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This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters

In brief:

• Scientists expect dramatic swings between active and inactive hurricane seasons in the future.
• The risk of back-to-back hurricanes is growing. 
• Hurricanes are expected to get more damaging and deadly. 

Wild year-to-year swings — from punishing hyperactive seasons to quiet years with little activity — could well become the norm for future Atlantic hurricane seasons, according to recent climate change research. 

The latest science paints a complex but alarming future, as the unprecedented amount of heat that humans are supplying to the climate system disrupts the fundamental atmospheric circulation pattern in which we designed our civilization. 

During the coming busy seasons, death and destruction from unprecedented hurricane catastrophes will probably grow much more commonplace, because even as risks grow, people have continued to build in risky flood-prone regions. But eventually, the coming hurricane catastrophes will pose an increasing threat to the viability of living in many coastal areas, particularly in the Caribbean.

The year-to-year variability of Atlantic basin hurricane activity already is the largest of any of the globe’s tropical cyclone basins. And climate change will make extreme swings between active and inactive hurricane seasons the norm, according to a 2024 paper, Projected increase in the frequency of extremely active Atlantic hurricane seasons. 

The high-resolution climate models used in the study projected a 36% increase by 2050 in the variance of Atlantic tropical cyclone activity. The main causes: an increase in the variability of wind shear (strong upper-level winds that tend to tear a storm apart), and major swings in how stable the atmosphere is in the tropical Atlantic. One good thing is that the study found that the increased activity during hyperactive seasons would be focused farther from land over the eastern and central Atlantic, with less activity over the Caribbean.

A 2022 study, Extreme Atlantic hurricane seasons made twice as likely by ocean warming, found that ocean warming from 1982 to 2020 doubled the probability of extremely active hurricane seasons over that time period. However, the authors did not clearly separate out how much of that change resulted from increased heat-trapping greenhouse gases and how much was caused by a reduction in planet-cooling air pollution particles called aerosols. These particles are not likely to change much in the future, while greenhouse gases will be increasing, so it is important to know their relative impacts on ocean warming.

The worst sequential hurricane disaster on record for the Atlantic occurred in 2020 in Nicaragua and Honduras. 

Hurricane Eta made landfall in northern Nicaragua on Nov. 3, 2020, as a Category 4 storm. Moving slowly at landfall, Eta lingered for three days over Central America and the adjacent waters, dropping catastrophic amounts of rain. 

Just two weeks later, Hurricane Iota made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Nicaragua only 15 miles from where Eta hit. Iota brought torrential rains that inundated flooded regions still struggling to recover from Eta, with the combined tolls from the two storms exceeding 300 people dead or missing. 

There was no precedent in the Atlantic for two such powerful hurricanes to make landfall so close together in space and time. The combined impact of the two hurricanes on Nicaragua was estimated at $738 million – about 6% of that nation’s GDP. 

But the twin Category 4 hurricanes left behind an even more extreme catastrophe in Honduras. The U.N. estimated that total damages from Hurricane Eta and Hurricane Iota in Honduras exceeded $2 billion – 8% of the poverty-stricken nation’s GDP.

In the future, an increase in hyperactive hurricane seasons will boost the threat of two hurricanes striking the same place within a few weeks of each other. Overlapping disasters could threaten the Gulf of Mexico region with a cycle of “perpetual disaster recovery” — making communities vulnerable to worse outcomes with every subsequent event, researchers at the National Academies wrote in a 2024 report.

A 2022 paper, Increasing sequential tropical cyclone hazards along the US East and Gulf coasts, found that in the current climate, two named storms hitting the same location within 15 days along the U.S. East and Gulf coasts and bringing significant hazards (strong winds, heavy rainfall and storm surges) could be expected to occur once every 10 to 92 years. But under a moderate emissions scenario, this return period could be expected to shrink to just one to three years because of sea-level rise and a change in storm climatology. The odds of a Katrina-like hurricane and a Harvey-like hurricane impacting the U.S. within 15 days of each other — which was non-existent in the historical period they simulated — was projected to have a one-in-650-year return period (or a 5% chance over 30 years) by the end of the century.

