Hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, and climate resilience

My research addresses the rising cost of extreme climate and weather events in the United States and alternative approaches to promote resilience.

nature-based solutions: conservation in the floodplain

With colleagues, I have evaluated the costs and benefits of conservation of natural lands such as forests and wetlands in the floodplain as a way to provide flood attenuation ecosystem services. I have an article in Environmental Science and Technology, coauthored with Carolyn Kousky, Sheila Olmstead, and Molly Macauley, that looks at strategically placing “natural infrastructure” in a riverine floodplain in Wisconsin. Carolyn Kousky and I took these methods to the Meramec River in Missouri; we performed a retrospective analysis of the benefits and costs of the Meramec Greenway. That paper is published in Ecological Economics (ungated version available here).

I have been working with engineers at George Mason University to evaluate the storm surge attenuation benefits of coastal wetlands in the Chesapeake Bay region. These methods combine hydrodynamic surge modeling, land cover information, and detailed property value data to calculate the damages avoided from changes in wetlands land area. A paper published in Natural Hazards Review shows how hurricane damages are likely to change as wetlands are lost due to sea level rise. One key finding: a weak storm in the future will have the same damaging impacts as a strong storm has today, just because of sea level rise and land use change. In a current project, we are working with a team from The Nature Conservancy and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to provide nature-based solutions for flooding in Pocomoke City, Maryland, a vulnerable community on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore. This StoryMap describes the project. A valuable park in the middle of town is subject to routine tidal flooding that is projected to get worse in the future with climate change. With a colleague, we looked into the idea of reinvisioning the park as a stormwater park that soaks and retains floodwaters but remains a useable recreation asset. In this RFF report, we describe some cities’ successes with these “double duty” parks and how small towns can overcome some of their special challenges to develop them.

coastal development and storm risks

Increasing exposure to risk is one of the reasons why costs from disasters and extreme weather events are on the rise. In the Coastal Barrier Resources System, a 3 million acre land area along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, landowners are ineligible for disaster aid, prohibited from purchasing a National Flood Insurance Policy, and no federal money is spent on infrastructure. Removing these development subsidies has been incredibly effective at reducing development on these risky lands and reducing flood damages on these lands. My colleague and I studied this and published our findings in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2024.

In Modeling Coastal Land and Housing Markets: Understanding the Competing Influences of Amenities and Storm Risks, Nicholas Magliocca, Virginia McConnell, and I use an economic agent-based model to analyze how housing consumers trade off coastal amenity values and storm risks (ungated version here). As storm frequency increases with climate change, our model shows people moving away from the coast, land values falling, and lower income people moving in—patterns that often play out in the real world.

I have done a lot of research on transfer of development rights (TDR) programs. TDRs allow landowners to sell their development rights for use on another property. The “sending” property usually gets a conservation easement placed on it; the “receiving” property is developed more densely than would otherwise be allowed under the baseline zoning rules. In this blog post, I wrote about the potential to use TDRs to protect land at risk from sea level rise. I have several other papers on TDRs; Virginia McConnell and I published a review in Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, which summarizes some of the pros and cons. Stay tuned for a Resources Radio podcast episode on TDRs, coming in June 2026.

flood risk perceptions, insurance, disaster aid

Andrew Royal and I conducted a survey to formally test for overoptimism in the floodplain and how it affects flood insurance purchases. Our paper, “Flood Risk Perceptions and Insurance Choice: Do Decisions in the Floodplain Reflect Overoptimism?” was published in Risk Analysis in 2018. This blog post provides a quick, user-friendly summary. tl;dr… yes, people seem to be overly optimistic: the average person thinks her flood risks are less than those of her neighbors.

The cost of providing aid after a disaster has risen dramatically in the U.S. But the amount of money most people get is pretty small. Danae Hernandez Cortes and I analyzed the FEMA data on disaster aid for the 2017 hurricane season (that was a big one: Harvey, Irma and Maria). In this blog post, we highlight three main findings: (1) disaster aid amounts are small ($8,900, on average, for homeowners affected by Hurricane Harvey, the highest amount of the three hurricanes); (2) most people getting disaster aid did not have flood insurance (28% for Harvey, again the highest of the three); and (3) richer households get more aid, on average, than poorer ones. The inequities in addressing disasters are becoming increasingly well-recognized. This webinar I co-organized with Carlos Martin includes a great panel discussion of the environmental justice issues with regard to flooding, disasters, and climate adaptation.

wildfires

Wildfires in the United States are increasing in frequency and intensity. 2020 and 2021 were two of the worst fire years on record. My research is analyzing impacts on outdoor recreation, paying particular attention to the role of wildfire smoke and whether recreationists are deterred by it. With colleagues Matt Wibbenmeyer and Jacob Gellman, I published a paper in the journal Forest Policy and Economics in January 2022 that measured the number of recreationists affected by fire and smoke, using daily data over a ten-year period, and the extent to which recreationists altered their plans for fire and smoke. In follow-on work, we developed a discrete choice recreation model and analyzed the welfare costs of wildfire smoke on outdoor recreation, finding that 21.5 million outdoor recreation visits in the western United States are affected by smoke every year, with annual welfare losses of $2.3 billion. Our findings were published in a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in 2025.

Homeowners insurance markets in states with increasing numbers and costs of extreme weather events are facing a number of problems. Nowhere are the problems greater than in California where rising wildfire risks are leading to insurer exits from the market, nonrenewals of policies, rising premiums, and growing enrollment in the state’s insurance of last resort, the California FAIR Plan. The state is enacting a number of reforms. One of them is a requirement that insurers provide discounts to homeowners who invest in wildfire mitigation measures. My colleagues and I investigated exactly how insurers are responding and we wrote about it in this RFF working paper. TLDR: the discounts are small, especially in comparison with the costs associated with these mitigation measures such as replacing a roof, windows, eaves, and vents.