The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

As the director of The Nature Conservancy’s North America Center for Resilient Conservation Science, ecologist Mark Anderson led a team of scientists in the development and mapping of TNC’s resilient and connected network: a detailed, nationwide map of linked landscapes that are uniquely suited to preserve biodiversity and withstand the impacts of climate change. In 2021, Anderson received the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award and Fellowship, named for the Boston lawyer and former Lincoln Institute fellow whose work led to the creation of the Land Trust Alliance. In this interview, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, he explains why connected natural strongholds are critical to combating our biodiversity crisis.

JON GOREY: What is the focus of your research?

MARK ANDERSON: Conservation of land and water is extremely expensive, and it’s long term. What we’ve really been focused on is making sure we’re conserving places that are resilient to climate change—really thinking about biodiversity loss, and where are the places on the ground or in the water that we think will continue to sustain nature, even as the climate changes in ways that we can’t fully predict.

As we dove deeper and deeper into the science, the beauty of it is that the properties of land and water—the topography, the soil types, the way water moves and collects—actually build resilience into the system. When you hear about a climate disaster, for example, a drought or a flood, you kind of picture it as a big swash everywhere. But in fact, there’s all sorts of detail to how that plays out on the land, and we can actually use an understanding of that to find places that are much more resilient and places that are much more vulnerable. So the effects of that are spread in understandable and predictable ways, and that’s what we are focused on: finding those places where we think nature will retain resilience.

Climate change is very different than any other threat we’ve ever faced because it’s a change in the ambient conditions of the planet. It’s a change in the temperature and moisture regimes. And in response to that change, nature literally has to rearrange. So a big question is, how do we help nature thrive and conserve the ability of nature to rearrange? Connectivity between places where species can thrive and move is key to that.

We divided the US into about 10 regions, and in each of those regions, we had a large steering committee of scientists from every state. They reviewed it, they argued about the concepts, we tested stuff out, they tested it on the ground, and that’s what improved the quality of the work, it’s all thanks to them. By the time we finished, it took 287 scientists and 12 years, so it was a lot of work. We involved a lot of people in the work, and so there’s a lot of trust now of the dataset.

JG: What are you working on now, and what are you interested in working on next?

MA: The US has not signed on to the global 30 by 30 agreement [to protect 30 percent of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030], but we have America the Beautiful, which the Biden Administration has launched as a 30 by 30 plan. People get hung up on that 30 percent, which is important, but if we want to sustain biodiversity, what’s really important is, which 30 percent is it? Are we representing all the ecosystems, are we reaching all the species? Are we finding places that are resilient, and are we connecting them in a way that nature can actually move and be sustained?

Our work is all about resilience and connectivity and biodiversity, and it turns out that the network we came up with, that has full representation of all the habitats and ecoregions and connectivity, turned out to be 34 percent [of the US]. So we have internally adopted it within TNC as our framework: We are trying to conserve that network, and that’s been super exciting. Because over the last five years, we conserved 1.1 million acres, of which about three quarters was directly in the network.

It’s very unlikely that the federal government is going to actually do the conservation; it’s really going to be done by the private NGOs, state agencies, and land trusts. In fact, in the Northeast, private land conservation over the last 10 years surpassed all the federal and state agency conservation combined. So our strategy has been to create a tool and get the science out and just encourage people to be using the science and thinking about climate resilience—with our fingers crossed that, if this makes sense to people, wherever they are, and we’re all sort of working off that, it will conserve the network in a diffuse way.

What we’re working on now is freshwater resilience, focusing on rivers and streams and the connectivity and resilience of those systems. Our vision of a resilient system is a long, connected network with good water quality that allows fish and mussels to move around and adapt to the changing climate. But a lot of those systems are fragmented by dams, their floodplains are developed, their water quality is poor, and there’s a lot of water use, because they’re in a residential area that’s extracting all the water.

JG: What do you wish more people knew about conservation, biodiversity, and ecology?

MA: Well, two things—one good, one bad. I wish more people understood the urgency of the biodiversity crisis. The fact that we’ve lost 3 billion birds—there are 3 billion fewer birds than there were 40 years ago. Our mammals are constrained now to small fragments of their original habitats. There’s a crisis in our insects, that is really scary. Most of my career, we were focused on rare things; now these are common things that are dropping in abundance. So I wish people really understood that.

And I also wish people understood that we can turn that around, by really focusing our energy and conserving the right places, and there’s still hope and time to do that. It’s a big task, and it can only be done by thousands of organizations working on it, but it can be turned around.

JG. When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

MA: Well, I’m a scientist, and there are so many potential errors and problems and data issues, they never end. So our results are not perfect. They’re pretty good, they’ve been ground tested a lot, but they’re not perfect.

The other thing is the future. I really want my kids and grandkids to have a wonderful world full of nature, and to get there, we’re going to have to really change our course.

JG. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned in your research?

MA: When we started this work, we didn’t have a concept of what the end was going to look like. And I probably thought of the end as a bunch of big places, you know? But it’s not a bunch of big places, it’s a net, it’s a web—a web of connected places, some big, some small. So that was a surprise to me.

JG: You work a lot with maps—what’s the coolest map you’ve ever seen?

MA: We have a concept called climate flow, which is predicting how nature will move through the landscape following unfragmented areas and climatic gradients. And one of our scientists successfully animated that map, so that you can see the movement of the flows—and that is one of the coolest maps. It’s not perfectly accurate, but it gets the concept across really nicely. And it was this map that helped us figure out that there’s a pattern to all this. It’s not random, there’s a pattern—there are places where flows concentrate, there are places where flow diffuses, and that’s really important to know.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately? 

MA: My favorite book recently was Wilding by Isabella Tree. It’s a nonfiction book from the British Isles, where a farming couple in Knepp, they were never able to make the area a productive farm so they decided just to stop farming it and let it go wild, and they document the change from farming to wildness. They introduce some grazing animals that would be the counterpart of the aurochs and warthogs that would have been there, and immediately, the farm becomes a total mess—lots of weeds, dug up areas, the neighbors complain. But over time, all these rare species start to show up, all these owls that have not been seen, nightingales, turtle doves, and pretty soon it is like a total biodiversity hotspot. So it’s a very interesting read, it’s very hopeful.

In the last year I’ve read several books about African American perspectives on the environmental movement, and those are powerful. One was called Black Faces, White Spaces, by Carolyn Finney, and I’m reading one now called A Darker Wilderness, and it’s really eye-opening on the equity issues that are buried in conservation.
 

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Fellows in Focus: Designing a New Approach to Property Tax Appraisals
 

Jon Gorey is staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Mark Anderson. Credit: Courtesy photo.

Some 150 heads of state, 195 countries, and a total of 85,000 participants engaged in the COP28 global climate summit in Dubai in December, which concluded with an appeal to triple renewable energy capacity and combat methane emissions, a goal to halt deforestation by 2030, an outline for a loss and damage fund, and the launch of a global stocktake to keep track of how nations are doing reducing carbon emissions.

Most of the headlines referred to a call at the close of COP28 for all nations to be focused on “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.” Many had hoped for stronger language calling for the phasing out of oil and gas on a stricter timetable – and of course there was the fact that the summit itself was hosted by a region whose economy is fundamentally based on extracting and exporting fossil fuels. But it was the first time a COP declaration has specifically identified fossil fuels.