It is widely acknowledged that higher weather disaster losses result primarily from an increase in exposure: more people with more stuff moving into vulnerable places, including those at risk of floods. 

Martin Bertogg, Swiss Re’s head of catastrophic peril, said in a 2022 AP interview that two-thirds, perhaps more, of the recent rise in weather-related disaster losses — including from hurricanes — is the result of more people and things in harm’s way. 

But this balance will likely shift in the coming decades. For example, a 2025 study led by Avantika Gori of Rice University, Sensitivity of tropical cyclone risk across the US to changes in storm climatology and socioeconomic growth, looked at how damages from wind, rainfall, and storm surge would change under a moderate global warming scenario. The study found that the fraction of increased hurricane damages because of climate change would grow by the end of the century to be roughly equal to the increased damages from higher exposure (assuming a 2% annual growth in GDP). The combined increased costs for hurricane damage for the future (2070-2100) period compared to the historical (1980-2005) period would be truly extraordinary, if no additional adaptation measures are taken: a 633% increase, the paper said.

Gori’s prediction is by no means a worst-case outcome, because the study assumed a moderate global warming scenario. Even in a best-case scenario — which I’ll explore in a future post — development is going to continue in flood-prone places. And there are at least four ways that hurricane scientists are very confident that climate change will make hurricanes worse:

• The strongest hurricanes will get stronger.
• Hurricanes will rapidly intensify more quickly and more often.
• Hurricanes will dump more rain.
• Storm surge damage will rise because of rising sea levels.

Accompanying the shocking increases in hurricane damages in our future will likely be sharply increased risks of high death tolls. Stronger, wetter, slower-moving storms will dump more rain, causing increased flood risk. Higher sea levels and stronger hurricanes will bring more dangerous storm surges and compound flood events. Post-storm power outages will coincide with heat waves more frequently, increasing heat mortality. More hurricanes will rapidly intensify just before landfall, leaving vulnerable populations unprepared, further increasing mortality risk.

Read: ‘Deadliest in generations’: The Texas floods are the latest in a disturbing pattern

Fortunately, steadily improving hurricane forecasts over the past 20 years have significantly lowered the risk of death, and the recent emergence of AI forecast models has been an exciting step forward. In some places, improved building codes have also reduced the hurricane damage and presumably, mortality risk. Nevertheless, it is concerning that the U.S. has suffered five hurricanes since 2005 that were deadlier than any hurricane since 1972.

In a stunning paper released in 2024, Mortality caused by tropical cyclones in the United States, Rachel Young and Solomon Tsiang found that the average U.S. hurricane that made landfall between 1930 and 2015 caused 24 direct deaths. 

However, they observed an increase in excess deaths – mortality beyond what would otherwise be expected in that period – that lingered for 15 years, totaling 7,000-11,000 excess deaths per storm. This burden is 300-480 times greater than government estimates of direct deaths and was equivalent to an astounding 3.2-5.1% of all deaths across the contiguous United States.

The largest single category of deaths was from cardiovascular disease (36%), while 12% of the deaths were from cancer, “consistent with some evidence of stress from extreme weather affecting long-run health,” the authors wrote. Between 1950 and 1995, monthly excess tropical cyclone deaths ranged from 4,500 to 6,000, then rose to about 7,500 per month by 2003. In 2004, an onslaught of landfalling hurricanes brought a sharp rise in the death rate, which peaked at approximately 13,000 per month in 2013.

