Climate change has claimed lives and upended livelihoods in every region of the United States, but its severe toll has prompted parts of the country to respond faster and more creatively than ever, according to a major government report released Tuesday.
But as the dangers become ever more evident, so does proof that many governments and communities are responding, the report says, even as the United States and other developed nations remain woefully far from hitting their long-term climate goals.
Renewable energy has become widespread and cheap in recent years, dramatically reducing the electricity grid’s emissions. Farming practices are storing more planet-warming carbon in the soil. Waterside communities are preparing for higher floods by raising some homes, demolishing others and enhancing natural barriers. Through infrastructure legislation and the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress has approved an unprecedented amount of spending on efforts to make the nation more weather-ready and to speed its transition from fossil fuels.
“All of these actions taken together give us hope because they tell us that we can do big things at the scale that’s required,” said Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
And yet, she said, “Much more work is needed.”
Risks from climate change, the report says, are becoming only more visible, whether it’s rapidly intensifying hurricanes in the Southeast, drought in the Midwest, ferocious fires and diminishing water supplies in the West or torrential rainstorms in the Northeast.
This year alone, the nation endured devastating wildfires in Maui, destructive flooding in Vermont, unprecedented and deadly heat in Phoenix and a blanket of thick smoke in New York and other East Coast cities from record-breaking wildfires in Canada.
After the globe surged to record heat in each of the past four months, 2023 is all but certain to go down as its hottest year in recorded history.
‘Far-reaching and worsening’ impacts
Tuesday’s report outlines how dramatically extreme weather disasters have increased in frequency and intensity in all corners of the country, with some startling examples even since the last assessment, which the Trump administration quietly published on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 2018. The assessment, the fifth of its kind since 2000, is the product of nearly four years of work by some 900 authors who study all aspects of climate change.
“The effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States,” the authors wrote, stressing how climate-driven catastrophes increasingly overlap in ways that compound their costs and burdens.
For example, a record-setting heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest in June 2021 came amid a historic drought, worsening the individual impacts of both events. That included more than 1,400 heat-related deaths, an intense wildfire season and $38.5 billion in damages, the report said.
The single costliest disaster of the past five years was Hurricane Ian, which caused $113 billion in damage in Florida last year. When Hurricane Idalia hit the Southeast in August, it became the 23rd billion-dollar disaster of 2023 — the most the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has observed in a calendar year.
Weather-related disasters responsible for at least $1 billion in damages, adjusted for inflation, struck about three times a year in the 1980s, on average, the report says. Between 2018 and 2022, according to NOAA, the nation averaged 18 such catastrophes a year.
But while every part of the United States faces threats, the assessment emphasizes that not all communities share the burden equally.
Low-income areas and communities of color often lack access to adequate flood infrastructure, green spaces, safe housing and other resources to help protect against climate impacts, the authors write. Extreme heat can lead to higher rates of illness and death in poor neighborhoods, which are already typically hotter for lack of tree cover.
Due in part to the legacy of racism and exclusionary housing practices, many minority and low-income people face the highest threat of inland flooding. Indigenous communities disproportionately face the loss of fisheries, reliable water and other resources.
“We know that these impacts exacerbate social inequities, including racial and gender-based disparities,” said Katharine Hayhoe, one of the report’s authors and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “And we’re now recognizing that climate solutions must also be solutions for justice and equity.”
Renee Collini, director of the Gulf Center for Equitable Climate Resilience and a contributor to the report, said the country is behind where it needs to be in addressing those inequities. But she called it “a huge step forward” that such concerns are now at the forefront of discussions about climate impacts.
“We are starting right now to ask the right questions,” she said.
The future lies ‘largely in human hands’
As Earth continues to warm, damages will only accumulate, and in ways that could cause even bigger disruptions, Tuesday’s assessment finds.
For example, the report forecasts food will become scarcer and more expensive as rising temperatures and changes in precipitation reduce farming productivity and even crops’ nutritional content. It predicts disproportionate harms to women, children, older adults and poor communities.
Extreme weather will encourage migration that could affect housing affordability. Millions of people are likely to be displaced in coming decades because of wildfires, rising seas and more prolific flooding. Disasters in other countries — and their economic effects — are also expected to increase immigration to the United States, the report predicts.