All of that could be fairly characterized as progress in the face of a planetary emergency. Still, 2023 was the hottest year on record, and current emissions are on track for a world that is 2.5 degrees warmer, well above the 1.5 degree Celsius goal set in the Paris Accords – the major international agreement to come out of the COP21 summit in 2015. Missing that target has contributed to more skepticism about COP, and the pledges and non-binding declarations that have followed, including some dashed hopes after COP26 in Glasgow two years ago.

Are these big summits what the world should be looking to? Are they designed to accomplish anything more than to keep the parties talking, taking stock, and keeping score on commitments? To break down the proceedings – and to consider progress that was made on other fronts, including land use and urban issues – this episode of the Land Matters podcast is devoted to a roundtable discussion with four Lincoln Institute staff members who were in Dubai: Amy Cotter and Patrick Welch from the climate strategies team, Anaclaudia Rossbach, who runs the Latin America program, and John Farner, the director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy.

“I gain a lot of encouragement from the prevailing understanding that these are systems and we can’t seek a single silver-bullet solution—we must embrace a multiplicity of solutions across different levels of government,” says Cotter. “But there’s both no time to waste and no single solution. The recognition of that, I hope, will break through analysis paralysis and finger-pointing.”

The next Conference of the Parties summit, COP29, will be hosted in December of this year in Azerbaijan, another petroleum state.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters  on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Further Reading

Low-Carbon, Climate-Resilient Communities and Regions (Lincoln Institute)

From COP28 to green cities: A call to action (Public Square)

Top Findings from the IPCC Climate Change Report 2023 (World Resources Institute)

Harvard delegates reflect on COP28 (The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability)

Bill McKibben on COP28, Maintaining Hope, and Walking in the Woods (Common Edge)

The World is Copping Out on Climate Change (Meer)

Local Solutions in Land: Multilevel Collaboration for Inclusive Climate Resilience (ICLEI Global)

Toward Win-Win Outcomes for Climate and Community (ICLEI Global)

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: A sculpture at COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Credit: Amy Cotter.

This content was developed through a partnership between the Lincoln Institute and the American Planning Association as part of the APA Foresight practice. It was originally published by APA in Planning. 

Blink twice and something new in the world is unfolding. It’s dizzying to think about, let alone remain informed about. Technological and social innovations continue to emerge and evolve. New economic trends and signals in the political arena are surfacing. And while new challenges and ever more crises keep us up at night, innovative developments promise potential solutions.

To stay a step ahead of the issues impacting the future of planning and our communities, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish its 2024 Trend Report for Planners in January, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The APA Foresight team, together with APA’s Trend Scouting Foresight Community, identifies existing, emerging, and potential future trends that may impact the planning profession in the future. Planners need to understand these drivers of change, learn how they can prepare for them, and identify when it’s time to act.

The report includes more than 100 trends and shows how some trends are interconnected in various future scenarios — like the future of housing in a world of hybrid work, advanced AI capabilities and its potential impacts on planning decisions, and the future of climate mitigation amid current uncertainties about global collaboration and tech innovations. Many of the trends identified in previous reports remain relevant (and can be explored in the APA Trend Universe) but there are new ones, as well.

There also is the recognition that we are moving into a “polycrisis.” The climate emergency and its close connection to current global challenges — such as food insecurity, the migrant crisis, economic warfare, resource scarcity, and social disputes — highlights the high risk of failing to mitigate and adapt to climate change on a global scale. Holistic approaches are needed to resolve this developing polycrisis.

You’ll Work in a Bespoke Office — at Home or Downtown

As the pandemic recedes, the world of work continues to evolve. In the post-pandemic U.S., a dominant trend is the adoption of a hybrid workstyle combining remote and in-office work. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 41 percent of remote-capable workers now follow hybrid schedules, up from 35 percent in January 2022. During that time, the number of people working from home full time decreased from 43 to 35 percent, but this is still significantly higher than the 7 percent who worked from home pre-pandemic. Worldwide, over one-third of office desks remain unoccupied throughout the week, though Asian and European employees have returned to workplaces faster than their U.S. counterparts.

The remaining question is what the future of the office might look like. While the number of fully remote workers seems to be going down in the U.S., space for the home office or a co-working space nearby will still be needed for hybrid workers. Meanwhile, for the companies that offer hybrid workstyles, we currently see two trends regarding the use of office space. Companies that are operating with shared offices or concierge office services tend to downsize their overall office space. Other companies emphasize collaboration and team building during their in-office time and therefore require more office space than before the pandemic to accommodate conference rooms, collaboration spaces, and space for creative activities.

Meanwhile, office-to-residential conversions are gaining interest. To further accelerate this trend, the Biden administration launched a commercial-to-residential conversion initiative in October 2023. Given these diverse directions and emerging trends, it looks like the office of the future will be fully bespoke and tailored to the customer’s needs, which will vary depending on emerging workstyles. —Petra Hurtado, PhD, and Sagar Shah, PhD, AICP

Climate Displacement on the Rise

In 2022, nearly 33 million people across the globe were displaced due to natural disasters, such as floods, drought, and wildfire, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. This far exceeds averages hovering near 20 million people in previous years.

In the U.S., climate displacement is a growing challenge. More than 3 million Americans lost their homes to natural disasters in 2022. As climate change continues to worsen, these numbers are expected to grow and even accelerate. By 2050, more than 1 billion people may be displaced due to climate-related impacts, according to the international think tank Institute for Economics and Peace. Adaptation at the local level will be critical. It will be imperative to prepare for the movement of people due to climate-related impacts and to more proactively retreat from especially high-risk areas.

Renewed discussion in the face of forced climate displacement has sought to better characterize managed retreat as a package of potential actions, rather than the wholesale abandonment of at-risk areas and the buyout of homes and properties. A June 2023 report from the University of Massachusetts Boston, together with representatives from coastal communities across the state, identified a variety of complementary tools for managed retreat, including enhanced setbacks, deed restrictions, green infrastructure, and an array of zoning and planning actions.

Yet, even as communities begin to understand the potential for these actions in concert with strategic retreat and buyout programs, continued development in hazardous areas remains the norm. In North Carolina, for example, for every buyout, 10 new homes were built in floodplains, according to a 2023 article in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Often, this is a result of market and insurance-based incentives that aren’t pricing long-term risk into development costs and home prices. —Scarlet Andrzejczak and Joe DeAngelis, AICP

Car-centric Planning Drives Inequities

Local governments and planners are overwhelmed with many emerging transportation systems popping up. While there are lots of exciting innovations in the transportation sector, the real story is that the ways cities are currently responding to these new systems are increasing inequities and harming communities. Today’s more diverse transportation system needs a different approach to transportation planning — one that doesn’t focus on cars.

Most new alternatives to the car are more sustainable, safer, healthier, and potentially easier to deploy in equitable ways. Usage is going up, with e-bikes on the rise in the U.S. for a few years (with 2022 sales topping $1.3 billion) and the popularity of bike-share programs and the market for cargo bikes also continuing to grow. However, cities often are unprepared for these new transportation options resulting — in some cases — to bans instead of plans to integrate them into existing systems.

Meanwhile, inequitable, car-centric planning practices continue to dominate. The rising number of traffic deaths and decreasing traffic safety, coupled with the lack of appropriate infrastructure for emerging systems, show the inequity in current transportation planning. While e-mobility is a part of the solution when it comes to decarbonizing transportation (as was noted in the 2023 Trend Report), electric vehicles (EVs) also come with many negative effects, including the concentration of public EV chargers mostly in wealthy areas.

