My climate change house hunt - Part 4

We’ve moved to Colorado!

Specifically, Fort Collins, in Larimer County.

Things progressed rapidly, with my daughter selecting a school, us listing our house in Portland, and several scouting trips to the Rocky Mountain state.

As of today, I am staring at a bunch of boxes in our new home, faced with the long prospect of settling in. Moving is a bitch, which I will have much to say in future posts. But we’re here, committed, and excited to start a new phase in our lives.

In this series I have tried to think through how to consider the ramifications of climate change on our potential move…in Part 1 I identified some intriguing data sources, Part 2 I built my own model, and in Part 3 I assessed different parts of the country we were considering.

So now that we’re here and in a specific house and location - how did we do? What are the risks of my new home?

First, let’s examine the county level data. I am moving from Multnomah County, Oregon to Larimer County, Colorado. According to the CD Dispatch Model that I developed as part of this series, we went from the 19th best County in the United States (out of 3135) to the 113th. A bit of a drop, but overall we’re still in the Top 5%.

But country level data is only part of the story. Now that we’re looking at an actual address, we need to examine site specific risks. For this, I relied on two different tools - Risk Factor and Climate Check. Both of these websites offer free assessments at the address level of various climate risks. You type in your home’s location and they return a rudimentary evaluation of the risks.

When I did a comparison of my previous home to our new place, here were the results:

So what do we make of this? We generally increased our exposure to wildfires, heat, and drought. That makes sense, I have moved to a dryer, warmer part of the country. On the positive side, we may have reduced our risks a bit in terms of storms and air quality. That is nice, especially given my experiences earlier this year with wind and ice storms.

So how did we use this information?

First, it wasn’t a make or break factor in the selection of our house. Tons of other criteria played a bigger role. But it helped in understanding what we were getting ourselves into. We specifically made sure our homeowner’s insurance covered wildfires, for example. We may change the way we landscape the yard to account for drought considerations.

But the primary benefit is that we have more information going in to the situation, we’re better informed and have a sense of what could happen.

Ignorance is a choice. Moving blindly without considering the risks feels shortsighted, a recipe for future turmoil.

We made our decision open-eyed and aware of the situation. From there, one can begin to try and mitigate the risks.

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A few final thoughts. First, I need to reiterate the extreme privilege embedded in this whole exercise. We’re able to make decisions on where we live. We have data and information at our fingertips to inform ourselves. Much of the world is not so fortunate.

Second, while we slightly increased our exposure to climate risks we’re still located relatively well, in the top 5% of counties. But that’s not very reassuring. Climate change is systemic and global crisis. We’re all going to suffer. It’s just a matter of how long, how much, and how resilient we can be as individuals and as a society.

So we need to keep working to mitigate the worst of climate change. Vote for politicians that do not promote or surf on a platform of ignorance. Reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. Keep pushing energy efficiency and renewable energy development. Bend the arc of the socio-economic curve towards solutions that are right before us, rather than ignore the problem.

Our climate change house hunt was a reactive response to what we’re seeing…but we all need to be more proactive every day to make a difference. It’s up to us to reduce the potential suffering of those who can’t embark on their own climate change house hunt.

Lyrical Truth Bomb

When musicians say what needs to be said:

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.