The Social, Political, and Economic Consequences of Climate Hazards

Max Besbris
Max Besbris
^aH. I. Romnes Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, United States
Manuel Pastor
Manuel Pastor
^bDistinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States
Anna Rhodes
Anna Rhodes
^cAssociate professor of sociology at Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States
Wolfram Schlenker
Wolfram Schlenker
^dRay A. Goldberg Professor of the Global Food System at the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
and Pamela Winston
Pamela Winston
^eSenior analyst with the US Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC, United States (retired)

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
July 2026,
12
(4)
1-32;
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2026.12.4.01

Abstract

As climate change intensifies, understanding the effects of climate hazards such as wildfires, hurricanes, coastal and riverine flooding, tornadoes, heat waves, and extreme snowstorms is key to understanding patterns of inequality. In this introduction, we review a multidisciplinary literature on the social, political, and economic consequences of climate hazards for individuals and communities in the US. We explore how the risk of exposure to climate hazards is unequal across places and demographic groups and examine how inequalities emerge in the process of recovery after climate disasters. We describe how different political actors shape climate policy as well as the role that government policies and programs play in mitigation and recovery efforts. The articles in this issue push novel research avenues for understanding the intersection of disasters and inequality. We conclude our introduction by discussing the challenges and key directions for future research.

In January 2025, multiple fires devastated Los Angeles County. The two largest, the Eaton Fire in Altadena and the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, will likely together constitute the costliest wildfire event in US history to date. While catastrophic, the fires were unsurprising. For years, climate scientists have shown that global warming is intensifying the hydrological cycle, making weather more extreme and climate hazards like wildfires and hurricanes more frequent and more destructive.

The fires in Los Angeles reflected another reality of climate change: as the homes of the wealthy and the poor alike burned, they showed that our climate fates are intertwined. The Pacific Palisades has been a tony neighborhood for decades, where millionaires and celebrities own large lots on secluded streets near the ocean. But wealth and fame do not necessarily shield people or places from climate hazards. At the same time, the fires revealed stark differences in risk. In Altadena, the lots are smaller, the housing stock is worth far less, and warnings to evacuate were delayed. While poorer than the Palisades, Altadena has historically been a center of a particular kind of wealth in Los Angeles County—Black and Latino wealth. Facing discrimination in other locales, Black and Latino families have made their homes in this unincorporated part of the County. As a result, nearly three-quarters of Black residents and more than 60 percent of Latino residents in Altadena own their own home, far outpacing the one-third and 40 percent rates for Black and Latino residents in the county as a whole. Altadena is a rare version of stable, racially mixed, middle-class life. Yet, Black Altadena residents were far more likely than others to be in the fire perimeter, and Black homeowners were much more likely to face financial and other obstacles in the rebuilding effort. Fates are intertwined, to be sure—but risk is also quite distinct given historic and current disparities. The Los Angeles fires were a grim reminder of the region’s (and our nation’s) collective ecological precarity, but the contrasts between the Palisades and Altadena are also evidence of important variations in the social, political, and economic consequences of climate hazards.

In this introduction, we highlight what existing research tells us about the consequences of climate hazards for inequality. First, we explore how the risk of exposure to climate hazards is unequal across places and demographic groups. While more privileged places and people have traditionally been less impacted by hazards relative to their more disadvantaged counterparts, climate change is expanding the scale and scope of climate hazards. This means that an increasing number of places, regardless of their demographics, are more vulnerable. In other words, the riskscape—the spatial and temporal distribution of climate vulnerability—is changing. How political leaders, communities, and households respond to these changes will shape the extent to which climate hazards amplify inequality.

Second, we examine how inequalities emerge in the process of recovery after climate disasters. We highlight how climate hazards tend to affect household finances, the role of insurance in trying to mitigate against downward mobility, and the way climate hazards precipitate novel forms of migration and affect local patterns of economic development. Yet, we point out that much is still to be learned about how America’s neighborhoods change in the wake of different kinds of climate disasters and how rapidly changing insurance markets will impact mobility and housing moving forward.

Third, we turn to the role of existing government policies and programs, describing how mitigation and recovery efforts fostered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other agencies have tended to reproduce or even exacerbate existing inequalities. We also trace the impacts of managed retreat policies that continue to be hotly debated within vulnerable communities.

Fourth, we explore how different political actors are affecting climate and disaster policy. We outline key institutions and describe a highly contingent policy landscape. The volatility in climate policy across presidential administrations and congressional terms—like the volatility in weather—points to just how dynamic the debate will be about how best to prepare for the future.

Finally, we highlight promising topics for future research. Climate hazards will continue to alter fundamental aspects of US society, including capital investment and economic development, housing and insurance markets, migration, economic mobility, and social solidarity. In this last section, we focus on research directions that meet the urgency of the current moment. These include the need for more work that compares outcomes like mobility and neighborhood change across different kinds of places and different kinds of hazards, as well as more life-course research that illuminates the long-term impacts of experiencing climate hazards. Additional research is also needed on how recovery resources are allocated when affluent places such as the Pacific Palisades and less advantaged places such as Altadena are devastated at the same time.

As long-term recovery from the Los Angeles fires begins, it remains unclear whether advantaged enclaves like the Pacific Palisades will hunker down and hoard resources or, paradoxically, if the growing threat of climate hazards to privileged places will lead to more effective appeals for aid and policy change for all communities. Indeed, much of the attention Altadena has received after the fires may be due to community groups that demanded fair and equitable treatment relative to their wealthier Palisades neighbors. The articles in this issue help illuminate these contingencies and begin to provide answers to questions that will only become more essential in our climate-changed future.

THE RISING TOLL OF CLIMATE DISASTERS

There is little doubt that rising greenhouse gas concentrations are affecting the scale and scope of climate hazards. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tracked the type and cost of hazards that have caused over $1 billion in damage since 1980 (NOAA 2025).¹ The data starkly illustrate not only the growing number of costly disaster events but also their increasing economic impacts (figure 1).

Figure 1.

United States Billion-Dollar Disaster Events, 1980–2024 (CPI-Adjusted)

Source: NOAA 2025.

Note: CI = confidence interval. The optimal way to view the this figure is in color. We refer readers of the print edition of this article to https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/12/4/1 to view the color version.

Across the US, these disasters are affecting a growing number of American households. According to the Federal Reserve’s 2024 Survey of Household Economic Decision-Making, 21 percent of Americans were financially impacted by climate-related extreme weather (flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, or extreme temperatures) in the previous year. Of those that were exposed, almost half experienced property damage, 28 percent lost income, and 19 percent had to temporarily or permanently relocate. To mitigate against extreme weather, 18 percent of Americans reported making improvements to their property, while 14 percent said they investigated other places to live, and 5 percent purchased additional insurance. Annually, millions of US residents face climate hazards, with millions more anticipating exposure soon. This widespread reality makes understanding the connections between climate hazards and broader social, political, and economic trends absolutely critical.

Types of Climate Hazards and Their Impacts

The term climate hazards refers to both acute and chronic weather-related risks, such as floods, wildfires, heat waves, hurricanes, and droughts, that have the potential to disrupt daily life and cause significant negative impacts. Disasters are the realization of these negative impacts on individuals and communities (Arcaya et al. 2020; Tierney 2019). In this issue, we focus specifically on climate hazards, rather than broadly considering all environmental hazards such as earthquakes or oil spills and toxic waste exposures. This narrow focus is intended to draw attention to the specific implications of climate change for understanding inequality in the US. Prior work establishes the underlying connections, showing a strong correlation between rising CO2 levels and the number of costly climate disasters (Bhola et al. 2023), as well as a strong correlation between disaster cost and various inequalities (Howell and Elliott 2018).