Assigning space by means of transportation instead of purpose isn’t working anymore. A holistic, comprehensive approach toward equitable transportation planning and funding is needed. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado

‘Made in America’ Comes Roaring Back

Geopolitical goals are becoming an increasingly deciding factor in economic policy and international trade. Self-sufficiency and independence from rival powers are resulting in an increase in friend-shoring and onshoring, financed through subsidies, a variety of policies, visa bans, and even exclusion of companies from specific markets. This includes, for example, U.S. policies toward certain high-tech products coming from China. Additionally, U.S. companies are actively seeking alternative manufacturing destinations to replace China, moving to countries such as India, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, manufacturing is coming back to the U.S., supported by new federal incentives to promote domestic manufacturing of crucial components, such as computer chips and EV parts. This trend has had tangible effects, with the sector adding nearly 800,000 jobs since early 2021 — reaching employment levels not seen since 2008. Additionally, U.S. manufacturing employment has exceeded the peak of the previous business cycle for the first time since the late 1970s, according to jobs data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But workforce challenges persist. As of March 2023, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said there were still 693,000 open positions in the manufacturing sector — and, according to some estimates, there may be around 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030.

Additionally, the introduction of the Tech Hubs program — a $500 million economic development initiative — is fostering technology hubs across the U.S., addressing regional disparities and promoting technology-driven economic growth in traditionally industrial regions. The Biden administration’s initiative aims to transform 31 regions into globally competitive innovation centers. These Tech Hubs span urban and rural areas, focusing on industries such as quantum computing, biotechnology, and clean energy. —Petra Hurtado and Sagar Shah

Extinct Species Get a Mammoth Rebirth

The concept of bringing back extinct species, discussed as part of a deep dive into rewilding in the 2023 Trend Report, has already seen some significant recent updates. Resurrection biology is centered on the revival or recreation of extinct species of plants and animals. The current destruction of the natural world, the impacts of climate change, and the steady march of ecosystem loss are leading to the rapid extinction of species across the world. Notably, resurrection biology might be critical both for bringing back long-lost species and reversing the ongoing extinction of current species.

De-extinction science relies on three different methods: cloning (using DNA of extinct species to clone new animals), back-breeding (for example, selectively breeding elephants to recreate mammoths), and gene editing (adding or removing traits from existing species’ DNA to recreate extinct species). Media interest largely centers on the resurrection of mammoths, dodos, and other high-profile extinctions.

However, this concept could be applied in more mundane but vitally important circumstances, such as insect extinctions — which are a major threat to the resilience of the global food supply and the health of ecosystems. This technology might one day help to reverse major impacts by reviving key extinct species. Planners should consider not only the long-term implications of this technology but also the ecosystem loss and the rapid species extinction occurring today that drive its continued relevancy. —Joe DeAngelis and Petra Hurtado

Co-creation Mirrors DIY Trends

Urban dwellers are increasingly embracing do-it-yourself (DIY) methods and self-organization. A trend toward co-creation is emerging as a collaborative approach in which planners and end users jointly develop solutions. This process emphasizes deep user engagement facilitated by new technologies. Consequently, there’s growing skepticism toward traditional experts and a surge in the creator economy.

Communities are becoming more proactive, self-regulated, and interconnected. Start-ups like Urbanist AI — leveraging advanced AI capabilities — are empowering users to step into the role of “citizen planners,” allowing them to actively co-design their surroundings. While this makes the planning process more intricate and less predictable, it also ensures a more inclusive approach. Such technology-driven self-organization and co-creation could significantly reshape the future of the planning profession and its approaches. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado

It’s Time to Welcome the Robots

Robots of all shapes and sizes are entering our cities. Seoul, South Korea, has recently developed plans for a robot-friendly city, proactively envisioning the wide-ranging integration of robots into everyday life. While “personal delivery devices” that deliver packages and meals in the air and on the ground are already coming, trends point to the potential for robots to fulfill a variety of other functions within society, including taking care of the very young and the elderly.

In nations grappling with the challenge of low birth rates, especially in Europe and Asia, the burden of care and the fulfilling of critical functions within cities may increasingly fall upon robots and other autonomous technologies. This includes mundane but vital services, such as street cleaning, public safety, and transit services.

With potential widespread adoption of these recent innovations looming, cities will need to be prepared to effectively integrate and consider them in their plans and ensure they won’t disrupt accessibility of public spaces. Some ideas for how to do that are coming from the Urban Robotics Foundation by bringing urban stakeholders together to create solutions to integrate new technology into cities and communities. —Senna Catenacci and Joe DeAngelis

Lead image: Urbanist AI allows community members to co-create with planners — and participate more fully in the design of places. Credit: Urbanist AI.

With more than 135,000 species of plants and animals, including rare and charismatic cats like Bengal tigers and snow leopards, India is an ecological treasure. Its forests, wetlands, grasslands, deserts, and other ecosystems comprise just 2.4 percent of the world’s land area, but host up to 8 percent of its biodiversity. That same land also holds over 17 percent of the world’s human population, so conservationists are looking at a variety of strategies to ensure ongoing prosperity for humans and wildlife alike. 

Protecting natural habitats is a challenge anywhere. But in a fast-growing place like India—the second-most populous country on Earth—land is under particular strain from development and agricultural pressures, and is also subject to complex legal restrictions.

To better understand those challenges, and some of the efforts to overcome them, a team from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s International Land Conservation Network spent two and half weeks in India earlier this year. Their goal, says Chandni Navalkha, associate director of sustainably managed land and water at the Lincoln Institute, was to learn more about land conservation practices and policy in India, and to make connections that will support ILCN’s efforts to expand its network in Asia. Navalkha was joined by Henry Tepper, advisor to the ILCN and strategic conservation advisor at the Chilean land trust Fundación Tierra Austral, and Marc Evans, founder of the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust and advisor to the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

While private land conservation is commonplace in Western countries and throughout much of the Global South, including in several African and Latin American countries, it’s less well known and practiced in South Asian countries, Navalkha says. In India, that’s partly because of strict government regulations on private land ownership, which limit how much land an individual can own, and how that land can be used, especially when it comes to forested and agricultural lands. Nonetheless, Navalkha says, the country has an active civic conservation movement that works to complement government-led conservation efforts, which the ILCN team learned about by meeting with conservation leaders, legal experts, organizations, and networks. One such leader is Belinda Wright, a noted conservationist and executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, who played a key role in connecting the ILCN team with legal experts and civic conservation practitioners and in providing important context for understanding land conservation efforts across the country.  

“What was really inspiring to us was to see that, in a unique context for civic efforts for land conservation, there were a huge number of initiatives and people who are making their best efforts using the laws and policies in place to protect the places that they love,” Navalkha says. “There’s so much good work happening, so much intact, amazing landscape and wildlife to protect.”

For example, the group visited a 40-acre forest reserve bordering Ranthambore National Park, one of the world’s best-known Bengal tiger sanctuaries. The reserve was created piece by piece, through persistence and passion, by wildlife photographer Aditya “Dicky” Singh and his wife, Poonam Singh. The couple first visited and fell in love with the area in the late 1990s; over the course of two decades, they purchased parcels of farmland bordering the national park and set about cultivating the land with native trees and shrubs, creating more habitat—and even watering holes, as the new greenery helped retain rainfall—for the park’s famed tigers.

