• Private home insurers are dropping a growing number of customers in most states, a Senate report found.
• That leaves homeowners at risk, turning to more expensive last-resort options or going uninsured.
• While Florida has managed to reverse the trend somewhat, the risk to homeowners is set to intensify.

As Americans flock to places in the US vulnerable to natural disasters, private home insurance companies are running the other way.

The problem has left a rising number of homeowners with just one option to cover property damage: insurers of last resort.

The scale of homeowners losing their plans became clearer on Wednesday after a Senate Budget Committee investigation found that private insurers' nonrenewals spiked threefold in more than 200 counties between 2018 and 2023.

"What our new data reveal is that the failure to deal with climate change is also affecting whether families can even get homeowners insurance, which threatens their ability to get a mortgage, which spells trouble for property values in climate-exposed communities across the country," Senate Budget Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse said in releasing the report.

A recent study by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies found that between 2018 and 2023, the number of properties enrolled in California and Florida's insurers of last resort more than doubled. A similar trend is playing out in Louisiana. While Florida has reduced participation this year, it still has the highest enrollment in the country.

The problem isn't isolated to the most predictable states. The Senate Budget Committee found that the rate of homeowners losing their private insurance also rose in Hawaii, North Carolina, and Massachusetts.

Policymakers and insurers are trying to stabilize the private market, by enacting new laws and overhauling regulations. However, with scientists predicting that climate-fueled disasters will become more frequent and severe for the foreseeable future, the risk to America's homeowners is mounting.

Growing insurance risk has some states looking for solutions

In nearly three dozen states, insurers of last resort, known as Fair Access to Insurance Requirements, or FAIR, are available to homeowners and businesses who struggle to find insurance on the private market.

The numbers are rising because private insurers are pulling back coverage and hiking premiums in areas at risk of wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, and other disasters often made worse by climate change.

While state-mandated FAIR plans are designed to be a backstop, insurance regulators and private insurance companies are alarmed by how many homeowners and businesses are enrolling, especially in California and Florida. The plans are often more expensive and provide less coverage. Plus, saddling one insurer with the riskiest policies increases the chances of one major disaster sinking the system and leaving taxpayers and insurance companies with the bill.

Florida and California are trying to reverse the trend, and Florida has seen some progress. The state's insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, said on December 4 that its policy count dropped below 1 million for the first time in two years.

Mark Friedlander, a spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute, said the drop reflects a series of changes in recent years to stabilize the state's private insurance market after more than a dozen companies left the state or stopped writing new policies.

The Florida legislature passed laws to curb rampant litigation and claim fraud that drove up legal costs for private insurers. Friedlander said insurance lawsuits in the first three quarters of 2024 are down 56%, compared with the first three quarters of 2021 — the year before the new laws were enacted. Citizens also started a "depopulation" program that shifts customers to the private market. State regulators in October said they had approved at least nine new property companies to enter the market, and premiums weren't rising nearly as much as last year.

In California, many of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires have occurred within the last five years. As a result, some private insurers are hiking premiums and limiting coverage in risky areas, pushing more homeowners to the insurer of last resort. The Harvard study found that policies in the state's FAIR plan doubled between 2018 and 2023 to more than 300,000. As of September, the California Insurance Commission said policies totaled nearly 452,000.

The commission is working to overhaul regulations to slow the trend, including requiring private insurers to sell in risky areas. In exchange, it should be easier for companies to raise premiums that factor in reinsurance costs and the risks of future disasters. That should help stabilize rates, said Michael Sollen, a spokesman for the commission.

Sollen added that in the past, private insurers could seek approval for higher premiums but weren't required to offer coverage in wildfire-prone areas.

"In a year from now, what's happening with the FAIR plan will be a key measure for us," he said. "We expect to see those numbers start to stabilize and go down."

A mounting home insurance crisis

Still, a reduction in state-backed plans isn't necessarily a sign of progress, Steve Koller, a postdoctoral fellow in climate and housing and author of the Harvard report, told Business Insider.

