.g. pesticide exposure) and provide meaningful benefits (e.g. improved groundwater levels, access to parks and nature, renewable energy, etc.). The students learned about cropland transition and took on the task of adapting these scientific concepts into game mechanics.

Informed by the real-world effects of nature-based solutions, the students created a range of potential project types in the game, each with different benefits for the environment, community well-being, economy, and local farmers

Over the course of the year, the students sought more feedback through playtests with their peers, UCS staff, and even came to Sacramento to share an early version of the game with the State Agencies and staff working directly on groundwater sustainability and cropland transition.

After a year of hard work, we are so excited to be able to share Common Ground—which is now available for you to play online! This game is designed so that anyone can play—all you need is 3 friends and an internet connection. We hope that the game can be used as an educational tool for anyone and everyone to learn about cropland transition and nature-based solutions, to simulate collaboration and negotiation throughout the project design and selection process and see the benefits and tradeoffs of climate resilience planning.

Attribution science is advancing quickly, researchers said. That could support lawsuits seeking damages for severe events worsened by global warming.

Most Australian capital cities have at least 80% chance of unusually warm and dry spring as climatologists watch developing system with increasing alarm

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The El Niño climate phenomenon linked to record global temperatures and now locked in place in the Pacific Ocean could develop into the strongest on record, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology.

Climatologists are watching the strengthening El Niño with increasing alarm, saying the forecasts from climate models in the coming months are “mind blowing” and “astounding”.

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