Read: The hidden health toll of hurricanes

a). Total incidence of tropical cyclone excess mortality in the contiguous U.S by month. Bar height is sum of average maximum wind speeds for all state-by-storm events. Colors correspond to decades. b) Stacked overlapping excess mortality responses to each storm for all of the contiguous U.S. Outline colors correspond to the decade when the storm occurred. The upper envelope is the total estimated mortality burden resulting from all tropical cyclones occurring during the prior 172 months (14.3 years). c) Official direct tropical cyclone deaths by month according to NOAA. The y-axis scale is the same for b and c. (image credit: Young, R., Hsiang, S. Mortality caused by tropical cyclones in the United States. Nature 635, 121–128 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07945-5, open access)

Young and Tsiang hypothesized five ways that hurricanes may have triggered excess mortality:

1. Economic disruption might change household economic decisions, eventually translating into worsened health outcomes. For example, a person who loses a job might lose health insurance, too. Or retirement savings could be drawn down to repair property damage, both of which could reduce future spending on health care.
2. Social network changes could affect future health. For example, working-age people might move away, changing the social support for older people who remain behind.
3. Fiscal adjustments by state or local governments in response to the disaster may impact future health outcomes. For example, restructuring budgets to support recovery might reduce spending on healthcare infrastructure.
4. Heightened physical and mental stress may alter health in the long term.
5. Changes in the natural environment could harm health — for example, ecological changes could redistribute disease vectors, or flooding may expose populations to harmful chemicals.

Many of these factors can be expected to grow worse in the future, resulting in higher hurricane excess mortality.

Over the last decade, Greenbelt Alliance has been advancing research on nature-based solutions and land-use planning best practices to achieve comprehensive wildfire resilience across our Bay Area landscapes. In our latest report, An Interwoven Greenbelt Buffer for Wildfire Risk Reduction, we discuss the challenges of implementing strategically-placed greenbelt buffers in existing communities, using Sonoma Springs as a case study.

One key takeaway from that research highlighted the need for regulatory and governance frameworks that enable effective collaboration among private property owners, government partners, and fire professionals.

One organization has emerged as a leader in doing just that – creating a collaborative system that delivers real results. Napa Communities Firewise Foundation (Napa Firewise) is a Napa County-based nonprofit supporting 25 Fire Safe Councils across the county.

This organization quietly built one of California’s most effective regional wildfire resilience models that centralizes grant writing, environmental compliance, and data collection under a single nonprofit “mothership” while keeping 25 community Fire Safe Councils as its connective tissue to residents on the ground- and in doing so, has already helped surface roughly $47 million in private resilience investments that firefighters and insurers never knew existed.

In this conversation, facilitated by Senior Director of Planning and Research, Sadie Wilson, Napa Firewise CEO Joe Nordlinger*, and Communications Director Stephanie Smithers** discuss how that structure works, the importance of engaging private landowners through their new Valley Stewards program, and how they’re bringing insurers back to fire-affected communities.

Joe Nordlinger* has been the CEO of Napa Firewise since 2024 and a volunteer with the organization since 2017. After the 2014 Wragg Canyon Fire got dangerously close to his hillside property in the lower Mayacamas, Joe was spurred to action. He got involved in the Mount Veeder Fire Safe Council, got trained as a volunteer firefighter, and has since continued to change the way we think about wildfire preparedness by bringing decades of experience in the business world to think differently about how communities work more efficiently and effectively to build resilience.

Stephanie Smithers** has been with the organization for two years after working in crisis communication and public information during the 2017 and 2020 fires in Napa Valley, and has been steeped in wildfire for the last decade, tracking wildland fire blogs, listening to radio traffic, and working to understand the landscape that her husband works in as a career firefighter.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Joe Nordlinger: In Napa, we filled a vacuum and were able to change the trajectory of how wildfire resilience was being approached in the county. We basically reorganized, recruited a new board, and decided that Napa Firewise would be the shared services platform doing all the grant writing, grants administration, environmental compliance, project development, and portfolio management for what are now 25 Fire Safe Councils.

There are absolutely lessons that could apply in other counties. One thing we’ve realized is that you have to think about your customers (homeowners, landowners, firefighters, etc.) and what the experience is like on their end. If the customer has to deal with nine different organizations, “Oh, you can go here for this. You can go there for that.” It just becomes so overwhelming and confusing that they tend to just get paralyzed.