Different types of hazards have distinct roots and they of course have varying effects—though some are better understood than others.² While more Americans experience flooding than any other type of hazard, extreme heat is responsible for more deaths (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2025). Drought can have a more acute impact on specific industries, such as agriculture and energy production (Sugg et al. 2020). Hurricanes and wildfires, by contrast, are most likely to lead to property damage and residential displacement—though with different implications for rebuilding, as hurricanes often leave building foundations intact while wildfires completely raze structures (Aung and Sehgal 2025).

These varying consequences are also products of government action and policy. Federal disaster declarations are at the discretion of elected leaders under existing law. The 1974 Disaster Relief Act, which became the Stafford Act in 1988 and was amended in 2000, specifies that a governor can request that the president declare a disaster, triggering relief funds through the FEMA.³ Notably, the Stafford Act does not classify extreme heat as a disaster, leaving households experiencing heat waves ineligible for federal aid. In addition, politicians are responsible for overseeing and managing disaster recovery agencies, making political considerations inherently part of the recovery process (Garrett and Sobel 2003; Reeves 2011). Building a robust understanding of the consequences of climate hazards for inequality thus requires specific attention to the role of politics.

Before we describe these political considerations, the next two sections elaborate on how climate hazards intersect with longstanding disparities, revealing how existing inequalities shape both vulnerability and unequal recovery (Cushing et al. 2015; Cutter et al. 2012; Shonkoff et al. 2011; Tierney 2014; Thomas et al. 2019). Critically, these intersections often magnify or transform inequalities both within and between communities (Besbris 2024; Rhodes and Besbris 2022a; Klinenberg et al. 2020; Kousky 2014).

SOCIAL VULNERABILITY TO CLIMATE HAZARDS

While climate change is a problem that affects the entire global population and impacts a wide range of US communities, the risk is not shared equally. Research confirms a “climate gap”: a disproportionate and unequal risk of exposure to climate hazards for lower socioeconomic status groups and people of color (Fothergill and Peek 2015; Morello-Frosch and Obasogie 2023; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2022; Shonkoff et al. 2011). This risk is determined in part by preexisting social, economic, and political conditions that make some groups more vulnerable to harm than others. Scholarship on “social vulnerability” draws specific attention to the characteristics of people and groups that influence their susceptibility to harm from exposure to climate hazards, as well as their adaptive capacity to respond to and recover from such events (Finch et al. 2010). Indeed, disparities in vulnerability are linked to factors such as geography, race, socioeconomic status, homeowner status, and other dimensions of social life—particularly in the US where these distinctions structure and produce various kinds of inequalities (Fothergill 1996; Fothergill et al. 1999; Fothergill and Peek 2004; Méndez et al. 2020). We believe social vulnerability offers a productive conceptual framework for understanding the relationships between preexisting inequalities and the impacts of climate hazards.

Differences in Risk

In the US, residential location is a central component of climate risk, largely determining a household’s likelihood of exposure to climate hazards. Research shows that climate hazards—both acute and chronic—disproportionately affect people living in disadvantaged locales, thereby deepening existing inequality. For example, analyses of flooding events show that lower-income households are more at risk. This is especially the case in coastal neighborhoods with higher proportions of Native American and Hispanic residents and in “hotspots” (where flood risk and social vulnerability overlap) in the American South where the proportion of Black residents tends to be higher compared to other parts of the country (Galster et al. 2024; Qiang 2019; Tate et al. 2021; Wing et al. 2022).

Poorer households are more at risk for two main reasons. First, Americans are highly segregated by income, and at-risk areas are more affordable (Hallegatte et al. 2020; Reardon and Bischoff 2011). Second, poorer places tend to be less protected, as mitigation and resilience efforts tend to favor higher-income and more politically efficacious communities (Avtar et al. 2023; Zahnow et al. 2025).

These communities not only have less protective infrastructure but also tend to contain lower-quality and less resilient housing, leading to more pervasive and severe losses when disasters hit (Fothergill and Peek 2004). Furthermore, poorer households are less likely to evacuate their neighborhoods when hurricanes and flooding occur, which heightens their risk. And when they do evacuate, poorer households are more likely to head to locales with lower quality infrastructure (Crawford et al. 2023; Gladwin and Peacock 1997; Thompson et al. 2017; Yabe and Ukkusuri 2020). During heat waves, individuals more concerned with utility costs may be less likely to turn on their air conditioning (if they have it), increasing their risk of mortality (Hernández and Laird 2025; Klinenberg 2002). So, across multiple climate hazard types, the poor tend to be more vulnerable.

Meta-analyses suggest that race also remains a significant and consistent predictor of unequal risk, even more so than household income or housing value (Downey and Hawkings 2008; Ringquist 2005). This illustrates that the uneven riskscape has much to do with historic and contemporary inequities, including an imbalance of power in the decision-making process to protect (or not protect) certain communities at risk (Besbris, Elliott et al. 2024; Hamilton 1995; Lane et al. 2022). Systemic forms of racism are one key factor in structuring vulnerability. Hurricane Katrina is often cited as a particularly revealing case, demonstrating how intersecting vulnerabilities by class and race affected risk and exposure (Horowitz 2020; Pastor et al. 2006). For example, Patrick Sharkey (2007), found that while age, race, and place were all consequential factors for potential death during Hurricane Katrina, it was not residents of New Orleans’s poorest neighborhoods that were most at risk of death, but residents of its most racially segregated neighborhoods.

Racial and socioeconomic disparities in vulnerability to climate hazards are shaped by a history of place-based policies related to community development, investment, and housing. For example, residential racial segregation—fostered by racist government policies such as redlining, exploitative lending and insuring practices, and discrimination by housing providers—has played a core role in shaping the unequal riskscape (Krysan and Crowder 2017; Morello-Frosch and Lopez 2006). Historically redlined neighborhoods, and segregated Black neighborhoods generally, have not received the same investment in public parks and landscaping relative to White neighborhoods, regardless of poverty levels, with less tree canopy and more impervious surfaces that retain heat and can exacerbate flooding. This means that their residents face higher land surface temperatures and are at higher risk of exposure to extreme heat (Harlan et al. 2007; Hsu et al. 2021; Jesdale et al. 2013; Klinenberg 2002; Marx and Morales-Burnett 2022; Mitchell and Chakraborty 2018; Nardone et al. 2021; Wilson 2020).

Members of disadvantaged groups often face greater barriers in accessing resources to support recovery (more on this later). Immigrant and limited English-speaking communities, for example, have more difficulty accessing the translation support and resources they need to prepare before a disaster hits, while lack of proof of citizenship can serve as a barrier to securing recovery resources (Besbris, Dempsey et al. 2024; Fussell et al. 2018; Méndez et al. 2020; Méndez et al. 2024; Stough et al. 2010). Claudia Valencia-Uribe and colleagues (2026, this issue) highlight the role that migrant-serving organizations frequently play in filling this gap in public services, taking on the taxing task of adapting their operational foci to meet the emerging needs of migrant and undocumented community members in the aftermath of climate-related disasters.

Broadly, a useful distinction in terms of understanding risk can be made between vulnerable population groups and structurally disadvantaged communities. The first entails people such as the young, the old, those with disabilities, pregnant women, poor people, and those who are homeless. The second includes people living where exposures are cumulative, individual disadvantage is exacerbated, and interventions should arguably be place-based. Developing analyses to separate the potentially distinct mechanisms that lead from unequal risk to post-disaster inequality is an evergreen goal for social scientists.

