| | | Welcome. This week, goodbye to the slender-billed curlew and taking a Thanksgiving camping trip. But first, here's my last column about whether your city is poised to bounce back from the next climate disaster. |  | | How do you pick a safe place to live? Climate scientists predict an intensifying barrage of hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, flooding and sea-level rise in many places. These disasters are already threatening, and even demolishing, homes. But risk is not all. Resilience, the capacity to rebound from adversity, can matter just as much. Climate modeling firm AlphaGeo analyzes 28 factors, from life expectancy to infrastructure spending, to assess a location's true vulnerability. Overlaying risk and resilience is a road map to a community's future. It paints a picture of why a place is positioned to thrive or struggle because climate change won't be a singular disaster. It's a succession of stresses, some small, others devastating. Most people think about good schools, safe streets or desirable jobs when considering where to live. As climate risks inexorably rise, how well your community bounces back from a climate-related disaster — or even a bad thunderstorm — will begin to weigh more heavily on the value of your home. Imagine a house high up on a hill. It may seem safe from flooding. But the streets around it become impassable during storms or even high tide. Getting to the grocery store is difficult. As extreme weather worsens, insurance rates rise. Some carriers stop issuing policies — or cancel them. Even if the house on higher ground is safe, property values could fall, reducing tax revenue needed to rebuild and protect the city. A downward cycle could ensue. "The individual shoulders the risk of the community," said Brian Stone, a professor and director of the Urban Climate Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Yet communities can also offer protection. It's not just risk that determines the value of a home, argued AlphaGeo's founder and CEO Parag Khanna: "It's how resilient you are." Resilient cities hold their value and appeal to new and current residents, enabling even risky places to thrive. While there's no perfect way to measure resilience, there's a growing body of data to draw from. AlphaGeo helps real estate, insurance and financial firms predict how global climate models translate into local impacts, and how those risks might be offset by factors on the ground, from a city's finances to how old the buildings are. We teamed up with AlphaGeo to reveal where and why communities appear best positioned to recover from adversity. We looked at the nation overall, as well as two high-risk, high-resilience communities — the flood-prone military town of Norfolk and California's Placer County, which is threatened by wildfire. And we built a tool so you can compare your city's risk and resilience scores, and judge its vulnerability in a volatile climate. Do you live in a resilience city? Write me at climatecoach@washpost.com. I read all your emails. |  | | A slender-billed curlew specimen (National History Museum) | | The slender-billed curlew has been declared extinct, reports Britain's Natural History Museum. The last official sighting of the wading bird was in 1995. It's disappearance marks the first mainland European bird to go extinct in 500 years. Hunting over their annual migration route over Europe, coupled with the Soviet Union's massive conversion of grasslands and steppes in central Asia during the mid-1900s, probably doomed the species. | | A sighting of a wild slender-billed curlew in Morocco at least 30 years ago (Chris Gomersall) | | Although the Eurasian curlew — which is related — survives, climate change threatens to claim more bird species in the coming decades. "As climate change continues, this is going to be the status quo," said Alex Bond, a senior curator of birds at the Natural History Museum. "This is going to be the new normal." You can read the full assessment here. | Learning Curve Plastic food packaging is composters' greatest challenge. Compost collection is on the rise: Curbside food scrap collection has increased by 49 percent since 2021. But people are tossing twist ties, cling wrap, foam trays and other plastic packaging into their bins, reducing the value for farmers, ranchers and landscapers. While municipalities try to manage contamination, there's a push for national standards. |  | | Globally, the world is struggling to strike a deal amid a tsunami on plastic waste. Delegates from 175 nations are gathering in Busan, South Korea, the final round of formal talks to address every part of the plastic problem — from design and production to disposal and recycling. Nations agreed to start working on a legally binding treaty in 2022. "A treaty like this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," John Hocevar, Greenpeace's oceans campaign director, told my colleague Allyson Chiu. "Just a few years ago, it was hard to imagine that the whole world would be sitting down to talk about how to end plastic pollution. I'm hoping that we can hold on to enough of that spirit that we can get something done that's really going to matter." Read more here. Tracking Biden |  |  | | On Saturday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed stronger limits on emissions of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) from new gas-fired power plants and other industrial facilities. Nitrogen oxides help form smog, and long-term exposure to this pollutant is linked to asthma and other health concerns. See all the actions here. |  | The Second Degree I wrote a few months ago that every bicycle is just an e-bike in waiting. David in the foothills of Los Angeles recently received his bike conversion. "I got it installed," he wrote. "I'm nearing 70 … and those hills have become daunting. This afternoon, they were fun again and I still got a decent workout." Gavin in Buffalo wrote to ask what was the least vulnerable city in my column about whether your city is poised to bounce back from the next climate disaster. Our analysis overlaid risk and resilience to reveal why a place is positioned to thrive or struggle in the future as the planet heats up. The analysis is a snapshot of a city's vulnerability, and every assessment is only an approximation. As we recently learned, extreme 1-in-1,000-year events like Hurricane Helene can hit cities like Asheville, North Carolina (very low risk). As climate change adjusts the odds, this will happen more. But our analysis found Burlington, Vermont, came out as among the least vulnerable cities in our sample. |  | On the Climate Front From The Post: How to reduce your waste on Black Friday. The U.N. climate deal offers $300 billion to poor nations — and sparks a backlash. Is tap water clean? What experts say amid new concerns. China looks to step into global vacuum on climate talks as Trump vows to pull U.S. back. From elsewhere: Urban wildflower patches in cities can be as beneficial as natural meadows for insects, says the Guardian. AI can distinguish between gray and red squirrels at feeders: A "game changer" for conservation, reports the BBC. Trading Thanksgiving for a family camping trip was an Outside magazine editor's "best decision ever." New Zealand stoneflies reveal a new textbook case of human-driven evolution, according to a study in Anthropocene. |  | | In the opening pages of "Waiting for Al Gore," the fictional but extinct Oswald's thrush makes an appearance. "Cute, quirky, free-spirited, pure of heart, noble of purpose, bizarrely telepathic, and, yes, sadly gone," writes the author Bob Katz. "That, in a nutshell, is the story of the Oswald's thrush." Fact sometimes rhymes with fiction. Oswald's thrush, described as "cobalt blue with burnt orange feathering" in the book, bore an uncanny resemblance to the blue rock thrush, photographed by Michael Sanchez, only the second time the species has been observed in North America, far from its native habitat in Europe and Asia. The blue-and-chestnut-colored "vagrant," a bird species wandering far from its usual habitat, was photographed at Hug Point State Recreation Site on Oregon's coast on April 21 two months after the book published. Send me your photos and stories at climatecoach@washpost.com | | The blue rock thrush photographed in Oregon. (Michael Sanchez) | | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Climate Coach in your inbox every Tuesday. See you next Tuesday, Michael Coren, Climate Coach | | |
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