A growing number of homeowners in places like Florida, Louisiana, and California are purchasing private insurance from nontraditional providers barely regulated by state governments. These so-called "non-admitted" insurers don't contribute to a state fund that guarantees homeowners will have their claims paid even if the insurance provider fails, leaving their customers without access to this backup coverage.

"Someone could be moving to a private insurer from Citizens, and that insurer might have higher insolvency risk," Koller said.

He added that more homeowners are opting out of insurance altogether. The number of US homeowners going without insurance has soared from 5% in 2019 to 12% in 2022, the Insurance Information Institute reported.

Plus, Americans are increasingly moving into parts of the country most vulnerable to extreme weather. Tens of thousands more people moved into the most flood—and fire-prone areas of the US last year rather than out of them, the real estate company Redfin reported earlier this year.

As insurers of last resort try to shift more risk to the private market, home insurance premiums are expected to keep rising. That's especially true in the areas hardest hit by climate-fueled disasters.

If private insurers exit hard-hit regions en masse in the future, Koller said states might need to become the predominant insurance provider in the same way the National Flood Insurance Program took over after the private market for flood insurance collapsed in the 1960s. Most flood insurance plans are still issued by the federal government.

"My guess is states are going to work very, very hard to avoid that and ensure the existence of a robust private market, but that's a parallel that I can't personally unthink about," he said.

Have you struggled to get home insurance, moved to an insurer of last resort, or gone uninsured? Contact these reporters at [email protected] or [email protected].

Puffs of smoke rose above a meadow in northeastern Washington as a small test fire danced in the grass a few feet away from me. Pleased by its slow, controlled behavior, my crew members and I, as part of a training program led by the nonprofit organization The Nature Conservancy and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, began to light the rest of the field on fire. The scene had all the trappings of a wildfire — water hoses, fire engines, people in flame-resistant outfits. But we weren't there to fight it; we were there to light it.

It might sound counterintuitive, but prescribed fires, or intentionally lit fires, help lessen fire's destruction. Natural flames sparked by lightning and intentional blazes lit by Indigenous peoples have historically helped clean up excess vegetation that now serves as fuel for the wildfires that regularly threaten people's homes and lives across the West and, increasingly, across the country.

For millennia, lighting fires was common practice in America. But in the mid-to-late 1800s, the US outlawed Indigenous burning practices and started suppressing wildfires, resulting in a massive buildup of flammable brush and trees. That combined with the dry, hot conditions caused by the climate crisis has left much of the country at a dangerously high risk of devastating wildfires. The top 10 most destructive years by acreage burned have all occurred since 2004.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, federal land managers reevaluated their approach to fire and did the first prescribed burns in national parks. We're still making up for lost time: Scientists and land managers say millions more acres of prescribed burns are necessary to keep the country from burning out of control.

But the scale of the task doesn't match that of the labor force, whose focus is often extinguishing fires, not starting them. Responding to the increase in natural disasters has left America with few resources to actually keep them from happening. As Mark Charlton, a prescribed-fire specialist with The Nature Conservancy, told me, "We need more people, and we need more time."

This fall, I outfitted myself in fire-resistant clothing and boots, donned a hard hat, and joined a training program called TREX to better understand how prescribed burns work. TREX hosts collaborative burns to provide training opportunities in the field for people from different employers and backgrounds. The hope is that more people will earn the qualifications they need to lead and participate in burns for the agencies they work for back home.

The program's emphasis on learning, coupled with the support of the University of Idaho's Artists-in-Fire Residency (which helped pay my way), is why I, a journalist with no fire jobs on my résumé, could join a prescribed-fire module of about two dozen more experienced participants. I had to pass a fitness test — speed walking three miles with a 45-pound backpack in under 45 minutes — take 40 hours' worth of online coursework, and complete field-operations training to participate as a crew member. While hundreds of people have participated in TREX burns across the country since the program's inception in 2008, the dramatic growth of wildfires is outpacing the number of people being trained to reduce their impact.