That said, I’m aware we’re a smaller, more affluent county with fewer players and a tight alignment with CAL FIRE through Napa County Fire. But the core insight is structural efficiency. If you’re trying to support 20 different nonprofits, all with their own overhead, there simply isn’t enough money to do that. You have to be very efficient.

What we’ve uncovered is that there’s a lot of value in centralizing and aggregating data to drive better wildfire containment outcomes and better insurance outcomes.

If you have too many entities gathering their own data, you don’t benefit from the aggregation needed to get actionable intelligence to firefighters or tell a better story to insurers. And fragmentation is compounded by complacency; you go a few years without a fire, the vegetation grows back, and you can find yourself right back in a potential catastrophic situation.

Stephanie Smithers: The community preparedness paired with the fuels management that we do is imperative to supporting wildfire response. It really helps us burn on our terms so we can help manage fire behavior and create opportunities for firefighters to contain wildfires faster and more safely.

What Napa Firewise does well is understand that we must be flexible. It isn’t a cookie-cutter approach. The needs and risks vary by neighborhood, terrain, and landowner profile. Our communities run the full spectrum, from very affluent neighborhoods to rural areas with very limited means. We walk each Fire Safe Council through their own community wildfire protection plan rather than expecting them all to fit into one bucket.

JN: Our model is efficient because all our Fire Safe Councils are essentially satellite entities that are part of us. They’re our connective tissue into the community. They help us push communications out, feed us project priorities, and we do the care and feeding in return: collateral, project delivery, grant writing, support with their community marketing.

For many Fire Safe Councils, it might be a retired teacher or a landowner running things. To expect them to write grants, do environmental compliance, and manage vendors is totally unrealistic.

Our model works because they can rely on us for all that back-end heavy lifting, while they stay focused on the community, which keeps us from getting complacent, because that’s the other big challenge in wildfire.

Every Fire Safe Council has its own Community Wildfire Protection Plan and NFPA Firewise designation, but they all roll up into the countywide CWPP. And all project priorities on the fuel and containment side are determined by the firefighting authorities (Napa County Fire, the city fire departments, CAL FIRE), not by us unilaterally.

JN: The program grew out of the reality that Napa, and this isn’t unique to Napa, has a lot of large landowners holding forested land, oak woodland, and mixed hardwood conifer forests, both burned and unburned from the major fires of the last seven years. To think about county-wide resilience, we have to figure out how to work with those landowners and understand what their needs are.

We ran focus groups and quickly discovered a few distinct groups. There are landowners with financial means who have done tremendous fuel mitigation, road improvement, and water storage work that nobody knows about. There are landowners willing to do more but who need to know it’ll improve their insurance or that firefighters will actually use the elements the landowner invests in. And then there are what we call property-wealthy but means-challenged landowners sitting on 450 acres with generational wealth tied to land at a very low tax basis, living on a fixed income, with limited capacity to invest.

The insight is that many of these large landowners possess critical locations for wildfire containment—about 25,000 to 30,000 of the 40,000 to 60,000 acres of forested land around the county—are strategic and critical. Firefighters look at topographically significant locations: where’s a ridge, a spur ridge, a wide saddle or bench? Those are places where they can take a stand and stop a fire. Many of those landowners already have legacy fire roads, ponds, reservoirs, areas of grazing and understory clearing, and if we can map those things and get them to firefighters as actionable intelligence, it improves containment outcomes. That’s the underpinning of Valley Stewards.

JN: Let me preface this by saying the insurance issue is very complicated, and I’m not going to claim this solves California’s insurance crisis. But we do seem to be making a difference because we’re helping insurance companies get a better understanding of contextualized risk around certain properties. Once they understand that some properties are more strategic by virtue of the resilience attributes landowners have invested in, they recognize those as likely priority locations where firefighters will want to take a stand.