Legacies of Environmental Injustice

The emphasis on understanding how climate-related hazards increase or change existing inequalities has grown as environmental justice activism and scholarship have moved to the fore. Environmental justice can be defined as the equitable exposure of all people to both environmental benefits and environmental harms with climate justice addressing equity around climate exposures specifically (Harlan et al. 2015; Holifield 2001; Mohai et al. 2009; Schlosberg and Collins 2014).

The earliest research in environmental justice focused on documenting disparities in proximity to hazards—usually toxic waste sites (Bullard 2000; United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice 1987; Taylor 2014). As the field developed, it consistently found disparate patterns of exposure to environmental hazards by race and income, often with race playing the more prominent role (Downey and Hawkings 2008; Mohai and Saha 2007; Pastor et al. 2001; Sadd et al. 1999; Saha and Mohai 2005; Taylor 2000). Environmental justice scholarship has since broadened to include access to resources for recovery from various environmental catastrophes (Bullard 2007; Bullard and Wright 2012).⁴ That is, it has described how both vulnerable population groups and structurally disadvantaged communities are put at higher risk of exposure to climate hazards and are overlooked in the distribution of recovery aid.⁵

More recently, the environmental justice framework has expanded to examine how factors like citizenship, disability, and gender identity affect vulnerability to climate hazards (Balbus and Malina 2009; Lindsay et al. 2023; Mann et al. 2024). One recent scoping review concluded that climatic changes were “having a disproportionate effect on the health of adults and children of color” as well as noncitizen immigrants (Berberian et al. 2022, 459), while additional research has demonstrated the high-risk experiences of undocumented immigrants who move into disaster zones to find work, particularly in hazardous industries like construction (Fussell et al. 2018; Méndez et al. 2020).

Environmental justice activists and scholars have also sought to reframe core concepts in the study of hazards. For example, by incorporating ecocultural practices from Native American and Indigenous traditions (Hankins 2024; Sovacool et al. 2023), recent work has expanded definitions of who and what is at risk. This work builds on critiques that prevailing assessments of risk are overly focused on economistic measures of cost-benefit and do not accurately capture the value and needs of communities with distinct histories (Balachandran et al. 2022). Shifting our frameworks, these scholars argue, can lead to more holistic definitions of key concepts such as damage and preparedness (Dennig 2018), and encourage a community-centered approach to addressing local needs in the context of climate hazards.

INEQUALITIES IN RECOVERY

People and places not only vary in their risk of exposure to climate hazards, they also vary in their capacity to recover. Here we highlight these observed patterns of inequality during recovery and how they are produced.

Recovery resources are not equally distributed. Households with preexisting financial advantages (such as higher incomes and more insurance coverage) and those in Whiter communities tend to receive more economic support in recovery than their less advantaged counterparts (Raker 2023). They also tend to have larger, wealthier social networks that can provide additional forms of monetary and in-kind aid during recovery (Aldrich and Meyer 2014; Rhodes and Besbris 2022a). While post-disaster migration patterns are complex and varied across places and hazards (Hoffmann et al. 2021), less advantaged households are often more likely to leave and less likely to return in the wake of climate hazards, incurring moving costs, leaving behind helpful social networks and support systems, and missing out on the benefits of reinvestment efforts that often occur after disasters (Elliott and Howell 2017; Fussell 2015; Fussell and Harris 2014; Fussell et al. 2010).⁶ Furthermore, there is growing evidence showing that lower-income households that leave their neighborhoods after exposure do not move to less risky places, while higher-income households who move do (Clark et al. 2025; Elliott et al. 2026, this issue). Finally, recovery processes tend to increase economic inequality across neighborhoods, as more advantaged places receive higher shares of aid and more economic development post-disaster (Gotham and Greenberg 2014; Raker 2023; Pais and Elliott 2008).

Household Budgets and Housing Values

Researchers examining recovery from climate disasters have often used prior inequalities to explain why post-disasters outcomes can be so disparate. Past work has posited a disaster Matthew effect—that households with preexisting economic advantages tend to increase their wealth in the wake of disaster while more disadvantaged households are more likely to face increased financial precarity (Rhodes and Besbris 2022a). Indeed, at the household level, hazards and disasters have the potential to dramatically alter budgets and socioeconomic profiles (Smith and McCarty 1996; Vigdor 2008).

The negative financial consequences for households exposed to hazards vary considerably in their size and duration, as well as whether the household relocates or returns after having evacuated its home. For example, evacuees who returned to New Orleans more quickly after Hurricane Katrina had better labor market outcomes than those who did not return (Groen and Polivka 2008). Additionally, while household earnings typically fall immediately following a disaster, some research shows they rebound relatively quickly (Deryugina et al. 2018). Access to disaster aid can also play a role in household finances, as research shows that aid is associated with reduced credit card debt (Deryugina et al. 2018; Gallagher et al. 2023; McIntosh 2008; Sacerdote 2012).

Lack of access to aid can also be consequential for downward economic mobility; for example, after Hurricane Harvey, bankruptcy rates and debts in severe delinquency increased in flooded neighborhoods. They were concentrated, however, in areas outside of the floodplain, where many residents were denied government loans for rebuilding (Billings et al. 2022). Broadly, research on the economic consequences of climate hazards shows that while disasters serve as an economic shock, effective policies can help limit negative and long-term consequences for household budgets. Unfortunately, highly unequal rates of access to recovery resources persist by race and place (Raker 2023). This can result in aid increasing rather than decreasing inequality (Howell and Elliott 2019).

Climate hazards can also affect housing values, impacting both household-level wealth and community-level property tax revenue (Besbris, Robinson et al. 2024). Less valuable housing—inhabited by more economically vulnerable people—is generally more at risk of reduced value after exposure (Peacock et al. 2014; Zhang 2016). Yet all types of housing in places at risk of and affected by climate-related hazards sell for lower prices relative to comparable housing in less risky places nearby (Ortega and Taspinar 2018). For example, houses more susceptible to flooding from sea-level rise sell for substantially lower prices than comparable homes equidistant from the beach that are less exposed (Bernstein et al. 2019; see also McAlpine and Porter 2018). Newer research is exploring the cumulative effects of repeated exposure to hazards, with lower housing prices in places that experience multiple disasters over time (Read 2025).

For renters, housing costs do not always change in the same way. As Brian Y. An and colleagues (2026, this issue) show, rents can rise after exposure to climate hazards, though the effect varies by hazard type and is mitigated by government spending on community development efforts. Changing rent costs can also increase inequality, especially when these increases are concentrated in units priced toward the bottom of the rent distribution, more directly impacting low-income renters (Brennan et al. 2024). These economic differences are often a key source of variation in how communities recover and what recovery looks like for different types of households. The concern that recovery processes can exacerbate existing inequalities has led to growing calls for a greater focus on social equity in risk management, adaptation policy, and disaster recovery funding (Domingue and Emrich 2019; Rhodes and Besbris 2022c; Siders 2019).

Private Home Insurance

One way that homeowners try to protect the value of their homes, a key asset for many Americans, is through private insurance. Homeowners’ insurance can facilitate rebuilding after loss or damage to property from some climate hazards—policies typically do not cover damage from flooding. But as the risk of exposure to climate hazards grows, so too will the cost of insurance, further exacerbating inequality in the context of climate change.

