Articles by Leslie Kaufman

Leslie Kaufman writes the Climate Report newsletter about the impact of global warming. To contact the author of this story: Leslie Kaufman in New York at lkaufman27@bloomberg.net

Tariffs Threaten to Push US Home Insurance Rates Even Higher

With the Los Angeles fires in January and last week’s severe storms that brought flooding and tornadoes to the Midwest, extreme weather is already battering US homes in 2025. Homeowners should expect their insurance rates to jump accordingly, says Insurify, …

A California City Is Pioneering Urban-Scale Insurance for Climate Disasters

“Fire took everything, please help.” The headline was one of hundreds like it on GoFundMe campaigns that launched even as the embers of the fires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena were still smoldering. They were a grim reminder that …

Fire Danger in LA Is All Around, But Signals to Residents Are Mixed

In the era of cutting-edge computer modeling, satellite data and AI, there has never been more abundant information on the danger that wildfire poses to homes in the Los Angeles area. But that didn’t necessarily help thousands of homeowners correctly …

Los Angeles Fires Become Existential Test for California’s Stopgap Insurer

The conflagrations tearing across Los Angeles are on track to be among the most expensive wildfire disasters in U.S. history, draining insurance coffers and threatening California’s massive state-sponsored insurance program. Losses from the fires “could push insurance markets over the …

Hurricanes Milton and Helene Expose Limits of US Flood Maps

Even before the second megastorm in as many weeks brings devastating floodwaters to the Southeast US, it’s already clear that federal flood-risk maps underpinning decisions by millions of American homeowners and businesses are severely out of sync with a new …

American Dams Weren’t Built for Today’s Climate-Charged Rain and Floods

As flooding hammered Appalachia in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, residents became intimately familiar with a new norm in the US’s post-storm script: dams at imminent risk of failing. Officials last week said multiple dams were on the brink, including …

Helene Dumps Rain on Millions of US Homes That Lack Flood Insurance

On Thursday night Helene crashed into Florida’s coast as a Category 4 hurricane. The giant storm with 140-mile-per-hour winds made landfall close to where Hurricane Debby hit in August and where Idalia struck just over a year ago. It quickly …

Removing US Subsidies Curbed Building in Climate Risk Zones, Study Finds

The US Congress passed the Coastal Barrier Resources Act in 1982 to preserve relatively undeveloped waterfront areas as natural buffer zones. At least 1.4 million acres along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts were made ineligible for the kind of federal …

Biden Administration Raises FEMA Bar for Flood Resilience

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has finalized a rule mandating that projects built using its funds not only take into account previous and current levels of local flood risk, but for the first time consider the future risk …

US Home Insurance Still Priced Too Low for Climate Risk, Says Swiss Re Chair

This has been a year of insurance sticker shock in the US. But the man who provides insurance to insurers thinks maybe the shock still isn’t enough to steer people away from risk in a changing climate. “There is not …