We’re not telling insurers, “these properties can withstand a wildfire” or that “firefighters are going to save that house.” We’re saying: this 500-acre property has three and a half miles of critical dozer lines on a ridge, abundant water, good staging…those are properties firefighters want to know about because they could mount backfiring operations or retardant drops there. That changes how an insurer thinks about that property, and about the properties adjacent to it. We initially thought it would take ten years to develop 100 of these enhanced resilience sites (a formal designation we worked out with CAL FIRE). In our first year, we already have around 200 landowners enrolled and expect to reach 350 or so sites in three years.

If we can build large enhanced resilient sites around a suburban neighborhood, then the insurance companies are saying that they would think differently about those neighborhoods [because] we can provide actionable intelligence to firefighters about where they can take a stand before the fire even gets into the neighborhood and we can build these big swaths of resilience and buffering layers, that helps to protect those [suburban] neighborhoods as well.

We’ve participated in about a dozen insurance renewals that resulted in substantially lower premiums, increased coverage, better terms, and, in about four cases, got people off the FAIR Plan entirely. Another 15 or so renewals are in process now. CAL FIRE is also interested in expanding this framework to potentially six or eight additional counties.

SS: To simplify – for non-insurance people, myself included – what Joe is describing isn’t about individual policies, but about creating a recognized standard of mitigation that the market can respond to, giving insurers something they’ve never had before: real, verifiable data about what’s actually been done on the land. CAL FIRE told us what they need for rapid containment and response. We built this around that.

SS: One thing we pride ourselves on is that we generally don’t use fear-based marketing. You see a lot of organizations sharing structure-loss imagery over and over again. For our community, they know what that feels like. I don’t need to share triggering content—our hillsides have the scars. That’s enough.

The power of our organization is that we have all these Fire Safe Councils. We are locals. This is a neighborly effort, and we have those trusted local connections with institutional support behind it. We’re not a government organization, but we have the backing of our fire authority, the county, and electeds—while also having grassroots community trust. We speak concisely, clearly, and lean toward the technical side, which shows we know what we’re doing. We also use an agnostic approach to fuels treatment. It could be grazing, it could be mechanical treatment. Why does it matter? What matters is risk reduction.

And the messaging must change community by community. We’re constantly asking: how do we speak to the people of Napa City differently than the people of Calistoga? How do you speak to people in the suburbs versus those in the wildland-urban interface?

JN: The communities with the largest wisdom about this are often the ones that have directly experienced wildfire. They know what it feels like to be evacuated, to see fire on their hillside. In more suburban areas where wildfire has been a distant threat, it’s challenging to ask people to foot the bill. Enough time goes by without a fire, and people forget. Fire doesn’t care about a city boundary or a county line; it moves on fuel, weather, and topography, but keeping that reality in people’s minds is its own ongoing job.

JN: We consider ourselves realistic optimists. Fire will come again, but we think we can be prepared for it. When we started enrolling large landowners into the Valley Stewards Initiative, we uncovered something like $47 million in resilience investments—expanded water, improved roads, fuel reduction—that had been made privately but never captured or considered by firefighters or insurance companies. Meanwhile, we’ve been out there raising $36 million in grant funds and over $26 million in County Funds. Private industry, among just the first 100 landowners, has already matched nearly that amount, and we’re uncovering more and more of it.

By almost every measure we are far better off than we were in 2017 and 2020. PG&E has hardened a lot of infrastructure. More people have solar panels, batteries, or generators. Thousands of acres of fuel mitigation and forest health work have been completed. There’s a lot still to do, but we’re far more resilient now.

I’d also add that maintaining fire roads is one of the most cost-effective ways to mitigate risk, even if it sounds counterintuitive ecologically. We’re far better off maintaining existing roads properly, with water bars and erosion control, than letting them fall into disrepair and having firefighters push roads in an emergency in ways that aren’t ecologically sensitive. Good roaded infrastructure is valuable for containment and for doing prescribed fire, grazing, and forest health work.

SS: We know that pre-fire work makes a difference. We saw this in 2025. There was a fire in Napa County last year that, without pre-fire work, had every opportunity to greatly disrupt the communities of Angwin and Pope Valley. They contained it pretty quickly with zero structure loss. CAL FIRE said at their press conferences that they used those mapped resources in their operational planning. That’s enough for me to continue this work for the next hundred years.

