My climate change house hunt - Part 3

In the first two posts in this series, I introduced the idea of using The U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index as a house hunting aide, and then took a stab at customizing my own ranking system.

Today, I want to compare my model against some other climate risk rankings, and then look deeper at what the results portend for specific locations we are considering.

As a comparison point, I did some searching online and found two different rankings of cities from a climate risk perspective. I quickly located a list of “The Best and Worst US Cities to Live as Global Warming Worsens” from the website 24/7 Wall Street, and another - Architectural Digest’s list of “Most Climate-Resilient Cities.”

I transferred my ranking of counties to the same list of cities used in each publication, making sure we were comparing equivalent locations. Then, I simply plotted our respective rankings on a basic X-Y chart and visually scanned the results to see how things stacked up.

(It might be obvious by this point that statistical analysis is not my jam…I am sure there are more robust mathematical ways to test for correlation than squinting my eyes at a simple Excel chart. Eh. Whatever….)

First you can see the results of the CD Dispatch rankings versus the 24/7 Wall Street list:

And next the comparison with Architectural Digest:

In the first chart, you can see a nice grouping and linear relationship along the diagonal line…indicating generally that my ranking tool generated similar results as the 24/7 list. On the other hand, the second chart shows a much more dispersed pattern, indicating much less correlation.

So why the distinction? In digging further, the Architectural Digest methodology relies fairly heavily on population, with the assumption that urban areas with large populations will have more stress put on their resources than other areas. The logic is probably sound…but I don’t think it applies to our situation as we are looking at cities of all sizes. That and some other minor methodological choices make my Model and the Architectural Digest approach quite different.

SO, overall I am generally happy with how the CD Dispatch Model ranks things…. It correlates well with other studies (like the 24/7 Wall Street report), is tailored to our priorities, and frankly produces intuitive results. It makes sense.

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Quick sidebar - as you might expect, property insurance is an area where the impacts of climate change are first emerging into the economy. The following two reports are worth a quick read - detailing how rising insurance prices are making certain areas of the country less affordable for homeowners due to climate risk: Soaring Home Insurance Costs Could Push Homeowners Out of These 10 States and Insurance Rates Are Soaring for US Homeowners in Climate Danger Zones.

The CD Dispatch Model doesn’t include a factor for insurability…so I’ll have to keep this in mind.

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Now, let’s dig into what the newly validated CD Dispatch Model is telling us!

Below is a quick summary of counties we are considering. This was our wish list way before I even started exploring the climate risk question. We had zeroed in on these areas for various reasons, quality of life, proximity to friends and family, etc. But now I can apply the CD Dispatch data to those destinations and sense the relative differences between them.

Here are the climate risk results, both in terms of overall ranking and % ranking:

As you can see, all of the areas we are exploring are well positioned - in the Top 5% or higher. No alarming results - like had we decided to explore New Orleans, LA or Tallahassee, FL as noted in Part 2. While climate change is going to impact everyone, everywhere, at least from a relativistic perspective we looking at some decent possibilities for our move.

However, soon we’re going to start looking at actual houses - and there will need to apply some different tools that take climate risk information to a much more granular level - specific addresses.

Stay tuned….

From the other side:

In the spirit of my post on Soccer Tactics or Life Hacks? I recently mashed up soccer and ESG for a blog post at my new job. Click below if interested…

Farewell photo

A little slice of life, until next time…

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Disclaimer:

All content and opinions are solely those of the author (Jack), and not representative of my employer, former employers, clients, anyone in Congress, my family, former college roommates, Baptists, the good citizens of Oregon, or my dog Mabel.