Dicky Singh passed away unexpectedly in September, at age 57. But his efforts to celebrate and protect India’s wildlife will leave an enduring legacy. “Aditya was a passionate conservationist and photographer, whose love of wildlife is a beacon for youth in India,” says Balendu Singh, former honorary wildlife warden of Ranthambore National Park, who helped the ILCN group connect with conservationists in Rajasthan.

Land ownership is highly regulated in India, and many private and civic conservation efforts are similarly small in scale. But one sentiment the ILCN team heard repeatedly, Navalkha says, was that the country’s extraordinary biological diversity, set against a backdrop of relentless development pressure from a population of 1.4 billion and growing, “makes every effort at land conservation important, no matter how modest.”

Recognizing Informal Land Conservation

Between 7.5 percent and 22 percent of India’s land is formally protected in accordance with criteria established by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). But many additional areas could be considered conserved through a designation known as “other effective area-based conservation measures,” or OECMs.

These areas aren’t formally protected the way a national park or wildlife preserve would be, but still provide enduring conservation and biodiversity outcomes—even if protecting nature isn’t their primary objective. Examples could include a sacred grove, or the watershed around a community reservoir. Since these lands lack formal recognition as conserved spaces, they typically don’t convey clear benefits to landowners. “The concept of an OECM, ideally, is that you’re recognizing protection that already exists, but that has not been recognized or supported,” Navalkha says. “I think that’s valuable, especially in a country like India.” 

OECMs represent a fairly new approach to tabulating conserved spaces; the term was only formally defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2018. But many countries are exploring the role OECMs can play in accomplishing the ambitious global conservation goal known as 30×30—a commitment to conserving 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030—which 190 nations signed on to at the United Nations COP 15 biodiversity conference in 2022. India is “really ahead of the curve working on identifying, designating, or recognizing OECMs,” Navalkha says.

One challenge, however, is that benefits to landowners and communities for their stewardship efforts are not well established or understood, crucial as they may be to the country’s conservation goals. Navalkha says some kind of incentive program could help to align the motivations of conservationists and government.

“I met three or four different people who are undertaking conservation efforts that would not meet any of the categories of the IUCN’s protected area, but may meet the criteria for an OECM. And there’s still some debate by those individuals about whether being designated as an OECM does anything for them,” Navalkha says. “What benefit does being designated give to a landowner who has helped to create this conservation area and keep it protected?”

Another takeaway from the trip, Navalkha says, was the important role that protecting wildlife—particularly tigers and elephants—plays in India’s land conservation efforts. “A lot of the conservation planning and programming is about human-wildlife conflict, and mitigating and preventing it, to protect these key species,” Navalkha says. In that context, the priorities for the landscape are different and need to be large-scale, community-centered, and multifunctional.

An Array of Approaches

Navalkha and Tepper visited several land conservation initiatives in northwestern and central India, and spoke to other practitioners while attending the fifth Central Indian Landscape Symposium, convened by the Network for Conserving Central India at Kanha National Park. These reserves varied in size, landscape, and approach—some were intended to protect wildlife or create biodiversity corridors, others focused on restoring degraded landscapes—and the team found that no two were alike, except, perhaps, for the amount of work it took to establish them.

The Singhs’ preserve was hardly the only one that took decades to establish. In the foothills of the Himalayas, for example, researcher Subir Chowfin created the Gadoli and Manda Khal Wildlife Conservation Trust to manage several hundred acres of family-owned forestland, with a focus on conservation and scientific research. It took a lengthy legal battle before Chowfin could legally manage the land for conservation purposes; in 2022, the United Nations Development Programme recognized the sanctuary as one of 14 potential OECMs in India.

Indeed, every situation the team encountered was unique. “One of the things I heard that really struck me was that, in India, there’s no such thing as a model,” Navalkha says. “No single approach is going to be replicable across states or places, as every project or initiative is navigating its own unique complexities and contexts. Every single civic land project that we saw was structured in a completely different way.”

Navalkha says she heard, often, of a need for someone to perform a legal analysis across the 28 states and eight Union territories of India to understand the role and opportunity for civil society efforts in particular places. Beyond the complex legal landscape, conservation groups also face funding challenges for land stewardship and management—and it’s not always for a lack of willing donors. Foreign funding is tightly regulated “for conservation, and for land purchase, and even for philanthropic donations,” Navalkha says.

Navalkha says the team returned from India feeling optimistic and excited about the work occurring there, and looks forward to connecting with Indian conservationists who expressed interest in engaging with the ILCN. She hopes some of them will attend ILCN’s next Global Congress, to be held in Quebec City in 2024. “This is the beauty and promise of a truly dynamic ILCN global network,” she says, “especially one with increased geographic representation.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A Bengal tiger at Ranthambore National Park. Credit: eROMAZe via E+/Getty Images.

Land policy decisions may not pack the headline punch of celebrity gossip or World Cup comebacks, but they can be far more consequential to people’s everyday lives. In that spirit, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy awarded prizes for excellence in journalism on urban policy, sustainable development, and climate change at the 2023 Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism (COLPIN) in Mexico City.  

The winning entries included an exploration of how climate finance mechanisms trap poorer countries in a cycle of debt and dependency, an account of indigenous land grabbing by an unscrupulous palm oil exporter, and a look at how luxury megaprojects in a Mexico City neighborhood threaten to drain the water supply for longtime residents. (Jump to the list of winners.)

This marks the second year that the Premio Lincoln has been awarded at the prestigious conference, which includes its own investigative reporting competition, as well as dozens of workshops and panel discussions held over four days. COLPIN is organized by the Lima, Peru–based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (Press and Society Institute), or IPYS.  

Competition for the 2023 award—which drew 141 entries from 47 cities and 15 countries—was inspiring, says Laura Mullahy, senior program manager at the Lincoln Institute. The contest attracted so many worthy entries that she and the other judges decided to name three honorable mention winners this year, in addition to the top prizes. The 2023 winners hailed from Costa Rica, Brazil, and Mexico; last year’s winning entries were published in Mexico and Colombia.

The breadth of geography, topics, and media formats represented in the contest is an encouraging sign for Latin American journalism, Mullahy says—as are the winners themselves. “It was really very heartening to meet these talented, young, earnest journalists,” says Mullahy, who presented the awards both years. 

Empowering the Press

The Lincoln Institute has a long history of engaging journalists with its research, both in the United States—where for over 20 years, the organization’s Journalists Forum has convened members of the press around a central topic, such as climate change and housing—and in Latin America. The institute began offering land policy training classes for Brazilian journalists a decade ago, when economist Martim Smolka was the director of the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) program. “Back when Martim was director,” Mullahy recalls, “he always said, ‘There are three audiences I would do anything to get in a room, but they’re hard to get: members of parliament, judges, and journalists.’ So that was always in the back of my mind.”

At the time, Mullahy says, there was very little coverage of land policy in Latin American media, and what coverage did exist wasn’t always well informed; it wasn’t a topic journalists in the region encountered in their formal education. “Land policy is a little bit niche,” Mullahy says. “And so the thought was, well, maybe we’re the ones who can provide this.” 

