Rekindling hope: Finding a path forward amidst destruction

The Los Angeles (LA) sky dawned clear and beautiful on the morning of Jan. 7. Few expected that a day beginning with a blue sky would end in one of the most devastating wildfires in the region’s history.

But this is our reality. 2024 was the first year that global temperatures rose 1.55 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, exceeding the Paris Agreement’s goal to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The chaparral ecosystem of Southern California has always been fire-prone. In fact, chaparral needs fire to regenerate by enhancing plant germination. But the recent fires are not normal fires. An extremely dry “wet season,” exacerbated by climate change, orchestrated the perfect storm of conditions that ignited these destructive fires.

Beyond the rising temperatures and low precipitation in the LA Basin, other factors were at play that led to the fire. The Santa Ana Winds, which are a result of both pressure and elevation differences between the LA Basin and the Great Basin further inland, resulted in gusts exceeding 100 mph that fanned the flames and grounded firefighting aircraft. The winds are concentrated into a few narrow passes in the San Gabriel Mountains, allowing embers and debris to rapidly spread. Wet conditions in LA over the last two years allowed for vegetation to proliferate, adding fuel to this year’s dry spell. This perfect combination of ideal fire conditions is the real reason behind the severity of the LA wildfires.

The real question is not whether the LA wildfires were caused by climate change. The real question is, where do we go from here?

Hurricane Helene ($250 billion in damages), Hurricane Milton ($34 billion), Cyclone Chido ($675 to $831 million) and the flooding in Europe (close to $14 billion), are just a few of the natural disasters our world has experienced over the last year. Each climate-related disaster is often examined individually. But when viewed as a whole, a pattern of increasingly severe disasters emerges. Instead of treating each event as an anomaly, we need to "climate-proof" our communities, building adaptation networks that expect the unexpected. In 2024, Congress allocated an extra $20 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) disaster relief fund, which simply addresses disaster response, not future resilience. As the scale of disasters expands, we need to look beyond immediate recovery and towards broader preparedness for chronic threats.

The proximity of both the Palisades and Eaton fires to Hollywood and the densely packed LA metro area has given the disaster outsized attention. But, devastating as they are, these fires are no longer unusual. The Lahaina Fire (2023, 17,000 acres burned, 101 dead), the Camp Fire (2018, 153,336 acres burned, 85 dead), the Tubbs Fire (2017, 36,807 acres burned, 22 dead) and the Woolsey Fire (2018, 96,949 acres burned, 3 dead) all briefly captured media attention before quickly falling out of the public consciousness. “Environmental stories don’t break, they ooze,” said journalist Frank Allen. But fires, with their fast-moving and catastrophic nature, seem to be an exception to this rule. And yet they still struggle to garner significant public attention after they lose the status of ‘breaking news.”

This absence of collective memory is indicative of a broad decline in attention span in our modern society. We are constantly overloaded with a never-ending stream of information, leaving us little headspace to grapple with the profundity of these disasters. The communities impacted by the aforementioned fires are still being rebuilt — long after they have been forgotten. This societal amnesia isn’t just a PR problem. It prevents us from learning from the past and adapting to these chronic threats. In the wake of the destructive fire seasons of 2017 and 2018, the California State Legislature considered a bill that would restrict the construction of homes in areas at very high risk of fire. But the bill failed to pass after an extensive lobbying campaign against it by the real estate industry. People want to live close to natural areas — where the fire risk is the highest — and memories of this fire will soon be glossed over by images of stunning vistas of the Pacific Ocean.

The fires also magnified stark inequalities when it comes to disaster resilience. While the homes of everyday citizens burned, billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso called on his squadron of private firefighters to protect his home and real estate interests. Even for those whose homes emerged unscathed, there will still be costs to bear. In just one example, a recent visit to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), I learned that 25-30% of electricity rate hikes were a result of wildfire mitigation. While resilience is a worthwhile endeavor, its costs are distributed unequally. When a new, usually upscale, house is built in a fire-prone area, a utility must build and maintain transmission to higher standards to limit the possibility of fire. However, the costs to upkeep these expensive power lines are billed equally across all customers, which is especially difficult for low-income residents, whose utility bills make up a larger percentage of their expenses.