Politics is local. Climate risk is too
· 20 min read
Not long ago, during the height of fire season in Northern California, I looked around my own neighbourhood in Redding and saw a herd of goats methodically eating their way through the grasses and underbrush. They were not there by accident. They were part of a local effort to remove vegetation that can become fuel when months of California heat have dried the landscape and the possibility of wildfire becomes part of daily life. Having recently returned to Redding, the city where I was born, the sight struck me differently than it might have years ago. I have spent much of my professional life thinking about sustainability, development, resilience and systemic risk at national and international scales. Here, within walking distance of home, was adaptation in one of its simplest forms.
Since returning, I have also begun attending Redding City Council meetings and becoming more involved in the civic life of the community. I have listened to discussions about electricity, infrastructure, flooding, emergency preparedness, economic development and the future of a city that I knew first as a child. The experience has reinforced an old lesson of American politics that becomes much more meaningful when experienced firsthand: politics is local. Increasingly, I have come to believe the same is true of climate risk. Climate change may be planetary in scale, but most people will encounter its consequences through something much closer to home.
That distinction matters as the United States moves through another midterm election season. Climate change remains enormously consequential, yet it competes for attention with problems that feel much more immediate. Families are worried about the economy, housing, healthcare, food and energy. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have created enormous geopolitical uncertainty. Oil prices have again demonstrated how quickly conflict thousands of miles away can influence household expenses thousands of miles from the battlefield. Americans are not irrational for focusing on those pressures. What would be irrational is assuming that climate risk becomes less important simply because other crises are demanding our attention at the same time.
The political environment reflects that competition for attention. In an October 2026 Pew Research Center survey, 84 percent of registered voters described the economy as very important to their vote in the congressional elections. Environment and climate policy was considered very important by 41 percent. Energy policy, foreign policy, healthcare, immigration, education and the future of democracy all competed for the finite attention of voters confronting a complicated political and economic environment.
The economic anxiety behind those numbers is equally significant. Seventy-four percent of Americans surveyed by Pew said they were very concerned about gasoline and energy prices, while 73 percent expressed the same level of concern about food and consumer goods. Concern over housing and healthcare costs was also widespread. These are not abstract political preferences. They describe pressures that people experience every time they buy groceries, pay rent, fill a vehicle, receive an insurance bill or open a utility statement.
Global events have made those concerns more acute. Oil markets have again become a reminder that modern economies remain deeply exposed to geopolitical disruption. In late October, Brent crude was trading above $115 per barrel as renewed instability around Middle Eastern energy infrastructure raised fears about global supply. The continuing war in Ukraine remains another source of geopolitical and energy uncertainty. When energy prices rise, the effects do not remain confined to commodity markets. Transportation becomes more expensive, agricultural inputs rise, manufacturing costs increase, freight costs move upward and eventually many of those pressures appear in consumer prices.
It is therefore understandable that climate change can move down the political agenda when people are confronting more immediate financial problems. The mistake is treating these issues as though they exist independently of one another. Climate change, energy security, infrastructure, insurance, food systems, public health and economic resilience are increasingly interconnected. The choice is not between caring about the cost of living and caring about climate change. In many cases, climate risk is already becoming part of the cost of living.
Redding provides an unusually powerful place from which to consider this relationship because natural hazards are already embedded in the memory of the community. The Carr Fire began west of Redding in July 2018 and ultimately burned 229,651 acres across Shasta and Trinity counties. It destroyed 1,614 structures and killed seven people. Those figures describe the scale of the disaster, but for people who lived through it they represent something more personal: neighbourhoods threatened or destroyed, families evacuated, roads closed and a landscape transformed in a matter of days.
Flooding has also repeatedly demonstrated how environmental hazards can become infrastructure and public-safety problems. In December 2025, intense rainfall caused flash flooding around Redding and other parts of Northern California, inundating roads and homes, requiring water rescues and resulting in a death after a person became trapped in a vehicle. Parts of Redding received several inches of rain during the event. The National Weather Service recorded 8.09 inches of precipitation in Redding during December, well above the normal monthly total.