The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of forests and grasslands across the country, burning an average of about 1.4 million acres, roughly the size of Delaware, each year with prescribed burns. It burned a record 2 million acres in fiscal 2023. But it's still not enough preparation, considering wildfires have burned over 10 million acres in recent years and people continue building and living in wildfire-prone areas. "It's a huge workload we have, and we know it," said Adam Mendonca, a deputy director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service who oversees the agency's prescribed-fire program. The agency plans to chip away at the problem with the roughly 11,300 wildland firefighters it employs each year who squeeze the work in during the offseason, when there are fewer fires to fight.

But relying on wildland firefighters can be problematic. "We only have those resources for a short time," said Charlton, who served as the incident commander on the Washington burns I joined this fall. "After a long fire season, people are exhausted. It's hard to get people to commit." Plus, wildfires are increasingly overlapping with the ideal windows to do prescribed burns — often the spring and the fall, when conditions are cooler and wetter, making fires easier to tame.

That was especially true this year: Multiple large fires burned across the West into October. These late-season wildfires, coupled with two hurricanes that firefighters helped respond to, strained federal resources. That month, the nation's fire-preparedness level increased to a 5 — the highest level — indicating the country's emergency crews were at their maximum capacity and would've struggled to respond to new incidents.

In response to the elevated preparedness level, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group urged "extreme caution" in executing new prescribed fires, saying backup firefighters or equipment might not be available. "We get to the point where we're competing for resources," said Kyle Lapham, the certified-burner-program manager for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and the burn boss on the Washington burns.

There's also a qualification shortage. Prescribed burns require a well-rounded group with a variety of expertise and positions — including a burn boss, who runs the show and must have years of training. Charlton estimated that hundreds more qualified burn bosses are necessary to tackle nationwide prescribed-burn goals.

Just as concerning is an interest shortage. The Forest Service has struggled to hire for and maintain its federal firefighting force in recent years, in large part because of poor pay (federal firefighter base pay was raised to $15 an hour in 2022) and other labor disputes over job classifications, pay raises, staffing, and more. The agency is also expecting budget cuts next year and has already said it won't be able to hire its usual seasonal workforce as a result.

Legislation inching its way through Congress could help, though its fate under a new administration is unclear. The National Prescribed Fire Act of 2024 would direct hundreds of millions of dollars to the Forest Service and the US Department of the Interior for prescribed burns, including investment in training a skilled workforce — but it hasn't progressed past a Senate subcommittee hearing in June.

Without a boost in funding, the agency will continue relying heavily on partnerships with nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy and the National Forest Foundation to staff prescribed burns. The Forest Service also recently expanded its Prescribed Fire Training Center to host educational opportunities out West. Critically, though, time is of the essence.

During my TREX training in October, about 20 foresters and firefighters from as far south as Texas and as far north as British Columbia worked beside me. Our group included employees of the Washington Department of Natural Resources and two citizens of the nearby Spokane Tribe of Indians, who have a robust prescribed-fire program of their own.

Over two weeks I got a front-row seat to how much planning (sometimes years) and time a single prescribed burn takes. We conducted several burns in the mountains north of Spokane on the property of a receptive landowner who'd hosted TREX in previous years. He provided the training ground and, in exchange, got work done on his property. This isn't a common scenario — burning on private land can be more complicated, and so more burns happen on state or federal property.

When I arrived, the burn's incident-management team had already put together a burn plan detailing our objectives — reducing wildfire risk to the landowner's house, thinning small tree saplings, knocking down invasive weeds, opening up more wildlife habitat — and the exact weather conditions, like wind speed, relative humidity, and temperature, we needed to safely burn. Prescribed burns on federal lands also go through an environmental review.