Homeowners’ insurance is typically required by lenders for the duration of the mortgage loan. And indeed, most American homeowners have some insurance on their property. However, an estimated 7–12 percent of homeowners are uninsured (Cornelissen et al. 2024; Insurance Information Institute 2023). Worsening inequality in the wake of climate-related disasters is driven in part by this gap in insurance coverage, as lower-income households, owners of mobile homes, and Black and Hispanic homeowners are disproportionately among the uninsured (Cornelissen et al. 2024). Moreover, insurers do not simply assess costs according to calculations of physical risk; they also use policyholders’ credit scores to determine premiums. While insurance is key to understanding differences in the material resources households have for repair, rebuilding, and relocation, it also shapes the scale and pace of recovery (Kousky 2019). Prices, however, may not serve as the risk signal insurers claim they do.

The cost of homeowners insurance is rising markedly (Mulder and Kousky 2023), with one study showing an increase of up to a third for policy prices between 2020 and 2023 (Keys and Mulder 2024). These cost increases vary by geography, with homeowners in zip codes with higher disaster risk facing the greatest increase in their premiums. In the face of these escalating insurance costs, a larger number of households are likely to go without homeowners’ insurance as premiums become prohibitive (Rhodes and Besbris 2022a; Sastry et al. 2024; see also Kousky and You 2024). This can also shift the composition of homeowners in disaster-prone areas to richer borrowers with higher credit who can afford these increasing expenses (Sastry 2022), potentially amplifying socioeconomic segregation.

Some property insurance firms are exiting markets in certain states altogether or are charging higher premiums in less regulated states to make up for losses (Cignarale et al. 2017; Oh et al. 2025). In the years preceding the Los Angeles wildfires, many homeowners in California had been forced off private insurance and into a plan designated as an insurer of last resort for high-risk properties that is now itself facing significant financial strain (Birss et al. 2024).⁷ More research is needed broadly on the relationship between private insurance and government safety nets, and specifically on the types of households who rely on these state insurance programs and how they fare in recovery. While some wealthy homeowners may be able to afford to repair damaged property absent insurance or in the context of less generous insurance, a growing number of lower-income households continue to live uninsured or underinsured in increasingly vulnerable communities.

Even when households do have insurance, they are not guaranteed to receive expected payouts. This means that the courts can become a site of emerging inequality. As Hannah K. Friederich and colleagues (2026, this issue) show, litigation over insurance claims following Hurricanes Laura and Delta in Louisiana was more likely in neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black residents. In addition, these cases took longer, reflecting that systemic procedural inequalities can amplify disparities in disaster recovery. The rapidly changing private insurance landscape is a ripe area for further research (Gourevitch and Kousky 2025; Kousky et al. 2020), with implications for evolving mobility and home-buying patterns, and inequities in wealth accumulation, among other concerns.

Data for Assessing Risk

Decisions about insurance availability and cost are informed by the quality and scale of available data. Indeed, climate analytics are incredibly important, as they are also used to determine the provision of aid and the siting of mitigation and adaptation efforts. We are in a period of rapidly improving climate analytics, but much of these new data are in private hands. Even when privately held analytics rely on science from public agencies, access to them is often limited to those who can pay (Webber and Donner 2017). As such, a less explored but potentially important source of climate hazard-related inequality may be access to data. Indeed, property insurers’ decisions, such as whether to renew or cancel policies, change premiums, or withdraw from some markets, are informed in part by their assessments of climate hazards and potential exposure (Boomhower et al. 2024; Condon 2023; Keys and Mulder 2024; Cignarale et al. 2017). Understanding how insurers model risk, therefore, is essential to understanding the equity of these decisions. There is a strong rationale for making climate analytics data available as a public good, rather than treating them as a private commodity housed in commercial organizations that do not share them with those unable to pay for access (Findlater et al. 2021; Mankin 2024).⁸

National Flood Insurance

The pace of change within insurance markets raises fundamental questions regarding who should pay for damage or mitigation efforts such as relocation. As private insurers continue to pull out of areas they deem too risky for flood, fire, and other climate hazards (Boomhower et al. 2023; Cignarale et al. 2017; McConnell and Koslov 2024), the structure and availability of public insurance options through federal and state governments are becoming a larger part of the insurance landscape. Federal flood insurance through the FEMA is particularly important, since most home insurance policies do not cover damage from flooding.

Managed by the FEMA, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is the largest federal disaster insurance program offering flood coverage to property owners, renters, and businesses. Coverage is only required for homes and businesses located in high-risk flood areas with mortgages insured by the federal government. The program is heavily subsidized—its cost is less than 60 percent of private homeowner-purchased policies, and coverage has not kept pace with the growing scale of flood risk (Blessing et al. 2017; Bradt et al. 2021; Kousky 2018; Kousky et al. 2017; Smiley 2020; Wagner 2022). Even in high-risk areas, uptake is low and skewed by socioeconomic advantage, with those with higher property values and higher education more likely to be insured (Atreya et al. 2015).

In recent years, FEMA has taken steps to improve the financial stability and transparency of the NFIP, as well as to make its risk assessments more accurate. In 2021, it rolled out the Risk Rating 2.0 to provide risk assessments for each individual property, rather than relying on the relatively static maps of entire floodplains.⁹ FEMA’s stated goal with this more specific evaluation of risk and resulting insurance pricing is to build a more equitable system for setting premiums across all policyholders. Broadly, it reflects an effort to reduce the cross-subsidization within the system, so that premiums more closely reflect actuarial risk (Elliott 2022). While many applaud this goal, it creates specific social tradeoffs and consequences. There is significant debate about whether NFIP premiums should be subsidized to encourage participation or instead set to reflect risk, which could make them less affordable and potentially reduce participation, making inequality in coverage worse (Elliott 2021; see also Gourevitch et al. 2023).¹⁰

Migration and Mobility

Another way that climate hazards can reveal or exacerbate inequality is by spurring novel patterns of mobility. Households and businesses may move, and in some cases, entire communities may relocate through managed retreat efforts.

Cross-border migration is one of the most notable effects of climate change, a pattern expected to intensify as more of the planet faces climate hazard risk. For example, nearly one-fifth of the world may become too hot for human habitation by 2070 (Xu et al. 2020), forcing many people to migrate to cooler locales. In this issue, Asad L. Asad and colleagues (2026) offer a particularly complex view of climate migration into the US from Mexico, using a unique and highly disaggregated dataset to illustrate how home-country dynamics can influence how sensitive different populations, particularly Indigenous communities, might be to climate conditions. These sorts of more nuanced approaches to who moves and why will be needed to determine policy responses that can mitigate both climate shifts and the sort of mobility that can be disruptive in receiving-country contexts (Waters 2025).

Even within the national context, it can be difficult to identify how mobility and migration reshape the characteristics of populations living in areas impacted by climate hazards. Often the geographic boundaries of climate hazards do not align with political or official designations of the counties, cities, neighborhoods, or block groups typically used as units to measure demographic characteristics of residents. Yet climate hazards do alter the demographic profiles of affected locales (Curtis et al. 2015; Logan et al. 2016; Fussell et al. 2014; Fussell et al. 2017; Hunter et al. 2015; Raker 2020; Seltzer and Nobles 2017). Climate hazards are certainly linked to residential mobility, particularly for households that experience damage to their housing. However, evidence is mixed on exactly what these changes look like, and how they vary depending on the type of climate hazard and the period of time studied after the disaster (Hoffmann et al. 2021).¹¹

Population Dynamics and the Economy

Major sectors of the labor market and the economy more broadly, such as agriculture, are influenced heavily by climate hazards and weather fluctuations (Schlenker and Roberts 2009). For example, both extreme heat and cold lead to losses of labor supply, particularly in weather-exposed industries (Rode et al. 2022). Firms that operate in multiple locations have been shown to reallocate employment (and hence production) in response to heat-related damages (Acharya et al. 2024). This relationship manifests itself through an increase in job postings at facilities not affected by extreme heat, as well as the opening of new facilities in unaffected areas. Both firms and households appear to prefer moderate climates, and these preferences may be reflected in population-level mobility trends in the coming decades (Albouy et al. 2016). Northern areas may be poised for economic growth, while hotter southern areas are predicted to see a decrease in their populations and economic activity (Cruz and Rossi-Hansberg 2024). Though this is not assured, as the continued population growth in the American Sunbelt shows.