The weather records have continued to provide examples of variability. On April 26, 2026, Redding received 1.39 inches of rain, breaking a daily rainfall record of 1.05 inches established in 1894. Several months later, on October 6, the temperature at Redding Airport reached 103 degrees Fahrenheit, tying the record for that date and standing 18 degrees above the normal daily maximum. These individual events should not be presented as proof that climate change directly caused a particular storm or hot day. Weather has always varied, and extreme events occurred long before modern climate change. What matters is the larger pattern in which existing hazards are interacting with changing climatic conditions.
California’s own climate adaptation planning describes that broader pattern. For the Sacramento Valley, the state expects increasing variability between extremely wet and dry periods, making the region more vulnerable to both drought and flooding. Rising temperatures are expected to alter snowpack and runoff patterns, while hotter and drier summers increase the potential for larger and more intense wildfires. The important point is not that climate change invents hazards that never existed before. It changes the conditions surrounding hazards that communities already know.
A wildfire may still begin because of a vehicle, a power line, lightning or human activity, but the temperature, moisture level and condition of surrounding vegetation influence what happens next. Rainfall has always produced flooding, but precipitation intensity, land use, drainage capacity and infrastructure determine whether a storm remains manageable or becomes destructive. Climate risk therefore emerges from interactions. It can amplify vulnerabilities that already exist within communities, economies and infrastructure systems.
This is why the goats I saw in my own neighbourhood stayed with me. At first glance, they looked almost comically low-tech compared with the scale of the climate problem. We live in an era of satellites, artificial intelligence, advanced climate models, remote sensing and increasingly sophisticated predictive analytics, yet one method for reducing wildfire exposure involves releasing animals onto a hillside and allowing them to eat.
The approach is more deliberate than it looks. Redding Electric Utility’s wildfire mitigation planning identifies annual goat grazing in high-risk areas as one component of its wildfire prevention strategy. The city’s 2025 Wildfire Mitigation Plan reports that an outside grazing contractor cleared 167 acres through goat vegetation management during the previous year. The same plan includes other measures, including vegetation clearing, wrapping utility poles with fire-resistant materials, emergency communications and targeted work in high-risk areas. Goat grazing is not the strategy; it is one part of a larger system intended to reduce the probability that a fire will become catastrophic.
There is an important lesson in that simplicity. Climate adaptation is sometimes discussed as though every solution must involve enormous infrastructure investments or technological breakthroughs. Many will. Electrical grids will need to become more resilient. Water systems will need to adjust to changing conditions. Communities will require better forecasting, emergency communications, risk mapping and infrastructure planning. Yet effective adaptation is rarely one massive solution. It is usually the accumulation of many interventions, some technologically sophisticated and others almost ancient, that collectively reduce vulnerability.
Seeing those goats during peak fire season made adaptation tangible to me in a way that another report or model could not. They were reducing fuel in the same neighbourhood where people live, drive, raise families and expect the electricity to remain on. Their presence illustrated the difference between talking about resilience as an abstract objective and actually building it into the operation of a community. It also demonstrated something I have increasingly come to believe about complex systems: resilience is often created through layers. No single intervention eliminates risk, but each layer can make it more difficult for one failure to become a catastrophe.
One reason climate change struggles to compete politically with inflation is that the two subjects are often presented as opposites. Economic concerns are treated as immediate and practical, while climate change is described as environmental and long-term. That distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to defend because climate exposure eventually produces financial consequences.
Insurance is one of the clearest examples. A wildfire does not disappear from an insurer’s balance sheet because climate change is unpopular in an election year. Neither does a flood, hurricane or severe storm. Insurers price expected losses, homeowners need coverage, mortgage lenders require protection for financed properties, businesses insure physical assets and governments eventually face pressure when private markets cannot absorb or adequately price extreme risk. When hazards become more frequent, more severe or more expensive, those changes eventually influence premiums, availability and investment decisions.
Infrastructure follows the same logic. When intense precipitation exceeds the capacity of a drainage system, someone pays to repair damaged roads, replace culverts, reinforce bridges or expand stormwater systems. When wildfire threatens electrical transmission and distribution infrastructure, utilities invest in vegetation management, hardening, monitoring and emergency preparedness. When extreme heat raises electricity demand, generation and grid capacity must be capable of meeting that demand. When drought changes water availability, communities invest in storage, conservation, treatment and new supply strategies.