And for anyone concerned about costs, these efforts reduce firefighting costs, too. If firefighters can contain fires faster, that’s fewer resources on the ground. The cost of rebuilding a single home in Napa County is greater than the critical ridgeline fuel break we just finished in the Mount Veeder area. The return on investment for doing this work ahead of time is massive. We’re honored to take the responsibility seriously, creating environments for firefighters to respond effectively and safely.

JN: For individual landowners: maintain vigilance, stay on top of notifications, track weather and fire conditions, and make those investments in defensible space and home hardening where you can. At the agency level, collaboration is everything. We can learn from [other counties], and we’re happy to share what we’re doing here.

SS: People should join their local Fire Safe Council. Even if you’re a quarter-acre property owner in the middle of town, there is something really empowering about working with your neighbors. Whether it’s a community work day, sharing education, or just inspiring one another, that connection matters. And it’s one of the most powerful ways we know to keep communities engaged over the long term.

Joe Nordlinger:<\/strong> In Napa, we filled a vacuum and were able to change the trajectory of how wildfire resilience was being approached in the county. We basically reorganized, recruited a new board, and decided that Napa Firewise would be the shared services platform doing all the grant writing, grants administration, environmental compliance, project development, and portfolio management for what are now 25 Fire Safe Councils.<\/p>

There are absolutely lessons that could apply in other counties. One thing we\u2019ve realized is that you have to think about your customers (homeowners, landowners, firefighters, etc.) and what the experience is like on their end. If the customer has to deal with nine different organizations, “Oh, you can go here for this. You can go there for that.” It just becomes so overwhelming and confusing that they tend to just get paralyzed.<\/p>

That said, I’m aware we’re a smaller, more affluent county with fewer players and a tight alignment with CAL FIRE through Napa County Fire. But the core insight is structural efficiency. If you’re trying to support 20 different nonprofits, all with their own overhead, there simply isn’t enough money to do that. You have to be very efficient.<\/p>

What we’ve uncovered is that there’s a lot of value in centralizing and aggregating data to drive better wildfire containment outcomes and better insurance outcomes.<\/strong><\/p>

If you have too many entities gathering their own data, you don’t benefit from the aggregation needed to get actionable intelligence to firefighters or tell a better story to insurers. And fragmentation is compounded by complacency; you go a few years without a fire, the vegetation grows back, and you can find yourself right back in a potential catastrophic situation.<\/span><\/p>

Stephanie Smithers: <\/strong>The community preparedness paired with the fuels management that we do is imperative to supporting wildfire response. It really helps us burn on our terms so we can help manage fire behavior and create opportunities for firefighters to contain wildfires faster and more safely.<\/p>

What Napa Firewise does well is understand that we must be flexible. It isn’t a cookie-cutter approach. The needs and risks vary by neighborhood, terrain, and landowner profile. Our communities run the full spectrum, from very affluent neighborhoods to rural areas with very limited means. We walk each Fire Safe Council through their own community wildfire protection plan rather than expecting them all to fit into one bucket.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"How do you manage 25 Fire Safe Councils without things becoming fragmented?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

JN:<\/strong> Our model is efficient because all our Fire Safe Councils are essentially satellite entities that are part of us. They’re our connective tissue into the community. They help us push communications out, feed us project priorities, and we do the care and feeding in return: collateral, project delivery, grant writing, support with their community marketing.<\/p>

For many Fire Safe Councils, it might be a retired teacher or a landowner running things. To expect them to write grants, do environmental compliance, and manage vendors is totally unrealistic.<\/p>

Our model works because they can rely on us for all that back-end heavy lifting, while they stay focused on the community, which keeps us from getting complacent, because that’s the other big challenge in wildfire.<\/strong><\/p>