Dania Francis and Keren Horn (2026, this issue) document some overall post-hazard employment and earnings trends but also show that variability emerges across hazard types. After hurricanes, for example, short-term growth in employment is driven by construction jobs, but other major storms are not associated with the same patterns. This highlights the value of further work comparing the impacts across hazard types, as well as contrasting short- and long-term economic impacts to build a holistic picture of how climate hazards will reshape the labor market.

Aside from the makeup of populations and local economic conditions, climate-related hazards have also been shown to change other aspects of communities. These include trends in development, the density of nonprofits and social service organizations, and housing markets—with stark implications for resulting levels and types of inequality (Comerio 1998; Smiley et al. 2018). Disasters are generally understood to act as economic shocks that provide new openings for investment. This investment can, in turn, foster uneven recoveries, with some people and communities benefiting and others losing out (Gotham and Greenberg 2014).

“Growth machines”—coalitions of politicians and business interests focused on development (Logan and Molotch 1987)—form after disasters, with an increasing number of firms operating in disaster-affected locales. Local development typically increases in the wake of disasters—often in previous undeveloped parcels (Elliott and Clement 2017)—which generally creates short-term profit. Local economies overall experience long-term increased activity after a disaster, particularly when loss of life is low, relatively few people leave the area, and there is substantial damage to buildings and infrastructure to make way for new development. However, having a preexisting capacity to rebuild is critical. Communities that lack such resources can become more impoverished after a disaster rather than less (Akao and Sakamoto 2018; Botzen et al. 2019; Hallegatte and Dumas 2009). Real estate market intermediaries like brokers and agents likely play an underappreciated role in reshaping post-disaster property values by actively steering investment in ways that increase racial and socioeconomic inequalities across neighborhoods. (Besbris 2020; Besbris and Korver-Glenn 2023; Korver-Glenn et al. 2023; Wohl and Besbris 2024).

Climate Gentrification

Post-disaster economic development can lead to climate gentrification, a process where more-advantaged households move into areas less vulnerable to climate hazards, displacing the less-advantaged households who currently reside there. This heightened demand occurs when lower-income neighborhoods become more desirable due to basic characteristics such as elevation, investment in resilience infrastructure that makes the neighborhood safer, or post-disaster development (Besbris, Robinson et al. 2024; Gould and Lewis 2017; Keenan et al. 2018; Knighton et al. 2021; Shokry et al. 2022). For example, Hurricane Sandy led to a resorting in the larger New York City metropolitan area, with wealthy White individuals moving from areas that had been damaged into the higher-amenity undamaged areas after the storm (Varela Varela 2023). But as Ingrid Gould Ellen and colleagues (2026, this issue) show, patterns of neighborhood change may not be the same across locales after similar climate hazards. While neighborhoods in New York that flooded during Hurricane Sandy but were outside the official designated flood zone seemed to get poorer, the same thing was not true for flooded neighborhoods in Harris County after Hurricane Harvey. Certainly, more work is needed to understand the spatial variation of climate gentrification.

GOVERNMENT POLICIES AND PROGRAMS

Climate policy is a critical underpinning factor in whether inequality is worsened, maintained, or reduced following climate hazards. Government programs shape the resilience of individuals and communities by influencing their capacity to anticipate, plan for, recover from, and ultimately reduce hazard risk. Several government policies and programs, including the FEMA Flood Insurance Program discussed earlier, seek to assist individuals, businesses, and communities affected by climate hazards but can in practice exacerbate existing inequalities.

FEMA Assistance Programs

After a federal disaster is declared, FEMA’s Individual and Households Program (IHP) plays a critical role in providing resources to households that are uninsured or underinsured. To receive cash assistance through the IHP, households file claims with FEMA, which contracts with private home inspectors to assess damage and determine the amount of aid. IHP funds are not designed to be a substitute for insurance and therefore do not cover the complete cost of the losses households experience. Instead, these funds are intended to make a home safe and habitable. The maximum direct IHP assistance is adjusted upward every year—in 2025 it was $43,600—though households rarely receive the maximum amount. In addition to the IHP, homeowners and renters may apply for FEMA rental assistance if they cannot live in their homes due to disaster damage.

Research on the IHP shows that while applications for federal disaster aid are more likely to come from lower income communities where non-White residents are the majority, inspectors are sent to higher income Whiter communities at higher rates (Raker 2023). In addition, applications from Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are more likely to be denied, and higher income homeowners residing in Whiter communities receive a disproportionate amount of aid (Raker 2023). Related research has found that increased FEMA aid at the county level is associated with subsequent increases in racial wealth inequality (Howell and Elliott 2019). This is, of course, a troubling finding, and more work is needed to understand the mechanisms by which federal aid might lead to increasing inequality.

After federally declared disasters, FEMA also collaborates with the Small Business Administration (SBA). When homeowners or businesses have repair expenses that are not covered by insurance, they can apply for low-interest SBA loans. These funds can facilitate the completion of repairs, but a lien is put on the property until full repayment is made. Reliance on SBA loans can therefore exacerbate inequality after disaster, with some residents able to complete repairs by using money from insurance payouts, other assets, or support from social networks, while others take on significant new debt (Rhodes and Besbris 2022a).

In addition to providing individual aid, FEMA supports disaster recovery at the community level through programs such as the Hazard Mitigation Assistance (HMA) grants. These funds are awarded to local governments, states, and tribal authorities to support community resilience through mitigation efforts such as elevating structures, dredging local waterways, and improving drainage, retrofitting buildings, and even financing home buyouts as part of managed retreat efforts. HMA can also grow the climate gap since it requires local governments to provide some cost-sharing funds, which can make grants less accessible to communities with fewer resources and lower tax bases. Wealthier communities often have the financial resources and administrative capacity to more effectively compete for these funds.

Managed Retreat

How policy can—or if it should—facilitate moving residents away from vulnerable places is a topic of considerable ongoing debate. Managed retreat (MR) is a widely used term for government-supported relocation of households and communities away from high-risk places (Koslov 2016; Mach et al. 2019; Siders 2019). The most prominent and widespread MR policy is property buyouts, where previously flooded parcels are purchased by the government and left undeveloped because they are deemed at high risk of future flooding.¹² Money for buyouts is provided through several programs administered by FEMA and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and buyouts are generally implemented by local governments.

Research on buyouts suggests they are not distributed equitably, as policymakers tend to prioritize majority-White communities for buyout offers (Elliott et al. 2020; Elliott et al. 2023). Patterns of mobility after buyouts are also disparate, with residents in more advantaged neighborhoods facing fewer tradeoffs compared to residents from less privileged communities who often move further away from their social networks (Loughran and Elliott 2019, 2022). James R. Elliott and colleagues (2026, this issue) show that in the majority-White communities where buyouts have been concentrated, homeowners are typically relocating to socioeconomically affluent neighborhoods, are staying close to their previous communities (only moving around seven miles), and moving to housing with less climate risk. This suggests potential challenges for scaling buyouts as a tool for MR, and highlights that when residents relocate, they are simply shifting risk to a new group of often less advantaged residents who are moving in (Jerolleman et al. 2024). However, much of the work on buyouts—and MR more generally—is derived from case studies, and so more comparative research is needed.