At the site, we scouted contained areas we would burn, called units, with trainees making additional plans for how to ignite and control fires. Keeping a fire in its intended location, called "holding," meant lots of prep work, like digging shallow trenches to box the fire in. During the burn, teams monitored smoke and occasionally sprayed the larger trees we wanted to preserve with water when flames threatened their canopies; others poured fuel on the ground, igniting bushes, grass, and smaller trees to slowly build the fire.

Managing the fire didn't end when we finished burning the 30 or so acres. In some cases, it can involve days of monitoring and cleanup. To make sure the fire was out, my crew and I combed through areas we'd burned the day before for smoke or heat. If we discovered something still smoking, we'd churn up the ground with a shovel or pickax, douse the hot spot with water, and repeat. Just when we thought we were done, we'd find another spot we'd missed.

I went to bed those nights dreaming of little puffs of smoke and woke up with small flakes of ash embedded behind my ears. The work was rewarding and exhausting — I left with a deeper appreciation for the workers who do it for a living.

While every prescribed burn is different, it's always a careful equation. Everything needs to line up: supportive communities, the right weather, and, of course, the workers necessary to plan, burn, and extinguish. Only then can you light the match.

Kylie Mohr is a Montana-based freelance journalist and correspondent for the magazine High Country News.

• The Arctic is rapidly changing from the climate crisis, with no "new normal," scientists warn.
• Wildfires and permafrost thaw are making the tundra emit more carbon than it absorbs.
• From beaver invasions to giant holes, drastic changes in the Arctic are affecting the entire planet.

From Alaska to Siberia, the Arctic is changing so rapidly that there is no "normal" there now, scientists warn. The consequences reach across the globe.

The Arctic tundra now releases more carbon than it naturally draws down from the sky, as wildfires burn down its trees and permafrost thaw releases potent gases from its soil.

Once-brown regions are turning green with vegetation, while green areas are turning brown and barren. Sea ice and herds of caribou are disappearing.

This summer was the wettest on record for the Arctic overall, as rain is becoming more common than snow in some areas. Region by region, though, rainfall and the snow season are knocking down both high and low records.

Decades of data on "vital signs" suggest that "the Arctic exists now within a new regime, in which conditions year after year are substantially different than just a couple of decades ago," Twila Moon, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said in a briefing on Tuesday.

"Climate change is not bringing about a new normal," she added. "Instead, climate change is bringing ongoing and rapid change."

That's because the Arctic is warming about four times faster than the rest of the planet, according to previous research.

The increase in average temperatures is changing weather and landscapes in the Arctic, speeding up the climate crisis worldwide.

Giant holes, beaver invasions, and polar wildfires

For example, beavers are moving into Alaska's tundra and transforming its waterways with their dams, as warmer conditions have brought more wooded, comfortable riverbanks for them.

In Siberia, a giant hole in the ground is rapidly growing because the permafrost — a layer of soil that used to be permanently frozen — is thawing.

That's an extreme example, but melt and thaw is happening all over the planet's northernmost regions. Combined with drastic swings in weather year-to-year, these changes are wreaking havoc on Arctic landscapes, ecosystems, and people.

"These dramatic differences are making it difficult for communities to plan and they create safety issues for people who are used to more stable ice, snow, and temperature," Moon said.

She was presenting the Arctic Report Card, an update that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publishes each year, at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

This year's report revealed a crucial shift in northern landscapes: The Arctic tundra is no longer a net carbon sink, with its boreal forests pulling carbon dioxide from the sky. Now it's a net source of carbon emissions.

"This transition from a carbon sink to a source is of global concern," Brendan Rogers, a scientist studying the tundra at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, said in the briefing.

He added that the tundra's carbon emissions are relatively small for now, "but it's that transition that we're concerned about."

This shift is partly due to giant polar wildfires burning down tundra vegetation and all the carbon it's stored. It's also because of permafrost thaw, which releases large amounts of methane — a heat-trapping gas more potent than carbon dioxide — as bacteria in the soil digest thawing plant matter.