With the goal of introducing core land policy concepts to journalists, the Lincoln Institute then partnered with IPYS to host a larger series of Latin America-wide training courses. Each session drew 30 or more participants, all of whom had to submit professional clips to be accepted into the program. By 2022, enough journalists were creating well-researched, engaging land use stories throughout Latin America that Mullahy and Adriana León at IPYS discussed the idea of offering a prize for urban land use reporting. “The stars seemed to align,” Mullahy says, and the inaugural Premio Lincoln drew more than 160 entries from 19 countries.

In addition to cash prizes—$3,000 for first place, $2,000 for second, and $1,000 for third—Lincoln Award winners are invited to attend and participate in the four-day COLPIN conference. At the 2022 conference in Rio de Janeiro, “Our panel discussion with the award recipients and two seasoned journalists who served on the selection committee highlighted how land policy-related stories can be developed as compelling journalistic reporting,” Mullahy says. This year’s winners joined a trio of veteran journalists—Miguel Jurado and Vanina Berghella of Argentina, and Chico Regueira of Brazil—for a session on researching cities and urban development.

Journalists are important allies to the Lincoln Institute’s mission, Mullahy says, but even those with an interest in land policy issues don’t always get the support they need from their editors or organizations. So it’s important to recognize and support those who bring quality urban and land use reporting into the mainstream.

Alongside the Lincoln Institute’s more than 30-year tradition of conducting research and offering free professional development courses in Latin America, the efforts to encourage and celebrate informed land use journalism is paying off, and not just for the prizewinners. Mullahy can see positive changes in Latin American land management practices “in which Lincoln Institute courses and their students have had an influence and, in some cases, an active role,” she told the LatAm Journalism Review. “We know our presence can make a difference.” 

2023 Winners

Here are the winners of the 2023 Lincoln Prize for Journalism on Urban Policy, Sustainable Development, and Climate Change: 

First place: Hassel Fallas and Michelle Soto from Costa Rica for their eight-article series, “¡Muéstrame el dinero! La ruta de los fondos climáticos en un mundo cada vez más caliente” (“Show Me the Money! The Route of Climate Funds in an Increasingly Hot World”), published in a collaboration between La Data Cuenta and Ojo al Clima.  

The series explores the global climate financing system to reveal a complex but unequal financial architecture that favors the interests of the Global North and hurts the most vulnerable countries, who have contributed least to the problem. Based on the analysis of databases from multiple sources, the series signals the need to correct the inequities in the distribution of resources and protect the planet for future generations.  

Second place: Karla Mendes for her article “Exportadora de óleo de palma acusada de fraude, grilagem de terras em cemitérios quilombolas” (“Brazil Palm Oil Exporter Accused of Fraud, Land-Grabbing in Quilombola Cemeteries”), published in Mongabay, Brazil.  

The article exposes a wide range of land-grabbing allegations against Agropalma, the only Brazilian company with a sustainability certificate issued by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), claiming that more than half of the 264,000 acres registered by Agropalma was derived from fraudulent land titles and even the creation of a fake land registration bureau. Moreover, the allegations assert that part of the area occupied by Agropalma overlaps with ancestral Quilombola land, including two cemeteries. The feature is available in three languages: 

Portuguese:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3  
English: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3  
Spanish: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 

Third place: Alejandro Melgoza Rocha and Jennifer González Posadas for “Ciudad sin agua. Un pueblo contra el gigante de concreto” (“A City Without Water: The People Against a Concrete Giant”), published in Mexico’s N+.  

This multimedia feature and video examine the complex issue of water scarcity in Mexico City, where the construction of luxury towers and shopping centers has depleted aquifers in the metropolitan zone, putting the ecosystems of the city at risk. As communities and indigenous peoples suffer from water shortages, road congestion, destruction of green areas, increased costs of services, and dispossession of their territory, the inaction of the authorities against developers has resulted in chaotic conflict. The article tells the story of residents taking on the most powerful player in the real estate industry.   

Honorable mention: Thiago Medaglia, Brazil, for “Aquazônia—A Floresta-Água” (“Aquazonia—The Water Rainforest”)  

Honorable mention: Aldo Facho Dede, Kenneth Sánchez Gonzales, and Vania García Pestana, Peru, for the podcast series “Ciudades Que Inspiran” (“Cities That Inspire”) 

Honorable mention: Juan Diego Ortiz Jiménez, of Colombia, for “Nómadas, Airbnb y falta de casas: en Medellín no hay cama para tanta gente” (“Nomads, Airbnb, and Housing Shortage: In Medellín, There Aren’t Enough Beds”) 

2022 Winners  

First place: Alejandro Melgoza Rocha (N+ Focus, Mexico), for “Tulum: un paraiso ilegal” (“Tulum, an Illegal Paradise”) 

Second place: Mónica Rivera Rueda (El Espectador, Colombia), for “Lo que debe saber del POT en Bogotá” (“What You Need to Know about the Land Management Plan in Bogotá”)  

Third place: Andrés de la Peña Subacius (Zona Docs, Mexico), for “La ciudad inhabitable: ¿Redensificación o destrucción de la vivienda?” (“The Inhabitable City: Housing Redensification or Destruction?”) 

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: The opening ceremony of the 2023 Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism (COLPIN) at the Colegio San Ildefonso, Mexico City. The backdrop is Diego Rivera’s first mural, La Creación (Creation), 1922. Credit: Laura Mullahy.

Realtor Gabriella Beale stopped for lunch at a cafe in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, this summer, on her way to show her buyers a home in nearby Larchmont, a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and early 20th-century houses. Then a late August downpour dumped more than two inches of rain on the city, forcing Beale to cancel the showing—because she could no longer get to the house. She watched helplessly from the cafe as flash flooding filled the road outside.

“I couldn’t even get to my car because part of the road essentially became a river,” Beale said. This wasn’t a hurricane, or even a tropical storm—just a rainy Monday in this low-lying city of 238,000. Situated between the Elizabeth River and Chesapeake Bay, Norfolk is experiencing the fastest relative sea-level rise on the East Coast—more than two inches just since 2012—so there isn’t much room for extra water. Parts of the city flood even without rainfall during king tides, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects that the city’s dozen or so annual “sunny-day flooding” incidents could double as soon as 2030.

The encroaching water hasn’t gone unnoticed, Beale said: more buyers ask about flooding than in years past, even in neighborhoods outside the 100-year floodplain. She dutifully counsels all her clients on flood risk, discussing insurance costs, personal safety, and the potential drop in future resale value. Some buyers want nothing to do with a floodplain house, but others don’t mind the risk—or can’t afford to be picky. Beale acknowledges that she can’t make decisions for them. “People have different ideas of what level of flood risk they’re comfortable with, and it’s not really up to me to say, ‘This is a bad house.’”

By the time the stormwater finally subsided on that rainy Monday, Beale’s car was toast; she wasn’t sure it could be repaired. “I can tell that story, and some buyers still want to live in that neighborhood,” she said. Indeed, her buyers rescheduled their showing for the very next day.

* * *

BEALE’S CLIENTS are hardly alone in their pursuit of risky real estate. Even as climate change delivers more intense and more frequent storms, wildfires, and heat waves, home buyers across the United States continue to move into areas at greater risk of climate impacts like flooding, wildfire, drought, and extreme heat—in fact, they’re doing so at a faster pace.