Additional work on MR efforts designed to relocate communities highlights the need for policymakers to be attentive to the value local residents place on community and relocating collectively. In some cases, these priorities can be more important than individual material gain and may be inconsistent with policymakers’ assumptions if residents are not adequately consulted, as was the case for the Indigenous community of Newtok, Alaska (Rosen 2024).¹³ These potential conflicts reveal one way that policies designed to help communities and residents adapt to climate change can produce disparities in outcomes, with wealthier communities mobilizing MR in ways that leave them relatively better off than their less advantaged counterparts (Koslov 2016). Indeed, Megan Mullin (2026, this volume), finds that policymakers were more willing to support MR for lower-income communities. While this could provide relocation resources to those who otherwise would lack them, it could also produce distinct class-based climate migration patterns if policymakers are more likely to ask disadvantaged communities to move while remaining more amenable to publicly funding physical adaptations such as sea walls or beach restoration for better-off places.

In general, past work examining the provision of government aid after disasters has shown that Whiter and wealthier communities are more likely to receive various kinds of adaptation and mitigation resources (Mach et al. 2019; Bullard and Wright 2012; Siders and Keenan 2020; Vilá et al. 2022). Given the importance of federal disaster aid to local recovery efforts, it is critical to continue assessing—and remedying—procedural inequities in the distribution of this aid (Domingue and Emrich 2019).

THE POLITICS OF CLIMATE HAZARDS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Government policies and programs to recover from and adapt to climate hazards—and proactive efforts to mitigate climate change more generally—are born from political processes that determine, in the classic definition, “who gets what, when, and how” (Lasswell 1936). In the context of climate politics, we should add “where” to that formulation since the impacts of hazards vary widely by place. In the United States, with its federal system, policymaking is highly fragmented, with jurisdictional level and location playing a distinctly important role. Further, allocation of political power across the different branches of government, the influence of political parties, public opinion, and special interests provide both numerous veto points and arenas of potential opportunity.

Federal Executive Branch and Congress

Policymaking at the federal level has been marked by a high degree of volatility, swinging in recent years from executive branch support for some climate action under President Joe Biden to unprecedented executive branch hostility under President Donald Trump. Over a period of several years, the US Congress has moved from relative inaction prior to the Biden administration to considerable investment in climate policies, to the dismantling of many of these policies under the second Trump administration and the 119th Congress. Republican lawmakers have shown high deference to the executive branch as they canceled billions of dollars in renewable energy projects—including ones in their districts. These actions risk job loss and increasing utility costs, and they surrender congressional authority over federal agencies and the power of the purse. As is frequently noted, elections have consequences, and climate policymaking at the national level reflects a dramatic shift in the context of intense partisanship.

The Judiciary

The courts have also played a growing but unsettled role in determining outcomes for policies related to climate hazards. There has been an increase in climate-related lawsuits and even calls for prosecutors to consider criminal charges against fossil fuel companies (Zraick 2024; Gelles 2024). At the highest level, the US Supreme Court has generally grown more deferential to the executive branch. In its 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises et al. v. Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce, et al., the US Supreme Court overturned the Chevron deference precedent, a move expected to reduce the federal government’s ability to regulate environmental hazards into the future.¹⁴ In 2025, the Trump administration began appealing to the judiciary in somewhat novel ways, including suing states to constrain “make polluters pay” laws. These laws set up superfund programs to require fossil fuel companies and other polluters to compensate states for the costs of climate resilience and recovery efforts. The net result of judicial action for climate policy and issues of inequality remains to be seen, and attention to the impact of key court rulings on climate-related inequality will be an important area for ongoing research.

States and Localities

Despite federally imposed policy constraints, important policy changes are occurring at the state and local levels. Responsibilities for policy development and implementation are also often shared across jurisdictional levels and with the private sector (Rabe 2008, Rabe 2025; Stokes 2020; Basseches et al. 2022; Trachtman 2023). This adds to the complexity of climate hazard-related policy development at the same time it offers both opportunity and risk. Many states—such as California, Colorado, Hawaii, New York, and Rhode Island—have been comparative innovators in policies to address climate hazards (Rabe 2023; Bromley-Trujillo and Holman 2020; Méndez 2020). California, for example, in 2025 passed a long-term extension of its cap-and-trade program, which sets limits on the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the state and effectively taxes high emitters (though, at the same time California increased allowances for oil drilling). Over time, states that have passed mitigation legislation tend to focus on technocratic market-based strategies, rather than broader approaches focused on equity or climate justice, such as investments in renewable energy jobs for lower-wage workers or infrastructure in disadvantaged communities (Boyle et al. 2021). Yet more work is needed on the consequences of this state-level variation in hazard mitigation.

At a more local level, city and county governments also play a critical role on the front lines of climate hazard risk. Given their direct control over key policy levers—such as zoning and building regulations—local jurisdictions are uniquely positioned to shape community resilience, as well as implement important mitigation and adaptation efforts. Yet research shows that the adoption of climate-related policies is shaped by the partisan composition of both local government and the electorate (Gerber 2013). In other words, politics and partisanship impact climate policy at all levels.

Public Opinion and Partisanship

Recent surveys suggest that support for action to address climate hazards is heavily tied to the nation’s partisan polarization, and attitudes about inequality and the environment (Bugden 2023, 2024). While 70 percent of adults surveyed in an April 2024 national poll favored the “US taking steps to try to reduce climate change,” views diverged sharply by party affiliation, with 91 percent of Democrats favoring, 68 percent of Independents, and 48 percent of Republicans favoring such action (De Pinto et al. 2024). It’s worth noting, however, that more young Republicans (61 percent of eighteen- to forty-four-year-olds) favored climate action than older Republicans (40 percent). Other polls show that support for particular policies, like limiting pollution, can reach much higher levels across parties (Carman et al. 2025). Nearly twenty years of polling in California have shown that significantly higher shares of Black and Latino respondents consistently view climate change as a serious threat. Over time this has created incentives for politicians to address issues of disproportionate exposure and, as a result, equity is a prominent part of climate hazard policies in that state (Pastor et al. 2024).

Cadence Willse’s (2026, this issue) article explores partisanship in environmental policymaking, suggesting the need for caution against wishful thinking that experience with climate hazards will readily overcome party divides, at least among legislators. She finds that major natural disasters changed legislative behavior, but in ways that could move in opposite directions across parties. In her analysis, Democrats voted more strongly in favor of environmental policy after a disaster. In contrast, Republican legislators moved toward greater opposition to environmental policy. These findings call into question the belief that shared experience of climate hazards across geographies with both Democratic and Republican residents will necessarily lead to more unified support for climate action (Grant et al. 2026; Hazlett and Mildenberger 2020; Kang et al. 2023).