Meanwhile, rising Arctic temperatures are driving ice melt, including on the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is a major contributor to sea-level rise worldwide. Rising oceans are already increasing flooding in coastal cities across the planet.

For example, US coastal cities from Boston to San Diego have seen more and more flood days per year every decade since 1950, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Arctic science is more important than ever

Reporters asked the NOAA scientists about the incoming Trump administration and whether they were concerned about losing funding for their Arctic research.

"The need, the requirement, the demand signal if you will, is higher than ever before," Richard Spinrad, the NOAA Administrator, said in the briefing.

Changes in extreme weather and sea level across the globe show that "there's a need for these investments to increase right now," he said, adding that studies have shown "the return on those investments is extraordinary, in many cases 10 to 1 in terms of protection of lives and property."

• Climate change poses a threat to US national parks like Yellowstone.
• Warmer temperatures and extreme weather impact both ecosystems and visitors.
• Advocates hope witnessing changes to the parks will inspire visitors to help protect them.

Each year, over 300 million visitors explore the hundreds of parks that make up the US National Park system. These spaces offer unparalleled views of mountains and forests, immersing people in the sights and sounds of nature that are often missing from their everyday lives.

But the national parks are in trouble. "Most of our parks have multiple assaults on them," Chad Lord, senior director of environmental policy and climate change with the National Parks Conservation Association advocacy group, told Business Insider.

From hotter, drier weather to invasive species to more powerful storms, many of the country's parks are experiencing dramatic changes. For example, warming temperatures are making glaciers disappear from Glacier National Park.

From Alaska to Florida, here are six examples of how the climate crisis is changing national parks.

Glacier National Park is a geological marvel.

Montana's Glacier National Park sprawls over 1,500 miles, encompassing mountains, valleys, and glacial lakes. Even if you've never visited, you might recognize the park's Going-to-the-Sun Road, which was featured in the 1980 movie "The Shining."

Throughout the park, grizzly bears graze on huckleberries. Little rodent-like pikas, lynx, and Harlequin ducks are also adapted to the area's chilly weather.

Glacier National Park's glaciers are melting.

The park once held 80 glaciers. In 2015, NPS estimated only 26 were left. Satellites have captured the remaining few as they continue to shrink.

Warming temperatures are driving the glaciers' disappearance, which will impact the plants and animals that live there.

For example, mountain goats rely on snow patches to stay cool during the summer. In the winter, the snow helps keep tiny mouse-like rodents, called pikas, insulated from the bitter cold.

Denali National Park has breathtaking views.

Together the Denali National Park and Preserve are larger than New Hampshire, stretching nearly 9,500 square miles of Alaskan terrain. Winter days there are short and cold, with temperatures as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit.

The park originally began as a way to protect Dall sheep. Today, an estimated 2,000 big-horned sheep brave the chilly climate. Red foxes, snowshoe hares, and dozens of bird species are also around, in addition to grizzlies, wolves, and moose. Even a small wood frog, the park's only amphibian, can survive the subarctic environment.

Part of Denali's road has been impassable for years.

In the 1960s, the Pretty Rocks landslide began cracking the road leading to the park. In 2014, the landslide was moving a few inches every year. By 2021, it was moving a few inches per hour. The road is now closed at about its halfway point, cutting off vehicle access to sites like Wonder Lake.

While the annual average temperature of the park was once well below freezing, it's now close to 32 °F, according to NPS. The warmer weather and melting permafrost is making the landslide move more quickly. The road is cut into a rock glacier, "and little bits of climate warming are causing this big kind of slump, and the road is falling off the cliff," said Cassidy Jones, a senior visitation program manager with NPCA.

The trees are tall and mighty at Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks.

At Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, visitors can enjoy over 1,300 square miles of trails, trees, foothills, and lakes. Groves of sequoia trees dominate some parts of the landscape, including the famous General Sherman tree towering almost 275 feet high. With its 100-foot circumference, it's one of the largest trees by volume in the world.