Every Fire Safe Council has its own Community Wildfire Protection Plan and NFPA Firewise designation, but they all roll up into the countywide CWPP. And all project priorities on the fuel and containment side are determined by the firefighting authorities (Napa County Fire, the city fire departments, CAL FIRE), not by us unilaterally.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"What is the Valley Stewards program, and why does it focus on large private landowners?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

JN:<\/strong> The program grew out of the reality that Napa, and this isn’t unique to Napa, has a lot of large landowners holding forested land, oak woodland, and mixed hardwood conifer forests, both burned and unburned from the major fires of the last seven years. To think about county-wide resilience, we have to figure out how to work with those landowners and understand what their needs are.<\/p>

We ran focus groups and quickly discovered a few distinct groups. There are landowners with financial means who have done tremendous fuel mitigation, road improvement, and water storage work that nobody knows about. There are landowners willing to do more but who need to know it’ll improve their insurance or that firefighters will actually use the elements the landowner invests in. And then there are what we call property-wealthy but means-challenged landowners sitting on 450 acres with generational wealth tied to land at a very low tax basis, living on a fixed income, with limited capacity to invest.<\/p>

The insight is that many of these large landowners possess critical locations for wildfire containment\u2014about 25,000 to 30,000 of the 40,000 to 60,000 acres of forested land around the county\u2014are strategic and critical. Firefighters look at topographically significant locations: where’s a ridge, a spur ridge, a wide saddle or bench? Those are places where they can take a stand and stop a fire. Many of those landowners already have legacy fire roads, ponds, reservoirs, areas of grazing and understory clearing, and if we can map those things and get them to firefighters as actionable intelligence, it improves containment outcomes. That’s the underpinning of Valley Stewards.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"You mentioned that this program has been able to bring insurers back into Napa communities. How does that work?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

JN:<\/strong> Let me preface this by saying the insurance issue is very complicated, and I’m not going to claim this solves California’s insurance crisis. But we do seem to be making a difference because we’re helping insurance companies get a better understanding of contextualized risk around certain properties. Once they understand that some properties are more strategic by virtue of the resilience attributes landowners have invested in, they recognize those as likely priority locations where firefighters will want to take a stand.<\/p>

We’re not telling insurers, “these properties can withstand a wildfire” or that “firefighters are going to save that house.” We’re saying: this 500-acre property has three and a half miles of critical dozer lines on a ridge, abundant water, good staging\u2026those are properties firefighters want to know about because they could mount backfiring operations or retardant drops there. That changes how an insurer thinks about that property, and about the properties adjacent to it. We initially thought it would take ten years to develop 100 of these enhanced resilience sites (a formal designation we worked out with CAL FIRE). In our first year, we already have around 200 landowners enrolled and expect to reach 350 or so sites in three years.<\/strong><\/p>

If we can build large enhanced resilient sites around a suburban neighborhood, then the insurance companies are saying that they would think differently about those neighborhoods [because] we can provide actionable intelligence to firefighters about where they can take a stand before the fire even gets into the neighborhood and we can build these big swaths of resilience and buffering layers, that helps to protect those [suburban] neighborhoods as well.<\/p>

We’ve participated in about a dozen insurance renewals that resulted in substantially lower premiums, increased coverage, better terms, and, in about four cases, got people off the FAIR Plan entirely.<\/strong> Another 15 or so renewals are in process now. CAL FIRE is also interested in expanding this framework to potentially six or eight additional counties.<\/p>

SS: <\/strong>To simplify \u2013 for non-insurance people, myself included \u2013 what Joe is describing isn’t about individual policies, but about creating a recognized standard of mitigation that the market can respond to, giving insurers something they’ve never had before: real, verifiable data about what’s actually been done on the land. CAL FIRE told us what they need for rapid containment and response. We built this around that.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"What have you learned about communicating wildfire risk in a way that actually motivates people to act?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

SS:<\/strong> One thing we pride ourselves on is that we generally don’t use fear-based marketing. You see a lot of organizations sharing structure-loss imagery over and over again. For our community, they know what that feels like. I don’t need to share triggering content\u2014our hillsides have the scars. That’s enough.<\/p>