Even amidst significant partisanship regarding climate change, opportunities for cross-party support remain when issues are more narrowly framed, such as addressing disaster recovery (Rabe 2023). This potential is crucial as climate-related risks will continue to intensify in regions across the nation, with indifference to local partisanship (Kusnetz et al. 2023). In fact, some research indicates that Republican constituencies face higher risk (Egan and Mullin 2024). This could lead to less political polarization around policies focused strictly on damage prevention from climate-related hazards—as opposed to fights against climate change (Bechtel and Mannino 2022). Yet, like Willse’s (2026) findings, results from experimental research on public opinion are not encouraging, as they tend to show that when resources are unequal and the costs of doing nothing fall more on the less advantaged, cooperation is unlikely (Burton-Chellew et al. 2013). This suggests that while opportunities remain for continued coalition building to advocate for equitable climate policy, these efforts may be most successful when focused on narrowly defined frameworks for specific aspects of recovery and hazard mitigation.

Special Interests and Political Coalitions

While the politics of climate change have been highly volatile in recent years, certain broad patterns remain relatively unchanged. Most notable are enduring tensions between resistance to robust climate action by the fossil fuel industry and related economic, political, and ideological actors. On the other side, pressure to respond to increasing climate hazards comes from public safety and health, scientific, and justice-focused actors. Each of these sets of interests works with coalitions and networks to achieve their ends (Oreskes and Conway 2011; Supran et al. 2023).¹⁵

Well-financed interests have worked for decades—with notable success—to slow, freeze, or reverse policy action through lobbying and financial contributions, advertising and public relations, funding the production of quasi-research content, and other means (Brulle and Dunlap 2021). Indeed, oil and gas companies have persistently outspent environmental and social justice actors with substantial payoff in policy results. However, while Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted legislation hostile to clean energy (Marshall and Burgess 2022; Stokes 2020), the business and employment benefits of investments in renewable energy infrastructure—and the plummeting costs of solar and wind in particular—have contributed to its increased prevalence even in states with Republican state governments such as Texas (McKibben 2025; Rabe 2023).

The policy development process can also be shaped by activism (for example, protests, civil disobedience, boycotts, and similar actions) and media campaigns designed to impose economic, political, and reputational benefits or costs on political and private actors seen as supportive of or hostile to action to address climate hazards (Srivastav and Rafaty 2023). There have been some moments of success using activism to gain climate policy wins—such as efforts by environmental and climate justice organizers to shape the Biden administration’s executive actions and passage of the Inflation Reduction Act—but many of them have not endured.

Political Possibilities

Given that exposure to climate hazards alone is insufficient to drive effective political mobilization, several additional factors may help promote public engagement, advocacy, and political action. First, as noted above, the specificity with which policies are framed affects their political viability. Second, building on information about cost holds promise for galvanizing public opinion and political action. Highlighting potential future cost savings from government action to prepare for hazards is more politically effective as solar and onshore wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels (Bechtel and Mannino 2023; McKibben 2025). Facts about the lower cost and greater feasibility of renewables may be able to piggyback on growing economic populism and broadly felt resentment toward the wealthy (among them fossil fuel tycoons and tech billionaires), especially as energy demand and costs escalate (Hernández and Laird 2025). Indeed, some have argued that efforts to mobilize around climate action need to be more focused on shared vulnerability and growing social and economic precarity (Besbris, Elliott et al. 2024).

Third, timing also matters for public engagement in disaster policy. We have seen that in the wake of a disaster, communities develop a short-term focus on local political action, policy implementation, and spending (Gilmore et al. 2022; Rhodes and Besbris 2024). Some studies have explored significant local organizing efforts for policy responses that communities deem necessary, such as buyouts after a storm (Elliott 2017, 2019; Koslov 2016), but more work is needed to understand what can sustain longer-term community mobilizations for recovery resources.

Climate change is what the political scientist Thomas Hale (2024) calls a “long problem” with inherent deep inequities between those who are most affected now and in the future relative to those most responsible for the problem in the past and present. The challenges of solving long problems include a lack of immediate political incentive and barriers to collective action, as well as psychological difficulties for most people in acting to prevent uncertain future occurrences. But as climate hazards such as wildfires, floods, and hurricanes become more common and reach across social and economic lines, as the Los Angeles fires did, these occurrences may not seem so uncertain and future-focused, and collective action may become easier to build. The clock is ticking on an intensifying problem that affects those with the fewest resources the hardest, but ultimately hits everyone, as we saw in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

FUTURE RESEARCH

We return to the Los Angeles fires of 2025 to highlight questions that will become even more relevant as climate change escalates and resulting hazards affect more people and communities.

California has experienced a decade of record-breaking fires and these are likely to have long-term effects that we are only starting to understand (Cunningham et al. 2025). Since higher temperatures and drier soil are a given, these areas may experience fires again soon. Indeed, the 2018 Woolsey fire was less than ten miles from the Palisades fire and places like Malibu and Butte County, California have burned multiple times in recent decades.

There are, of course, the negative health consequences of repeated exposure to climate hazards including smoke and poor air quality that result from fires and excessive heat (Leppold et al. 2022; NASEM 2025). But there is room for more research on how repeated exposure may affect critical issues including household financial trajectories, migration and residential mobility patterns, or other facets of family well-being, such as children’s educational outcomes. The Gulf Coast and southern Atlantic states have experienced recurring climate hazards—in this case multiple hurricanes and floods—and offer lessons about repeated exposures. Tyler W. McDaniel (2026, this issue) examines the case of children who live through multiple hurricanes and makes a strong case for the importance of work analyzing the potentially cumulative effects of multiple exposures, but also notes that repeated exposure to hazards may increase certain forms of resilience. Life-course research will become increasingly relevant in examinations of both risk to climate hazards and in understanding differential rates of recovery, adaptation, and other response.¹⁶ More generally, studies that track individuals, households, places, and populations over the long term after exposure to climate hazards are needed to build more effective mitigation and adaptation strategies.

With different demographics and housing stocks across the Palisades and Altadena, the Los Angeles fires provide a ready-made comparison of how place matters. More work such as Elliott and colleagues (2026) and Ellen and colleagues (2026) is needed to compare similar neighborhood and mobility processes across different locales. Further, two related aspects of these fires that received a great deal of public attention require more empirical investigation—housing supply and the insurance crisis. Fires and other hazards can place great strain on already unaffordable housing markets. After the Los Angeles fires, thousands of households were suddenly pushed into one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. Some households doubled up, others reported being gouged for rents on short-term housing while at the same time receiving offers for their scorched lots from buyers eager for prime opportunities for redevelopment. There is some recent research on the effects of multiple disasters on housing values (see Read 2025), but more work is needed particularly on the local rental markets that will receive growing influxes of consumers as hazards continue to grow. Given the findings of An et al. (2026, this issue), more government oversight such as price controls—as well as simply more available and affordable housing—is clearly necessary.

In addition, California (similar to Louisiana and Florida) was in the midst of an insurance crisis, even before the fires. Home insurers were dropping policies or pulling out of the state entirely. After the fires, insurers asked California’s insurance commissioner to approve increases to premiums. As a result, more households will find themselves in the position of doing battle with insurance companies. As Hannah K. Friedrich and colleagues (2026, this issue) show, these battles will reveal inequalities in access to legal resources—and resources for recourse in obtaining further recovery support more generally—across affected households.

Furthermore, it remains unclear if and how different types of hazards and the responses to them may lead to more or less economic inequality in both the short term and the long run. Research that compares economic outcomes across disaster types, as Francis and Horn (2026) do in this issue, is vital to understanding this question. Finally, the case of the Los Angeles fires brings us back to the ramifications of shared exposures in multiple places.¹⁷ The fact that these fires burned the Palisades as well as Altadena has seemingly enabled Altadena residents to frame their demands for aid in the language of fundamental fairness and equity. Community groups in Altadena have made potent arguments that it would be grossly unfair to focus recovery efforts disproportionately on their wealthier, coastal neighbors. It remains to be seen if the continued expansion of risk and exposure to more advantaged places allows for novel and effective claims on the state from less advantaged places. Or will recovery remain a spatially unequal endeavor?

