Mayor Karen Bass: Los Angeles Needs to Adapt to Our Climate-Altered Future

Los Angeles residents are struggling to make sense of the devastating wildfires that have wiped out whole communities, forever changing the landscape of an acclaimed city.

While these disastrous urban wildfires seem unfathomable, Californians have increasinglyseen their state go up in flames in recent years. Unfortunately, the climate crisis has made these "natural" disasters more intense and more frequent. As the impacts of climate change escalate, the need for resiliency and adaptation is clearer than ever.

Mayor Karen Bass's recent executive ordermisses the mark in a big way. While quickly getting Angelenos who have been displaced back into their neighborhoods is understandable and needed, doing so in a landscape that will certainly and increasingly face the same dry, hot, windy conditions that allowed for this devastation in the first place is setting up Angelenos to fail. Rebuilding in the same places in the same ways as before fails to acknowledge or reduce the risks of climate change and ends up putting people into even more perilous situations than before.

Learn More: Living in Extreme Weather

While Los Angeles must contend with housing tens of thousands of people who have lost their homes and been displaced, these fires should ideally spur the city and state to recover in a way that dramatically reduces the risks of climate change for residents. The solution is not to replace "like with like" as it is written in the executive order. This is a reckless approach-we can and must do better. We have the ingenuity and resources to ensure those suffering today and future generations will never experience this level of devastation again.

State and city leaders can use the fires as an opportunity to accelerate implementation of the California Climate Adaptation Strategy, which identifies the need for urgent, integrated approaches that reduce risks from all climate hazards. City leaders can immediately review building codes and land use standards, ensuring climate- and disaster-informed standards are in place before beginning to rebuild.

Politicizingthe situation and spreading misinformation in order to withhold aid is an injustice to suffering Angelenos-legislators must not attach political strings on aid that our neighbors need and deserve.

However, an important distinction must be made: Los Angeles must become resilient, adapt to, and build communities that can better withstand future wildfires along with the inevitability of many other climate hazards, including sea level rise, drought, and extreme heat.

The climate crisis has already put us on a dangerous path, and we need to face that reality. We must change how we live, and many of us will have to change where we live.

Making sense of this extraordinary tragedy requires us all to acknowledge that our changing climate necessitates the need to completely overhaul the way we interact and live with nature.

How Los Angeles wants to rebuild or not must account for what living in the city will be like in our climate-altered, extreme weather future.

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