Closer to the ground, vivid flora like Evalyn's jewel flower grow and kingsnakes slither. Gophers, skunks, and squirrels scamper about, along with larger mammals like black bears, mule deer, and mountain lions. The parks span a range of habitats, making it a bird-watcher's paradise.

A 2021 fire ravaged swaths of the Sequoia National Park.

In 2021, lightning struck several areas, igniting what became the KNP Complex Fire. A year earlier, the Castle Fire also ravaged Sequoia National Park. Fires over those two years killed between 8,400 to 12,000 sequoias. Some of the trees were thousands of years old.

Forest fires aren't uncommon, but the sequoias were already vulnerable after a lengthy drought. A combination of low humidity and high temperatures can be a dangerous combination when fires erupt. "Fires have gotten bigger and hotter," Jones said.

Sequoias have long been able to withstand fires, she said. "It tells you something different is going on in terms of just the way the fire is behaving, in the amplification of fire weather," she said.

Yellowstone is the US's first national park.

Covering 3,500 miles, most of it in Wyoming, Yellowstone became the US's first national park in 1872. It's home to Old Faithful, as well as many more geysers and hot springs.

Visitors sometimes have to halt their vehicles for bison crossing the road, and moose, bobcats, badgers, bats, and the many other species that live in the park.

However, warmer temperatures are speeding up snowmelt, changing vegetation, and leading to less water in some areas — all of which will likely force some wildlife to relocate. Every year, pronghorn antelope migrate through the park, a journey that's already risky as they cross over roads and fences. A lack of water and food could alter their path.

Yellowstone experienced extensive damage during a flood in 2022.

A mix of rain and snowmelt caused severe flooding in June 2022. The rushing water damaged roads, structures, and trails. NPS called it an unprecedented, 500-year flood. While the disaster was rare, warmer temperatures are increasing snowmelt and rain is falling instead of snow. Floods could become more common as the climate continues to change.

Death Valley has breathtaking views, day and night.

Along the California-Nevada border, Death Valley draws visitors keen to see the salt flats, sand dunes, and craters. It's 3.4 million acres of wilderness, making it one of the largest national parks in the country. At night, its remote location and aridity make it ideal for stargazing.

The scorching desert climate might not seem hospitable to many kinds of life. Yet jackrabbits, bats, tortoises, and roadrunners have all thrived in the park.

Death Valley is getting hotter by the year.

Extreme heat is nothing new for Death Valley. But in recent years, temperatures regularly soar past 125 degrees Fahrenheit in July. Plus, triple-digits can extend into October, and the nights don't get as cool.

The sizzling weather can be dangerous for visitors and residents, and plants and animals have difficulty coping, too. Some animals may start migrating to cooler climates, but some species may not survive. For example, the extremely rare Devils Home pupfish population, found only in Death Valley, has been in decline since the 1990s.

The Everglades host a wealth of biodiversity.

Located in Southern Florida, the Everglades National Park is a patchwork of unique ecosystems, from mangroves to pinelands. With 1.5 million acres of land, it has space for estuaries, giant cypress trees, and marshy rivers.

With so many habitats, a huge range of species create the delicate web of life that is the Everglades. Dozens of species of lizards and snakes scuttle and slither, while ducks, doves, and nighthawks mingle not far from flamingos. River otters and manatees also swim through different parts of the park.

Sea-level rise threatens the Everglades' Cape Sable.

Elevated temperatures, more-intense hurricanes, and rising sea levels are among the challenges the Everglades face. When salty seawater seeps into the park's coastal landscape, it can harm rare tropical orchids and other vegetation that can't cope with increased salinity.

Cape Sable lies at Florida's southwestern tip. Sea levels have risen at an accelerated pace over the last 100 years, according to NPS. Hurricanes and tropical storms have washed seawater into what was once freshwater marshes and lakes. The incursion threatens not only mangrove forests but wildlife like the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, which is only found in this unique habitat.