The questions that this issue addresses are urgent, and their relevance will only grow in the coming years as temperatures rise and inimical weather increases. Understanding the problems that escalating climate hazards create for all Americans—but in particular those who are most economically and socially marginalized—is vital. We need more effective and durable policies to reduce, adapt to, and recover from the effects of climate hazards. And just as urgently, we need policies that can tackle the multiple inequalities that accompany climate hazards and that this issue identifies. Time will tell if we can muster the political will to develop and implement them.

FOOTNOTES

↵1. The NOAA was directed to stop producing these data by the second Trump administration. Some nonprofits, such as Climate Central, have sought to fill the void (Climate Central, n.d.).
↵2. For example, we have clear evidence that past political and development decisions have increased the Gulf Coast’s vulnerability to hurricanes (Freudenberg et al. 2012; Horowitz 2020; Pastor et al. 2006); however, we know comparatively less about why so much housing is built in fire-prone areas in the West (see Greenberg et al. 2024; Radeloff et al. 2018).
↵3. Disaster relief may not be settled policy as the second Trump administration has suggested reducing FEMA’s funding (or eliminating it altogether) and distributing the responsibility for disaster relief to states.
↵4. There is an emerging body of scholarship exploring normative questions of fairness and equity in climate hazard response. This work argues for combining climate reparations—wealth transfers to historically marginalized groups made more vulnerable by environmental racism—with rigorous equity rating systems that assess mitigation policy (Chapman and Ahmed 2021; Donoghoe and Perry 2023). This type of work will likely grow in prominence as climate hazards increase in scale and scope, and critical justice-oriented scholarship will be a key component of addressing the ways that climate change and policy responses drive inequality.
↵5. The environmental justice field has also become more adept at tracking the effects of disparities on health outcomes and in developing tools, such as mapping systems, to provide information for policymakers and others trying to decide how to address problems (Brulle and Pellow 2006; California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment 2023; Jbaily et al. 2022). The federal government developed several national mapping tools and other resources focused on identifying environmental inequities and their links to health and social vulnerabilities in the early 2020s, including the EPA’s EJ Screen and CDC’s Environmental Justice Index. While some of these tools were dismantled by the most recent Trump administration, EJ Screen has been restored and hosted by Public Environmental Data Partners, a nongovernmental group (Public Environment Data Partners n.d.), and the Environmental Justice Index was still available on the CDC website under court order as of October 2025 (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry 2024).
↵6. Evictions rise after disasters and related forced mobility is associated with myriad negative effects on household budgets, neighborhood attainment, and health (Brennan et al. 2022; DeLuca and Rosen 2022; see Graif 2016).
↵7. Some official state plans, like Florida’s and Louisiana’s, were created after climate hazards (Kousky 2019) though some, like California’s FAIR Plan, were created in the wake of urban unrest in the 1960s.
↵8. Furthermore, a lack of funding and staffing in federal science agencies will exacerbate inequalities in predictive power as private firms increasingly fill the information gap with proprietary data and analysis.
↵9. Even as FEMA has begun to update its assessments of flood risk, homeowners, municipalities, and state-level regulators are not required to use new maps (Mulder and Kousky 2023). Moreover, rezonings are politically fraught processes (Elliott 2019) and have, in the past, incorrectly assessed non-White places at lower rates of risk than White ones, thus leaving them at potentially greater risk (Weill 2023).
↵10. This debate is amplified by the long-term insolvency of the program—in the past twenty years Congress has both increased the NFIP’s borrowing limit by tens of billions of dollars and canceled tens of billions of dollars of debt owed by the program.
↵11. Climate hazards have other consequences for nearby, unaffected areas as well, illustrating the complexity of measuring the effects of disasters on place. Often, they lead to disruptions or intensification of existing patterns of mobility, but they can also lead to novel mobility trends (Curtis and Schneider 2011; Fussell et al. 2010; Hauer et al. 2020; Rhodes and Besbris 2022b).
↵12. Though typically utilized in flood-prone areas, communities are starting to examine managed retreat as a response to other hazards such as fires.
↵13. In another location, Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, the state government and the community were at odds about what constituted just compensation and fair access to properties as they negotiated MR (Simms et al. 2021).
↵14. Loper Bright Enterprises et al. v. Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce, et al., No. 22–451 (US June 28, 2024).
↵15. Some scholars have framed policies to address disasters and other climate hazards as “policies without publics,” arguing that disaster policy has lacked an organized (and durable) constituency to vigorously engage with policy formulation (Tierney 2019). This may be true for advocacy for climate action, but advocacy against it has been enduring and forceful (Stokes 2020).
↵16. For example, we know that age is emerging as a particularly salient characteristic for understanding recovery, with stark differences in how children and older people are able to cope (Benevolenza and DeRigne 2019; Haq et al. 2008; Sacerdote 2012; Torche et al. 2024). Much of the literature on adverse outcomes for children post-disaster shows that some of these negative effects, such as lower test scores and reduced school attendance (see Kousky 2016), abate over time and are less detrimental to children from high-resourced households (Fothergill and Peek 2017).
↵17. These include political coalition formations that make demands about recovery and adaptation resources or shape attitudes more generally about government efforts for mitigation and adaptation (Darr et al. 2019).

© 2026 Russell Sage Foundation. Besbris, Max, Manuel Pastor, Anna Rhodes, Wolfram Schlenker, and Pamela Winston. 2026. “The Social, Political, and Economic Consequences of Climate Hazards.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 12(4): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2026.12.4.01. Direct correspondence to: Max Besbris, at besbris@wisc.edu, William H. Sewell Social Science Building, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706, United States.

Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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The Social, Political, and Economic Consequences of Climate Hazards

Max Besbris

Max Besbris

Manuel Pastor

Manuel Pastor

Anna Rhodes

Anna Rhodes

Wolfram Schlenker

Wolfram Schlenker

and Pamela Winston

Pamela Winston

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Jul 2026,

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DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2026.12.4.01

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The Social, Political, and Economic Consequences of Climate Hazards

Max Besbris

Max Besbris

Manuel Pastor

Manuel Pastor

Anna Rhodes

Anna Rhodes

Wolfram Schlenker

Wolfram Schlenker

and Pamela Winston

Pamela Winston

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Jul 2026,

12

(4)

1-32;

DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2026.12.4.01

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Keywords

climate hazard, inequality, disaster, risk, recovery, climate policy

The Social, Political, and Economic Consequences of Climate Hazards

Abstract

THE RISING TOLL OF CLIMATE DISASTERS

Types of Climate Hazards and Their Impacts

SOCIAL VULNERABILITY TO CLIMATE HAZARDS

Differences in Risk

Legacies of Environmental Injustice

INEQUALITIES IN RECOVERY

Household Budgets and Housing Values

Private Home Insurance

Data for Assessing Risk

National Flood Insurance

Migration and Mobility

Population Dynamics and the Economy

Climate Gentrification

GOVERNMENT POLICIES AND PROGRAMS

FEMA Assistance Programs

Managed Retreat

THE POLITICS OF CLIMATE HAZARDS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Federal Executive Branch and Congress

The Judiciary

States and Localities

Public Opinion and Partisanship

Special Interests and Political Coalitions

Political Possibilities

FUTURE RESEARCH

FOOTNOTES

REFERENCES

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