That the climate is changing, and not for the better, is hard to miss. The US experienced a record 23 separate billion-dollar weather disasters in just the first nine months of 2023; the previous annual record of 22 was not even three years old, set in 2020. The number of buildings destroyed by wildfire in California each year has spiked 335 percent since 2009, according to First Street Foundation, a research nonprofit seeking to make climate risk data more accessible. Nationwide, we’re now losing an average of more than 17,000 structures a year to wildfire, a number that is forecast to top 33,700 by 2053—meaning we can soon expect to lose the equivalent of Daytona Beach, Florida, or Asheville, North Carolina, to fire every single year.

Yet home buyers still don’t seem to factor in climate risk when they make one of the biggest decisions of their lives. We keep building and buying homes in the fire-prone “wildland-urban interface” where town meets wilderness, and moving closer to the water, not away from it.

The most flood-prone counties in the US had 384,000 more people move in than out in 2021 and 2022, according to a Redfin analysis, roughly double the net increase of the prior two years. That includes Lee County, Florida, which gained 60,000 net new residents in two years even as Hurricane Ian destroyed nearly 10,000 homes in 2022.

Counties facing the greatest wildfire risk, meanwhile, netted 426,000 new residents in that time. And those most threatened by heat collectively gained 629,000 net residents—including Maricopa County, Arizona, where 76,000 newcomers sweltered in temperatures that topped 110º Fahrenheit for 31 straight days last summer and left hundreds dead.

And yet, the housing market in Maricopa County has been almost as hot as the sidewalks that gave residents third-degree burns in July: median home prices rose a staggering 64 percent in four years, from $290,000 in June 2019 to $475,000 in 2023, as more residents moved in. Prices in Florida’s Lee County rose 70 percent in that time, compared to 40 percent nationwide. Accounting for likely long-term flood damage—to say nothing of drought or wildfire risk—a study published in Nature Climate Change estimated that the residential real estate market in the US is collectively overvalued by as much as $237 billion.

The disconnect is largely driven by short-term affordability concerns, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. “People are leaving places like San Francisco because their rent is too high, and then they’re moving to places like Tampa or Las Vegas because they can actually afford to buy a home there,” Fairweather said. “But what they’re not thinking about is how their housing expenses might change in the future, how the value of their home might change in the future, and also how the livability of those places might change in the future.”

Where the planet is sending us flashing red “stop” signals, home buyers and developers seem to see green lights. Why? And what will it take to get them to heed the stop signs?

Tell Me About It

One reason a driver might recklessly blow past a stop sign, putting themselves and others in danger, is if the sign itself isn’t visible—if it’s concealed by overgrown foliage, for example.

Sometimes warnings of flood or fire risk aren’t immediately obvious to home buyers, either.

“One thing that we’ve learned is that information is just so critical,” said Patrick Welch, policy analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “Even though there is so much information out there about climate risks, it’s not necessarily that accessible—people don’t know about it.”

In 23 states, for example, home sellers aren’t typically required to disclose a home’s flood history to potential buyers, including in vulnerable coastal states like Florida, Massachusetts, and Virginia. Only two states, California and Oregon, require some disclosure of wildfire risk. And often such notices are confusing or reach buyers too late for them to act on the information—after the home inspection, for example, or buried in a stack of forms signed at the closing.

Getting clear, accurate risk assessments into home buyers’ hands can help them make more climate-informed decisions about where they choose to live, Welch said.

“Disclosure of risks is very uneven across states,” agreed Margaret Walls, senior fellow at the nonprofit Resources for the Future. In fact, disclosure rules can even vary within a state, which is how Walls and her colleagues were able to isolate the impact of disclosing fire risk on home values in California in a new working paper. 

California requires home sellers located in a moderate, high, or very-high Fire Hazard Severity Zone to disclose that fire risk to buyers—but only if the home falls within a state responsibility zone, meaning the state manages wildfire prevention and response. In areas where the local jurisdiction is responsible, sellers aren’t required to disclose moderate or high fire risk.

That allowed Walls to compare homes that share the same level of fire risk—as well as school districts, walkability, and other location-based amenities—but have different disclosure requirements. By comparing years of sales data for neighboring homes on either side of the disclosure divide, the researchers were able to show that homes with a disclosed fire risk sold for an average of 4.3 percent less than similar nearby properties with undisclosed risk.

In other words, buyers who were made aware of the risks seemed to adjust their behaviors in a rational way—exactly what you’d hope to see in a well-functioning market. “We can’t expect markets to work and prices to reflect something unless we have all the information,” Walls said.

The effect of risk disclosure on sale prices seems to be strengthening as fire seasons intensify. The eight largest wildfires in California history have all occurred since 2017, burning more than 4 million acres, and 2020 was the state’s worst fire year on record. “We found a stronger effect in the more recent years,” Walls adds. “It’s getting more salient to people after these bad fire years.”

Past research has found that strict flood disclosure rules yield a similar price penalty of about 4 percent. In the absence of flood disclosures, though, home buyers can still get some idea of a home’s flood risk from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA’s flood maps aren’t perfect—they’re based on historical flooding, for one thing, not future climate models—but they’re freely available. Anyone can access them online, though Beale says most home buyers don’t think to do so until she recommends it. And even then, it’s hard to get a price quote for flood insurance without applying for coverage. In fact, because lenders require borrowers to purchase flood insurance on homes located within a FEMA high-risk floodplain, loan officers are often the ones breaking the bad news about flood risk and insurance premiums—typically very late in the process.

“Usually at that point, the buyers can’t get out of the contract,” Beale said. The average annual flood insurance premium nationwide was $888 in 2022, “so that’s not a huge impact if you’re spreading it out over 12 months,” she notes. But rates can vary dramatically by property, even cresting five figures. “If it comes back at $10,000, and you can still technically afford the house according to the lender … you can’t walk away.”

Major real estate sites Redfin and Realtor.com have started incorporating First Street’s climate risk data on their property listings—right alongside other typical home buyer concerns, such as school districts and taxes. And getting that information to a home buyer early in the process makes a real difference, according to a new working paper Fairweather coauthored.

Redfin started publishing flood risk data sitewide in February 2021. But before that, in late 2020, the brokerage leveraged a soft launch of the new feature to conduct a three-month experiment among 17.5 million users. Half of them saw detailed flood risk data and “Flood Factor” scores on the homes they searched, while the other half did not. That randomized flood risk information “had a significant and meaningful impact on users’ search behavior,” and influenced every stage of the home buying process, from initial search to making offers to the final purchase. Over time, buyers who encountered high Flood Factor scores on their initial home searches gradually adjusted their searches toward—and were later more likely to bid on—less flood-prone homes than were users who didn’t see flood risk information.

“Increasing information to home buyers, especially at the moment they’re buying a home, would help them make a different decision when it comes to taking on climate risk,” said Fairweather. 

A Reckoning in the Insurance Market

One way markets traditionally communicate risk is through insurance rates; higher premiums quite clearly reflect a greater likelihood of losses. But right now, the home and flood insurance markets are struggling to adapt to a range of issues, with the costs of climate change-fueled disasters, reconstruction, and fraudulent claims all on the rise.

For decades, FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has underpriced coverage, indirectly subsidizing homeowners in flood-prone areas by making it less expensive to live there than it should be. This is evident through simple math: The NFIP is $20 billion in debt, as premiums have failed to keep up with the actual cost of damages incurred.