These costs eventually appear somewhere. They may be carried by municipal budgets, insurance premiums, utility rates, taxes, bonds, corporate balance sheets or federal disaster assistance. The accounting category may change, but the economic burden remains. Climate risk does not stop being climate risk merely because its cost arrives as an insurance premium, a utility investment or a public-works project.
That makes resilience an economic question as much as an environmental one. The relevant calculation is not simply how much society should spend on climate policy. It is how much physical and financial vulnerability society is willing to carry without preparing for it. Failing to invest in resilience does not necessarily save money. Sometimes it merely postpones the expenditure until after a disaster, when the options are fewer and the costs are larger.
Modern organisations are exceptionally good at measuring the cost of preparation and far less capable of measuring the value of catastrophes that never occur. A city can calculate what it paid a contractor to manage vegetation. It cannot easily place a number on the fire that did not spread because a fuel load had been reduced. A utility knows what it spent to reinforce infrastructure, but calculating the exact economic value of an outage that never happened is much more difficult.
This creates a structural bias toward short-term efficiency. Redundant systems appear wasteful when they are not being used. Backup capacity appears unnecessary when the primary system is functioning. Maintaining additional suppliers raises procurement costs. Additional drainage capacity seems excessive during ordinary rain. Emergency reserves sit idle most of the time. Vegetation management must be performed repeatedly, even in years when no major fire occurs nearby.
Yet resilience often looks inefficient precisely until the moment it becomes essential. A backup supplier suddenly becomes valuable when the primary supplier fails. Additional electrical capacity becomes important during an extreme heat event. A second communications system becomes indispensable when the first system stops functioning. A hillside cleared of heavy vegetation may never provide a dramatic return that can be displayed on a quarterly report, but that does not mean the investment had no value.
Climate change increases the importance of this distinction because historical averages become less reliable as planning tools when environmental conditions are changing. Infrastructure built around rainfall patterns from previous decades may remain perfectly adequate most of the time while becoming increasingly vulnerable to extreme events. Electricity systems designed around historical peak temperatures can face new pressures when extreme heat intensifies. Wildfire planning based on earlier seasons may underestimate changes in fuel conditions, vegetation and temperature.
Resilience therefore requires a different relationship with efficiency. The objective should not be waste, duplication or unlimited precaution. Resources remain finite and every dollar spent in one place cannot be spent somewhere else. The challenge is identifying where additional capacity, redundancy or preparation produces enough reduction in vulnerability to justify its cost. That is ultimately an economic decision, but it requires calculating risk across a longer time horizon than the next budget cycle.
The current instability in global energy markets illustrates another weakness in the way climate policy is often framed. Oil prices rise when geopolitical instability threatens production, refineries, pipelines or important shipping corridors. Governments then focus, understandably, on immediate supply: whether producers can increase output, whether inventories are sufficient, whether strategic reserves should be used and whether transportation routes will remain secure.
Those questions are necessary. Modern economies cannot simply stop using energy while waiting for a cleaner future. Households must drive, factories must operate, goods must move and electricity must remain available. Energy transitions that ignore affordability and reliability will struggle economically and politically.
However, a crisis that exposes dependence on particular fuels, producers or transportation routes should also raise a longer-term question: how much geopolitical vulnerability should an economy be willing to accept?
The answer is not simply to replace one source of energy with another. Solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric power, nuclear energy, natural gas, storage and other technologies have different capabilities and constraints. Some are intermittent. Some require substantial capital investment. Some require new transmission. Some depend on minerals or supply chains concentrated in other parts of the world. Resilience comes not from pretending those trade-offs do not exist, but from building a system with enough diversity and flexibility that disruption in one area does not become systemic.
Seen from this perspective, climate policy and energy security overlap considerably. Improving efficiency lowers energy consumption and reduces exposure to price volatility. Distributed generation can give some communities and facilities additional options when centralised systems are disrupted. Grid modernisation can support renewable integration while also strengthening reliability. Domestic low-carbon energy can reduce emissions while reducing dependence on imported fuels. In the right circumstances, the same investment can address economic, security and environmental objectives simultaneously.