Health impacts are also likely to accelerate. The report found that climate-related disasters including drought, wildfires and hurricanes increased coronavirus transmission during the pandemic and contributed to worse health for essential workers, farmworkers, poor and elderly people, and people of color.
Ecosystems are already suffering and could face collapse if global warming continues. Coral reefs are being lost as oceans warm and as carbon emissions turn waters more acidic. Sea level rise is killing coastal forests and drowning marshes. The report predicts that mass fish die-offs could increase dramatically even in northern, more temperate lakes if warming is not held in check.
But the report adds that the most dire consequences are not inevitable, and that society has the capacity to shape what lies ahead. “Each increment of warming that the world avoids … reduces the risks and harmful impacts of climate change,” the report states.
If the country takes aggressive action to gird communities for climate impacts and curtail emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels, other benefits will follow, from cleaner air and water to more jobs in burgeoning industries that support the transition.
“While there are still uncertainties about how the planet will react to rapid warming,” the authors write, “the degree to which climate change will continue to worsen is largely in human hands.”
Signs of action toward ‘a livable future’
Biden administration officials emphasized that states, communities and even many parts of the private sector are increasingly taking action to confront climate change impacts and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Though the country is lagging behind targets for renewable energy adoption, the administration underscored signs of progress: Solar energy costs have fallen by 90 percent over the past decade, and 80 percent of new electricity generation capacity came from renewable sources in 2020, for example.
Hayhoe, who also worked on previous assessments, said researchers struggled years ago to find case studies of U.S. climate adaptation, but no longer. “We were beating the bushes looking for examples of cities and states that were already adapting,” she said. “That is something that is a big difference [now].”
Tuesday’s report points to places like Kauai, the Hawaiian island that at times runs fully on renewable energy during the day, as proof that goals are within reach.
It highlights places such as Pittsburgh, which required new development projects to account for increasingly heavy rainfall, and Princeville, N.C., which has elevated and purchased homes that have flooded in recent hurricanes. And in states such as Nebraska, Texas and Kansas, some farmers are adopting soil management practices that increase how much carbon is stored in the ground.
The Biden administration also forecasts that changes to the energy industry, while reducing employment in fossil-fuel-related sectors, will mean more jobs overall — in work on renewable energy and low-carbon technologies, such as biofuels and development of climate-change-resilient housing and infrastructure.
“We know what we need to do to create a livable future for ourselves and our children,” said John Podesta, a clean energy senior adviser to Biden. That “will require the transformation of the global economy on a size and scale that’s never occurred in human history.”
A White House official said President Biden plans to announce roughly $6 billion in funding Tuesday aimed at making vulnerable places more resilient in the face of climate change. The investments include efforts to upgrade the nation’s aging electric grid, support conservation programs, lessen flood risks in at-risk communities and promote environmental justice.
Despite such commitments, the nation remains largely unprepared for the significant changes that are unfolding and those that have yet to play out, said Kim Cobb, a Brown University climate scientist and director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.
She said the United States needs to embrace the sort of “transformative adaptation” that Tuesday’s assessment says will be essential to withstand the coming risks.
“We have to close that gap, and we have to close it very quickly,” Cobb said. “And incremental changes are not going to be enough.”
The latest report is intended to offer a road map for the decisions being made all around the country. Already, communities across the Southeast, for example, are taking information on sea level rise and flooding into account when planning development and zoning, said Alys Campaigne, the Southern Environmental Law Center’s climate initiative leader.
“Those decisions really come from the bottom up,” Campaigne said.
‘What we are becoming, we are becoming together’
Ultimately, Tuesday’s sprawling report offers a story of interconnectedness.
What happens in one sliver of the nation could have profound reverberations elsewhere in the country — and the world. And the decisions made around the country will determine not only whether the United States hits its goals to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in coming years, but whether it suffers or thrives in a rapidly changing world.
White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi said he finds faith in the young people who have grown up amid climate-fueled disasters but are pushing the country toward tangible and lasting solutions.
“The takeaway from this assessment, the takeaway from all of our collective work on climate should not be doom and despair,” Zaidi said. “The takeaway … should be a sense of hope and possibilities.”
The best possible future will emerge, the report finds, only if the nation works collectively to confront a challenge unlike any faced by previous generations.
“The world says, What we are becoming, we are becoming together,” U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón wrote in a poem included in Tuesday’s assessment. “The world says, Once we were separate, and now we must move in unison.”
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