FEMA took a step toward correcting that imbalance by implementing Risk Rating 2.0 in late 2021, a new methodology that better aligns premiums with an individual property’s flood risk. However, Congress capped NFIP rate increases at 18 percent a year to ease the impact on existing policyholders. A report by the Government Accountability Office found that median flood insurance premiums would still need to almost double, from $689 to $1,288, for the program to be actuarially sound, and that roughly one in 10 properties insured by the NFIP will eventually require at least a 300 percent rate hike. In Naples, Florida, for example, the average annual flood insurance premium among 1,568 policyholders was $2,228 in 2022; FEMA calculated the risk-based cost of those policies should average almost four times as much: $8,067 per year.

Meanwhile, private insurers (whose homeowner policies generally don’t cover flood damage) are increasingly finding it difficult or impossible to provide coverage at fair but profitable rates as windstorms and wildfires grow more destructive, and as reconstruction gets more expensive.

State Farm announced in May that it would no longer write new homeowner policies in California, where it is the largest insurer, citing “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure” and historically high construction costs. Soon after, Allstate announced that it would do the same, making permanent a pause on new policies instituted in 2022. More than a dozen insurance companies have pulled out of Florida and Louisiana in the past two years, leaving homeowners scrambling for coverage.

Insurance companies could theoretically just raise their rates enough to offset increased costs. But insurance is something of a necessity—lenders won’t approve a mortgage without it, and four in five home buyers rely on a home loan to finance their purchases. So, to protect consumers, big insurance premium hikes often must be approved by state regulators. And in California, insurers can only use past losses, not future risk estimates, to justify rate increases. That makes it hard for insurers to price their coverage accurately or profitably as risk intensifies. 

As Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford, told KQED, the price of home insurance in California no longer matches the risk. “Our insurance system kind of pretends that climate change doesn’t exist, and that’s not workable anymore,” he said.

The price signals that private insurers ordinarily provide through premium adjustments are crucial to a functioning real estate market, “because that is ultimately how decisions get made,” University of Pennsylvania economist Benjamin Keys told Penn Today. “When there are incentives for the choices that homebuilders make, that homeowners make, that’s going to reshape where we live and where we build. When we don’t get that price signal, that distorts our perceptions of risk.”

A report by First Street Foundation asserts that millions of US homes face more climate risk than their insurance rates would indicate, creating a “climate insurance bubble” in the market. “You don’t want someone to live in a place that always burns,” First Street Head of Climate Implications Jeremy Porter told Grist. “We’re subsidizing people to live in harm’s way.” In that respect, it makes some sense for home insurers like State Farm and Allstate to stop writing new policies in the most high-risk areas—doing so could help dissuade developers from building in places most likely to burn.

But millions of people already live in high-risk areas. And when those homeowners can’t get insurance on the private market, they must turn to state-run plans that offer less coverage at higher prices. These public options are meant to offer policies of last resort, but their role is growing; in Florida, the public Citizens Property Insurance Corporation is now the state’s largest insurer, according to the First Street report, with 1.3 million policyholders. The number of homeowners on California’s state-run FAIR Plan more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, to nearly 273,000.

“I worry that a larger state role in insurance markets will bring political pressure to keep premiums low without reflecting the growing climate risks,” Keys said. “It’s challenging for a state-backed plan to raise rates aggressively on homeowners in that state. There’s real political tension.” State-run plans also transfer financial risk to taxpayers: Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation expects to turn a profit in 2023, but lost more than $2 billion in 2022. That’s one reason Florida is phasing in a new law over the next four years requiring all Citizens policyholders to obtain flood insurance as well.

In September, California insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara announced emergency steps aimed at stabilizing the state’s wobbly home insurance market by the end of 2024. Under these new rules, insurers will be permitted to consider climate change and future catastrophe risk when setting premiums. However, they’ll also be required to cover a percentage of high-risk homes, to start transitioning homeowners off the FAIR Plan and back into the private market. That could well be enough to draw insurance companies back, Keys says: “When an insurer leaves a state, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to write insurance policies. It means that they don’t want to write insurance policies under the current regulatory environment and with the current limits on premiums. They want to make a profit.”

As insurance rates rise to account for increased climate risk, one way to ease the impact on homeowners (without artificially suppressing premiums) is for insurers to offer discounts when property owners invest in preventative risk-reduction measures—such as raising a home’s mechanical systems above the base flood elevation, or clearing fire-fueling vegetation from around a house. A new California initiative called “Safer From Wildfires,” introduced in late 2022, requires insurers to recognize and reward fire resiliency measures by offering discounts to homeowners who create five-foot ember-resistant zones around their homes, for example, or who invest in upgraded roofs, windows, or vents.

“By incentivizing policyholders to implement wildfire-resistant measures, insurance companies can create a win-win situation,” the First Street report notes. That could create a positive cycle, reducing the frequency and severity of wildfire losses—and the resulting financial burden on both insurers and communities—while potentially preserving home values.

Change the Lending Landscape

As the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that back most mortgages in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wield tremendous influence over the real estate market—and could also help home buyers heed climate risk.

The GSEs already require borrowers purchasing a high-flood-risk home to secure flood insurance as a condition of their mortgage. But they could, in theory, take more aggressive steps to dissuade risky home purchases, such as requiring a bigger down payment on high-risk properties, charging higher interest rates on such loans, or factoring climate risk into valuations. Fannie Mae has started enlisting climate analytics companies like First Street to figure out how and whether it can fairly incorporate climate risk into its underwriting and lending guidelines. 

It’s a delicate exercise, however. Adjusting valuation or lending criteria to make it more difficult or more expensive to get a mortgage in flood-prone areas would very likely devalue the affected homes. And it’s not just expensive beach houses. Due to historical discrimination and redlining practices, low-income households and people of color are disproportionately represented in the most flood-prone areas. These are some of the very communities Fannie and Freddie have been trying to better support through their “Duty to Serve” mandate. 

“It’s really a double-edged sword,” said Ellie White, senior associate on the buildings team at RMI. Like the Lincoln Institute, RMI is a member of the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition (UMMC), which seeks to hold Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accountable for bringing housing finance opportunities to families not traditionally served by the private market.

“A main roadblock of incorporating climate risk information into the valuation of a property revolves around this challenge of ensuring that we’re not devaluing properties in already high-risk, low-income, historically disadvantaged communities,” White said. “So I think the GSEs are very cautious, and rightfully so, about what it would mean if we had wide-scale incorporation of those physical risks into the valuation of property.”

The stakes are uniquely high in the US, where homeownership has long been a primary engine of wealth creation. “If not done correctly, this could really completely wipe out families’ generational wealth, and it would disproportionately impact low-income communities,” Welch said. “It’s a really complicated, tricky issue.” Local governments that rely heavily on property taxes could also see major shifts in their tax base if climate risk were fully reflected in home values. While municipalities can typically offset potential revenue loss by adjusting tax rates when property values decline, large shifts in the distribution of tax burdens can create political challenges.

But the GSEs could do other things, like using risk research and data to guide policy, and helping homeowners in high-risk areas pay for resiliency upgrades like elevating structures. “The GSEs can take more action on the community engagement front, to support educational programs and raise awareness of these risks and resilience solutions among home buyers,” White said.

