Facing Our New Climate Reality

Last summer, scorching heat melted streetcar cables in Portland, Oregon, and smoke from simultaneous Western wildfires drifted across the continent, triggering "code red" air-quality alerts in Philadelphia. Hurricane Ida formed in the Caribbean, struck southern Louisiana on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and proceeded northeast and up the coast, causing tornadoes in eight states and flash flooding that killed at least 30 people in New Jersey alone.

As climate change accelerates, its effects are becoming both more obvious and more widespread, and Americans, like people everywhere, are contending with new challenges to their physical safety and overall quality of life. Extreme heat and drought, heavy rains, hurricanes, ice storms, sea-level rise, and floods threaten lives and livelihoods—and challenge the basic livability of many communities. 

But census data show populations continuing to grow in the parts of the United States that are most susceptible to climate-change impacts, including flood-prone coastal regions and the arid Southwest. In response, local leaders are working to protect both their most immediately vulnerable residents and their areas’ long-term economic viability. And while sharing a common cause—global warming exacerbated by the burning of fossil fuels—the effects of climate change look different in different places. So do the responses.

In the Pacific Northwest, for example, the extreme weather of the last few years has complicated the region’s verdant appeal. Years of drought conditions have caused many communities to implement emergency water-conservation measures. Meanwhile, record wildfires throughout Oregon have sent inlanders scrambling out to the coastline to escape the smoke. The wave of unprecedented heat that trapped the entire region over the summer would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change, according to World Weather Attribution, an international initiative by climate scientists to analyze extreme weather events in near-real time.

"Folks from California or warmer places can’t assume that it’s cool and wet in the Pacific Northwest anymore," says Brian Rankin, the long-range planning manager for Bend, Oregon, one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States over the last several years. "Climate impacts are now so broadly distributed in different ways that it’s simply a question of, What climate impact are you going to feel in a given location?"

Pacific Northwest communities have been working to improve wildfire prevention for years but are poorly equipped to handle intense heat like they saw this past summer. Seattle and Portland, for instance, are among the least likely cities in the country to have air-conditioned homes. People used to working outside through the summer months were struck down by toiling too long without rest or rehydration. It "was a bit of a watershed moment," says Ladd Keith, an assistant professor of planning and sustainable built environments at the University of Arizona. "A lot of the communities that thought they were safe from heat are reevaluating that now."

Portland recently adopted a series of zoning changes aimed at improving resilience in the face of climate change, including standards and incentives to promote more sustainable building practices like installing solar panels, using porous pavement, and creating green roofs. The city has increased its focus on building dense, walkable, and green neighborhoods, says Andrea Durbin, Portland’s director of planning and sustainability. But major land-use changes remain politically challenging throughout the nation, even as more cities seek to incentivize multifamily development to promote environmental sustainability and housing affordability. Changes to state building codes and investment from the federal government would help cities like Portland accelerate their preparations for more extreme climate impacts, Durbin says.

"This moment should be a wake-up call for everybody to realize it’s time to quickly change our behaviors, practices, and investment decisions."

—Andrea Durbin, director of the Portland, Oregon, Bureau of Planning and Sustainability

"Cities are where the majority of people live," she says. "It’s where the decisions about the built environment and infrastructure investments happen, and we really need to be equipped and supported to make the right kind of investment decisions and choices today."

In recent decades, heat has been the deadliest weather phenomenon in the U.S.—and while areas like the Southwest have long dealt with chronic dangerous heat, cooler cities like those in the Northwest face unique challenges because they have such little experience with it. The danger is also unequally distributed within urban areas across the country, with low-income neighborhoods and communities of color tending to have both less shade and more hard surfaces, which raise temperatures. Urban heat resilience requires increasing tree cover and vegetation, protecting green areas, reducing vehicle miles traveled by promoting denser housing and other development, and establishing emergency procedures and cooling centers for when heat waves occur, among other strategies.

Hazards also lie on the opposite end of the spectrum. Houston may be relatively accustomed to heat, but the catastrophic winter storm of 2021 showed the weaknesses of both its buildings and its energy grid in the face of glacial conditions. The historic freeze and widespread power outages, held directly responsible for killing more than 200 people across the state of Texas, came just a few years after Hurricane Harvey caused unprecedented flooding. As with last February’s storm, the 2017 hurricane caused the most deaths, 36, in the Houston metropolitan area. A large, diverse, relatively affordable city at the center of a growing region, Houston also has famously unzoned sprawl that allows more people to live in flood-prone areas.