This is one of the central problems with treating climate change as a separate political category. Climate risk does not remain inside an environmental department. Energy policy affects national security. Water affects agriculture and economic development. Wildfire affects insurance, housing, public health and electricity. Flooding affects transportation, municipal finance and land use. The boundaries in government organisations are often much clearer than the boundaries in the physical world.
National governments dominate the political climate debate because they control major regulatory, fiscal and energy policies. International negotiations receive attention because greenhouse gases cross every border. Yet much of the actual work of adapting to climate change occurs at levels of government that receive far less attention.
Cities manage streets, drainage systems, land-use decisions and emergency response. Utilities maintain electrical infrastructure. Fire departments plan for wildfire. Water agencies manage supply and treatment. Planning departments determine where new development can occur and under what conditions. Local officials make decisions about capital improvements that may determine how well a community functions during a future disaster.
This is something I have come to appreciate more deeply since returning to Redding and attending local meetings. The global climate problem eventually becomes a local engineering problem, a local budget problem or a local public-safety problem. Changes in extreme heat become questions about electricity demand. Flood risk becomes a conversation about drainage and roads. Wildfire becomes vegetation management, emergency communications and utility hardening. A climate projection produced by scientists can eventually influence decisions made by a city engineer or public-works department years later.
At that level, ideological arguments begin to lose some of their usefulness. A community may remain politically divided over federal emissions policy while still agreeing that homes should be protected from wildfire, roads should not routinely become impassable during storms and essential services should remain available during an emergency. People do not have to agree about every component of national climate policy to ask whether their own community is adequately prepared for hazards that already exist.
This makes resilience a potentially more productive point of entry into the climate conversation. Instead of beginning with ideological identity, it begins with practical questions about exposure. Which neighbourhoods are most vulnerable? Which systems are essential? Where can a small failure cascade into a larger one? Which infrastructure is approaching the limits of the conditions it was designed to withstand? Which relatively inexpensive interventions can reduce risk immediately, and which larger investments require years of planning?
Those questions are not politically neutral in the sense that every answer will produce universal agreement. Budgets are limited, priorities compete and communities will disagree over land use, regulation and public investment. Yet they shift the discussion away from whether risk exists and toward what level of risk a community is willing to accept.
Perhaps the deeper problem is our tendency to treat major public issues as though they must wait in a queue. When inflation rises, climate policy is expected to wait. When war begins, climate policy must wait. When energy becomes expensive, the energy transition must wait. When governments face fiscal pressure, infrastructure investment and adaptation can be deferred until conditions improve.
The problem is that the world rarely provides such clean sequencing. There will not be a moment when geopolitical conflict has ended, inflation has disappeared, public debt is no longer a concern, housing is universally affordable, artificial intelligence has stopped disrupting industries and every other major political controversy has been resolved. Climate change is occurring inside that world, not outside it.
This is not unique to climate. The defining feature of complex systems is that several risks can evolve simultaneously and interact in ways that make each one more difficult to manage. A geopolitical conflict can raise energy prices, which affect transportation and production costs, which contribute to inflation, which changes monetary policy and investment. A drought can affect agricultural output, water supplies, electricity generation, food prices and political stability. A wildfire can simultaneously become a public-health emergency, an insurance event, an infrastructure failure, a housing crisis and a municipal finance problem.
Businesses understand the necessity of managing several risks at once because they have no alternative. A company cannot stop thinking about cybersecurity because interest rates are high. It cannot suspend supply-chain management because labour costs have increased. It cannot ignore regulatory changes because executives are focused on quarterly earnings. Leadership consists partly of deciding how to allocate attention and resources among several important threats without pretending that the others have disappeared.
Governments face the same challenge. Prioritisation will always be necessary, and not every risk should receive equal resources at every moment. Immediate hardship may require immediate intervention. A war may demand urgent attention. A natural disaster may temporarily overwhelm nearly every other priority. But prioritisation is different from neglect. Multiple problems can matter at the same time, and capable institutions must learn to manage overlapping time horizons.