In a letter to Federal Housing Finance Authority Director Sandra Thompson in August, the UMMC made a wide range of policy recommendations. Among them: requiring the disclosure of both climate risk and energy performance on existing homes backed with GSE mortgages, and requiring new homes backed by GSE loans to meet more energy-efficient building codes. The latter would reduce long-term ownership costs for home buyers, while also reducing financial risk to the GSEs.

Zoning for the Future

Figuring out how to protect, insure, or move residents of existing neighborhoods that face increased climate risk is a thorny problem without many satisfactory solutions. But at the very least, experts say, we should stop creating more at-risk residents, and focus new development in climate-resilient places. 

“New construction has been increasingly going in places with high climate risks, particularly when it comes to wildfire risk and drought risk,” Fairweather said. “And it’s exurban sprawl that is to blame. Because of single-family zoning, people build more and more into places that aren’t naturally equipped for climate change—they’re building into the forests in inland California, they’re building into the deserts, which don’t have access to water.”

Communities should instead be trying to shift development away from high-climate-risk areas, and encouraging more density and affordable housing in safer areas, says Michael Rodriguez, research director at Smart Growth America. “Climate-informed zoning can easily overlay with a lot of other priorities that a city has,” he said, such as transit-oriented development.

Right now, land markets clearly aren’t sending the right signals about climate risk, Welch said, but planners and elected officials could help correct that at a local level. “Updating zoning codes and land use regulations to reflect climate risks, whether it’s wildfire or flooding, are relatively simple ways that local governments can start to move the needle on this,” he said.   

Back in Norfolk, Virginia, city leaders have taken the lead on climate-informed zoning. Over the past decade, Norfolk has adopted a pair of new land use plans: the short-term PlaNorfolk2030, and the long-term Vision 2100, along with accompanying zoning overlays.

The long-range plan divides the city into four color-coded sections. Red zones, which include the naval base and the downtown district where Beale watched stormwater surge through the streets, are densely developed and economically important, but very vulnerable to flooding; the plan calls for investments in flood protection and mitigation in these areas. Yellow zones indicate flood-prone residential and historic areas, where a resilience overlay will discourage new development but support existing residents’ adaptation efforts. Low-risk green zones are where the city wants to invest in denser, transit-rich neighborhoods. And purple zones, which also have a lower flood risk, are slated for infrastructure investments and lower-density development aimed at preserving housing affordability. 

Such a climate policy can influence land use and real estate decisions in a couple of ways, Rodriguez said. “It might work through literal policy incentives and disincentives, in a tangible sense, like money or regulations,” he said. “But then there’s also the signaling aspect. The city government has now put out a map, and that map in itself can send a signal that can have market impacts.”

Some people worried that, by officially declaring some places risky and others preferable for development, Norfolk’s plan could spook home buyers and investors and sink home values in the high-risk areas. But Rodriguez and his colleagues compared years of sales and permit data before and after the Vision 2100 plan was released, and, as they describe in a new working paper commissioned by the Lincoln Institute, there was no statistical impact on home prices.

That could be the result of the unusually strong pandemic real estate market during the years studied, the authors wrote, or a general lack of climate concern among area home buyers at the time. But it may offer some assurance to hesitant communities: Enacting climate-informed zoning to guide future development doesn’t necessarily have to wreak havoc on existing home values, at least in the short term.

“It’s a long-term solution—it’s not going to change the development patterns or reduce the risk today or tomorrow,” Welch said. “But it’s going to slowly incentivize and push development into less risky areas. And I think one of the takeaways from that study was that you can do this and not immediately crash the local housing market or cause a panic.”

Norfolk’s experience also showed that an inclusive process can ease perceptions of malicious remapping. “You’re drawing lines on the map, and you’re saying, ‘Build here, don’t build there,’” Rodriguez said. “That feels weird, and it feels a little bit like redlining in a historical context of planning. And that feels doubly weird when we know that a lot of the places facing the most climate risk tend to be poor, and tend to have more people of color. . . . There has to be a lot of community input and communication as to what it means to have climate-informed zoning to try and mitigate some of those concerns.”

In that sense, while Norfolk’s policy lacks “teeth” and the city has yet to implement follow-up measures such as density bonuses or the transfer of development rights (which would allow landowners in vulnerable zones to sell their development rights to builders in a low-risk zone), the city has already taken a huge step. “They were one of one of the few communities out there that did anything like this,” Rodriguez said.

States and municipalities have other levers they can pull, too—some more drastic than others.

In water-stressed Arizona, for example—where the Colorado River is overdrawn, and depleted underground aquifers are projected to eventually run dry at current usage levels—state officials recently announced a moratorium on new residential construction that relies on groundwater in the Phoenix metro area. 

Even without placing an outright ban on new construction in high-risk areas, communities can, through zoning and other regulations, effectively stymie risky new development by refusing to fund or permit new streets, water service, and other key infrastructure in high-risk settings. The federal government uses a similar approach to protect sensitive coastal ecosystems through the Coastal Barrier Resources Act. The CBRA doesn’t explicitly outlaw development in those areas, but dissuades it by withholding federal support for things like infrastructure, flood insurance, and disaster relief. That disincentive has proven remarkably effective, research commissioned by the Lincoln Institute has shown, reducing development by 85 percent.

It’s worth noting that Norfolk didn’t outright ban new construction in high-flood-risk areas, either. But it did set stricter building codes in those zones, which can help the city’s built environment adapt to climate risk by accomplishing two things at once. “To the extent that you do build there, at least you’re going to build something that’s more resilient,” Rodriguez said. Meanwhile, higher design standards can add cost and complexity to construction in vulnerable areas, creating a disincentive to build there, and encouraging developers to locate projects on safer sites instead.

Local governments can also charge higher taxes or impact fees to discourage building or buying in high-risk areas—for example, raising water and sewage rates in water-stressed areas, or funding wildfire prevention efforts with a higher tax on fire-prone properties. “Higher fees in risky areas serve two purposes,” write Brookings Institute researchers Julia Gill and Jenny Schuetz. “They encourage price-sensitive households to choose safer locations, and they also provide local governments with more revenue to upgrade the climate resilience of infrastructure.”

All of these policies could help point home buyers toward making better, more rational decisions. But where we choose to live sometimes defies reason.

Beale, the Norfolk realtor who counsels all her buyers about flood risk, understands why some of them still choose a high-risk home. For some, it’s straightforward economics. “If a buyer can only afford $150,000, and they want a detached house, Norfolk’s going to be it—and it’s maybe in a flood risk area,” Beale said.

But for others, it’s a deep-seated desire that isn’t so easily erased by rising insurance rates or flood disclosure forms. “These are beautiful neighborhoods” of century-old Colonials and tree-lined sidewalks, she said. “It’s not all about money. It’s this perceived dream of homeownership—this ideal of, ‘What do you want your life to be?’”

Unfortunately, the one thing that does seem to break through and change home buyer behavior is witnessing a weather disaster. Beale says many buyers still shy away from particular streets because they remember driving past flood-ravaged houses there after a bad storm.

After all, no one’s ideal dream of homeownership involves fleeing a fire or wading through floodwater. Fairweather expects attitudes to shift as risk increasingly becomes reality for more people. “I think experience will be a teacher,” she said, “as there are more hurricanes and more fire events. I think more homeowners will start to worry about it when they see it in real life.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Tidal flooding in Norfolk, Virginia. Credit: Aileen Devlin/Virginia Sea Grant via Flickr.