In this planetary crisis, not every place has a future.
There will come a point, sooner than one might think, when rebuilding in vulnerable communities will no longer make sense. We are not prepared for this.
Our understanding and expectations of disasters are premised on the idea that they are interruptions in the normal state of things. We assume continuity in our surroundings. When disasters hit, we assume they are rare, and limited in scope.
But what’s happening now is not the normal state of things. It’s not even a “new normal.” It’s a discontinuity, in which weird events, systemic erosion, and unpatternings will keep generating unprecedented outcomes on unpredictable timelines, across wide geographies... and without any reversion to comparatively stable past states. Discontinuity is a one-way ticket for us.
In the past, when disasters hit or upheavals occurred, but we expected things were “going back to normal,” all sorts of bets on the future — insurance, loans, national recovery program investments, and so on — made sense.
In the present, fewer and fewer of them do. Fewer and fewer hard-hit places will be fully rebuilt and revived. I talked about this in January:
The Last Disaster
In this brand new When We Are podcast, I discuss why our concept of “natural disaster” — a sudden and unexpected calamitous natural event bringing great loss from which we then recover and return to normal life — is less and less useful for understanding the world we now live in.
When risk rises and rebuilding becomes uncertain, values drop. In places where brittleness accumulates through multiple systems, hitting everything from local government budgets to the availability of health care, values could crater. And brittleness will continue to intensify as climate progress slows, and climate response is delayed.
I strongly suspect that we face an absolutely staggering brittleness bubble:
“We can now worry that this out-of-control Brittleness Bubble is not in the range of a trillion dollars in the U.S., but in the tens of trillions. The Brittleness Bubble isn’t the Subprime Crisis: it’s likely both bigger, and something we’ll never recover from. It will permanently alter the fortunes of entire regions.
“Of course, we will respond in some way to these risks. Defenses will be built. People will move out of harm’s way. Systems will be ruggedized. Not all potential losses will be allowed to become actual losses. Frantic adaptation is an industry with a future.
“But the scale of the danger now means that a huge number of those losses will materialize. As I wrote last year about Hurricane Helene, ‘Even in the best scenarios—where humanity cuts emissions rapidly and mobilizes national-scale responses—we’ll start to see more and more places that no longer have it in them to recover and rebuild.’
When will the bottom drop out, though? How soon will risk be priced into assets?
A decade ago, I thought the inevitable reckoning was still several decades away. Now I see more and more evidence that it’s already begun.
Take Southern California, where observers see prices already responding to insurance costs and fire risks, worsening an already struggling housing market:
Los Angeles real estate agent Corrie Sommers told her video audience recently that the LA market was slower in August than it had been since property figures tracking began in the 1980s. “We have seen a huge softening across Los Angeles,” Sommers said, at the same time that fewer properties were reaching the market compared to the month before—sellers are apparently delisting in huge numbers, or simply waiting for a better market to magically emerge. On average, houses in Encino are taking 75 days to sell. It takes 52 days in Sherman Oaks and 69 in Brentwood. Even in desirable Santa Monica, houses are sitting for 35 days. And in order to sell, nearly 20 percent of sellers had to reduce their price. Longer to sell. Higher price reductions. This is a soft, decaying market.
You can find similar reporting from vulnerable places all over the world.
And it really needs to be said that conditions are still worsening, and worsening fast.
If we decided, today, as a species, to go carbon zero and engage in worldwide ecological restoration, we would still face decades of damage as we made the necessary changes. And unfortunately, special interests have jammed predatory delay into the gears of progress.
We’re not doing much better on climate response. Indeed, most of the planning being done in most nations is a continuation of past patterns — the same ones that produced this planetary crisis and plunged us into unprecedented risks. We’re still planning to make the future more dangerous and leave our societies more vulnerable:
“If we want to understand the landscape of brittleness that surrounds us, we must acknowledge that in a very real sense all these catastrophes are planned disasters…
“The harsher conditions we face today have been being predicted for years, indeed, for the entire careers of all but the oldest professionals. People whose job it was to craft built environments and infrastructure for the public good planned a world unready for what they had been warned was coming. Even if they never meant for disasters to happen, they planned them.
“If you think these same institutions and interests aren’t busily planning far worse disasters — far greater mismatches between the cities and systems we’ll have and the ones we’ll need — you’re not paying attention.
Torque is still building up, all around us. We’re not ready for the pace of change itself to accelerate.
Not all rapid change is loss, though. Gains, too, can be disruptive.
The other side of the brittleness coin is the rapid rise in the value of relative safety, and the dawning realization that there are not enough well-sited and well-prepared places to go around. Not everyone will have the chance to secure better futures.
I wrote about this climate relocation bottleneck last year:
We don’t talk about it — for a variety of understandable reasons — but not only are some places safer than others, but the safer places are also generally easier to ruggedize, further increasing their resilience to risk. We would all be better off on a planet that was not simmering in pollution and fraying at the ecological seams, but some of us will live in places where harsh realities are far more manageable.
There is already a premium on properties in these places. People are already willing to pay more to live outside of flood zones, in more temperate climates, in places where you don’t feel an itchy sense of looming disaster whenever you wake up to a hot stormy day or smoke in the air. In a crisis that will last the rest of our lives, peace of mind is the ultimate amenity.
It’s not just vibes, though. Safer places are worth more in concrete terms. Avoided damage is money in the bank. The prices people are willing to pay for safety will likely continue to rise.
This, too, I saw as something that would unfold over a decade or more. But here, too, we’re seeing an acceleration, as people and investors start to grasp the disconnect between the supply of at least potentially stable communities and the relocation demand about to skyrocket.
(We are not doing anything like enough here in the U.S. to turn inevitable climate migrations towards sensible, equitable outcomes. To be blunt, there really isn’t any plan at all to do so, or much likelihood of one being seriously proposed for several years, at least. For most people, little or no help is coming.)
We’re as unprepared for the potentially massive distortions of successful climate response as we are unprepared for the systemic declines brought on by worsening brittleness.
This future — of plummeting values and expensive safety — may not be far off now.
- You can learn how to plan more sensibly and successfully for life in planetary discontinuity. The New York Times recently featured my Personal Climate Strategy Workshop. You can learn more about my other offerings at my climate courses site. The next Workshop will be offered in September 2026. You can also read a participant’s recent review of the Workshop, here.
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- Check out my books: Worldchanging (which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary!) and Carbon Zero
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