Climate change remains politically polarised in the United States. Pew’s October polling illustrates just how wide that gap has become: 66 percent of voters supporting Democratic congressional candidates described environment and climate policy as very important to their vote, compared with 15 percent of those supporting Republican candidates. Whatever one’s political preferences, that divide presents a practical governance challenge for a problem whose physical consequences do not change according to voting behaviour.
Resilience does not eliminate those disagreements, but it may create a broader vocabulary for addressing some of the underlying risks. A homeowner does not have to adopt a particular political identity to want a house protected from wildfire. A business does not need ideological agreement on climate policy to want reliable electricity, affordable insurance and transportation infrastructure that works. A farmer does not need to resolve the national climate debate before caring about water availability, extreme heat or changing precipitation.
This should not become an excuse to abandon mitigation. There are limits to adaptation. If warming continues indefinitely, the cost and difficulty of protecting communities, infrastructure and ecosystems will continue to rise. Reducing greenhouse-gas emissions remains necessary precisely because adaptation becomes harder as physical conditions become more extreme.
But mitigation and adaptation do not have to compete for intellectual space. One addresses how much additional change occurs; the other addresses how societies manage changes and hazards that are already present or increasingly difficult to avoid. Serious climate strategy requires both.
For years, much of my work on sustainability and development was international. I thought about institutions, energy systems, poverty, resilience, economic development and environmental risk across countries and regions with very different political and economic conditions. That experience remains central to how I understand climate change because the challenge is unquestionably global.
Yet returning to the place where I was born has changed the scale at which I see some of these issues.
It is one thing to analyse wildfire as a category of physical climate risk. It is another to drive through areas where people remember the Carr Fire vividly. It is one thing to read about extreme precipitation and infrastructure exposure. It is another to hear people in your own community discuss streets, creeks and neighbourhoods that have flooded. It is one thing to write professionally about vegetation management as a component of wildfire resilience. It is another to walk through your neighbourhood during fire season and see the goats doing the work.
That experience has reinforced something that the climate debate sometimes overlooks. Most people will never directly experience a global average temperature. They will experience what happens where they live. They will experience heat, smoke, water, insurance costs, electricity bills, damaged infrastructure, evacuation warnings and changing landscapes. Climate change becomes politically and economically meaningful when those global trends intersect with local systems.
This may also explain why communicating climate change primarily through distant projections has often struggled to sustain public attention. Global models and emissions pathways are essential to understanding where the planet is heading, but they can make the problem feel remote. Local resilience brings the discussion into the present. It asks whether the bridge, electrical line, drainage system, hospital, business district or neighbourhood in front of us is prepared for conditions that may be different from those under which it was designed.
The economy matters. Energy prices matter. Housing and healthcare matter. Ukraine matters. The conflict involving Iran and the wider instability of the Middle East matter. National security, immigration, public safety and the many other issues people consider when they vote matter. Climate change does not become unimportant because those problems are important too.
In fact, one of the defining governance challenges of this century will be learning to manage precisely this kind of environment: several serious risks unfolding simultaneously, interacting with one another and operating across different time horizons. Climate change is not the only risk confronting governments, companies and communities, but it increasingly shapes the conditions in which many other risks develop.
Waiting to address it until every more immediate problem has been solved would mean waiting forever. There will always be another election, another economic slowdown, another geopolitical confrontation or another unexpected crisis. The better approach is to build the capacity to respond to today’s problems while reducing vulnerability to tomorrow’s.
Here in Redding, some of that work can already be seen. It appears in wildfire mitigation, infrastructure planning, emergency preparedness and the difficult decisions local governments and utilities make about risks that may never produce a dramatic return on investment precisely because preparation prevented something worse from happening.
Sometimes that preparation involves advanced technology, sophisticated modelling and major capital investment. Sometimes it involves engineers strengthening infrastructure or emergency managers preparing for disasters that everyone hopes will never occur. And sometimes, during fire season in a neighbourhood in Northern California, it involves a herd of goats quietly eating the underbrush.
There is nothing abstract about that. It is adaptation taking place at the scale where people actually live.
Politics is local, but so are vulnerability, preparation and resilience. Climate change may be global, yet our ability to live with its consequences will ultimately depend on thousands of decisions made community by community, institution by institution and investment by investment. We do not have to solve every crisis before addressing climate risk. We have to become capable of addressing several important things at once.
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