The power of our organization is that we have all these Fire Safe Councils. We are locals. This is a neighborly effort, and we have those trusted local connections with institutional support behind it.<\/strong> We’re not a government organization, but we have the backing of our fire authority, the county, and electeds\u2014while also having grassroots community trust. We speak concisely, clearly, and lean toward the technical side, which shows we know what we’re doing. We also use an agnostic approach to fuels treatment. It could be grazing, it could be mechanical treatment. Why does it matter? What matters is risk reduction.<\/p>

And the messaging must change community by community. We’re constantly asking: how do we speak to the people of Napa City differently than the people of Calistoga? How do you speak to people in the suburbs versus those in the wildland-urban interface?<\/p>

JN:<\/strong> The communities with the largest wisdom about this are often the ones that have directly experienced wildfire.<\/strong> They know what it feels like to be evacuated, to see fire on their hillside. In more suburban areas where wildfire has been a distant threat, it’s challenging to ask people to foot the bill. Enough time goes by without a fire, and people forget. Fire doesn’t care about a city boundary or a county line; it moves on fuel, weather, and topography, but keeping that reality in people’s minds is its own ongoing job.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"What gives you hope? What's the bright spot in the often difficult world of wildfire?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

JN:<\/strong> We consider ourselves realistic optimists. Fire will come again, but we think we can be prepared for it. When we started enrolling large landowners into the Valley Stewards Initiative, we uncovered something like $47 million in resilience investments\u2014expanded water, improved roads, fuel reduction\u2014that had been made privately but never captured or considered by firefighters or insurance companies.<\/strong> Meanwhile, we’ve been out there raising $36 million in grant funds and over $26 million in County Funds. Private industry, among just the first 100 landowners, has already matched nearly that amount, and we’re uncovering more and more of it.<\/p>

By almost every measure we are far better off than we were in 2017 and 2020. PG&E has hardened a lot of infrastructure. More people have solar panels, batteries, or generators. Thousands of acres of fuel mitigation and forest health work have been completed. There’s a lot still to do, but we’re far more resilient now.<\/p>

I’d also add that maintaining fire roads is one of the most cost-effective ways to mitigate risk, even if it sounds counterintuitive ecologically. We’re far better off maintaining existing roads properly, with water bars and erosion control, than letting them fall into disrepair and having firefighters push roads in an emergency in ways that aren’t ecologically sensitive. Good roaded infrastructure is valuable for containment and for doing prescribed fire, grazing, and forest health work.<\/p>

SS:<\/strong> We know that pre-fire work makes a difference. We saw this in 2025. There was a fire in Napa County last year that, without pre-fire work, had every opportunity to greatly disrupt the communities of Angwin and Pope Valley. They contained it pretty quickly with zero structure loss. CAL FIRE said at their press conferences that they used those mapped resources in their operational planning. That’s enough for me to continue this work for the next hundred years.<\/p>

And for anyone concerned about costs, these efforts reduce firefighting costs, too. If firefighters can contain fires faster, that’s fewer resources on the ground. The cost of rebuilding a single home in Napa County is greater than the critical ridgeline fuel break we just finished in the Mount Veeder area. The return on investment for doing this work ahead of time is massive.<\/strong> We’re honored to take the responsibility seriously, creating environments for firefighters to respond effectively and safely.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"Any final advice for individual residents, or for organizations in other counties looking to learn from your model?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

JN:<\/strong> For individual landowners: maintain vigilance, stay on top of notifications, track weather and fire conditions, and make those investments in defensible space and home hardening where you can. At the agency level, collaboration is everything. We can learn from [other counties], and we’re happy to share what we’re doing here.<\/p>

SS: <\/strong>People should join their local Fire Safe Council. Even if you’re a quarter-acre property owner in the middle of town, there is something really empowering about working with your neighbors. Whether it’s a community work day, sharing education, or just inspiring one another, that connection matters. And it’s one of the most powerful ways we know to keep communities engaged over the long term.<\/p>"}}]}

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