After the Fires: How to Rebuild Los Angeles

Alice C. Hill is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

What is happening in Los Angeles alters not only the landscape of the nation’s second-largest city, but also who lives in it and how it does business. Loss estimates have ranged up to $150 billion, with more than ten thousand structures destroyed or damaged. An area about the size of St. Louis, Missouri, has burned. Tens of thousands of people have lost their homes. Schools, stores, restaurants, and business centers have all gone up in smoke. 

When the last embers of the Los Angeles fires extinguish, the metropolitan area will embark on an unprecedented rebuilding effort—reducing future fire risk should define those efforts. Achieving that goal will require a novel approach never undertaken before: systematically accounting for future climate risk. That approach requires incorporating the growing risk of climate-fueled fires when determining how to create fire-safe communities. 

The city’s response will resonate far beyond Los Angeles. Climate-fueled fires can occur in almost any state in the United States. Los Angeles can set an example for how to recover and build a safer, more resilient future.

Account for Climate Risk

Well before this winter’s events, it was clear that climate change is altering wildfire risk around the world. Rising temperatures, primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, bring prolonged heatwaves, deeper droughts, reduced soil moisture, and drier vegetation. In these conditions, forests and grasslands turn into tinderboxes waiting for ignition. This January’s conditions in Southern California are particularly vulnerable to wildfire. After two years of hardy rains that caused vegetation to flourish, Southern California entered a drought. Vegetation became kindling as the bushes, trees, and grasses dried up.

While factors like lightning or human activity spark fires, climate change is amplifying the scale. According to a 2023 study, California has experienced a 320 percent increase in burned areas from 1996 to 2021 due to climate change. That trend will continue. The question for Los Angeles becomes how to thrive in those conditions—that will require improvements to firefighting, land use, and building practices so that Los Angeles can be an insurable city.

New Ways to Fight Fires 

Wildfire behaviors have changed in recent decades, burning hotter, creating their own weather, moving faster, and causing embers to fly miles further. Today’s wildfires can turn entire subdivisions into wisps of smoke within a few hours. Burned cars and industrial facilities leave a toxic mess that endangers human health. These changes have overwhelmed firefighters’ tool chests.

In 2016, when I was senior director for resilience policy at the White House, I hosted a meeting of fire chiefs from around the country focused on fire in the wildland-urban interface—the area near and within grasslands and forests where people increasingly choose to live. The fire chiefs lamented that as more people moved to areas closer to wildlands, more homes were lost to fire. The chiefs could not fight these fires with urban firefighting techniques where houses burned from within, or wildfire fighting techniques used in remote areas where it did not matter if reinforcements arrived days after the fire started. 

The Los Angeles fires has exposed the deficiencies of current efforts. Twenty percent of fire hydrants have run dry, according to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Those systems were not designed for the water demand created by climate-fueled conflagrations. High winds grounded water-dumping planes. Evacuation notices were mistakenly issued. The overhaul of firefighting techniques that the fire chiefs envisioned in 2016 is long overdue. When it comes, these reforms must account for the altered nature of fire due to climate change. Doing so would require:

• expanding evacuation routes, 
• creating larger fire breaks around communities, 
• conducting more controlled burns, 
• enhancing firefighting and emergency management training, 
• improving vegetation management, and 
• enhancing early warning systems.

Retreat Rather Than Rebuild?

With fire risks growing in many places, it simply is unsafe to rebuild communities back where they were, and retreating may be the wisest approach. But few communities in the United States have tackled the challenge. For example, after the Tubbs Fire in 2017 destroyed more than 5,500 homes in what was then the most destructive wildfire in recorded history, Sonoma County did not restrict building in the most fire-prone areas, prioritizing housing needs over potential fire risks.

There is no question that the need for housing puts pressure on everyone to just put things back as they were as quickly as possible. But as the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency Craig Fugate stated, “a house that gets destroyed is not an affordable home.” With massive acreage now charred, Los Angeles could model how to help people make better decisions about rebuilding in the wake of fire. 

Building back safely requires, among other things:

• rethinking housing density, 
• implementing and enforcing vegetation restrictions, 
• repurposing land away from residential use, and
• creating fire management plans that incorporate the latest research, as well as enhanced fire detection and monitoring systems.

Reforms could also include reducing government-backed mortgages in high-risk areas and revisions to building codes to make sure that a structure can survive and be usable after a fire. To be sure, California already has the strongest statewide fire code in the country. That code proved its worth in the 2018 Camp Fire that devastated Paradise, California. According to a study of homes affected by the fires, only 18 percent of houses built before the 2008 code escaped damage, while 51 percent of homes built after the regulation survived. But that percentage may have shrunk even further as evidenced by the flattening of certain neighborhoods in these latest climate-fueled wildfires. 

The post-fire landscape raises the possibility of alternative land use forms to increase the resilience and sustainability of the city. More green space could reduce fire risk by acting as a buffer between developed and high-risk fire areas as well as reducing fuel loads. Areas such as playing fields, bike paths, and golf courses can slow the spread of fire. When irrigated, they can provide moisture to reduce ignitions. 

Fire-resistant plants and landscaping techniques can also lower fire risk. Additional green space could add to the vitality and health of the city, bringing the added benefit of reducing urban temperatures while acting as a “carbon sink” to trap carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere. To be sure, achieving that goal would still face many obstacles, including the fact that much of the charred land is in private hands. 

Property Insurance Crisis Forces New Choices

Rising property insurance prices will likely force Los Angeles to make bold choices. Property insurance is the cornerstone protection against catastrophe and is required for federally backed mortgages. According to CoreLogic, a property analysis firm, 245,000 homes in the Los Angeles metropolitan area were at high risk of wildfire before this year’s fires ignited. California was already fighting an exodus of insurers before the fires; now, even more insurers will want to depart.

With fewer insurers willing to underwrite the risk, more and more homeowners will turn to the California FAIR Plan—or the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements plan—known as the insurer of last resort. As of January 2025, the FAIR Plan held 451,799 policies, a 41 percent increase since 2023. But the ability of the plan to pay all the claims from the recent fires is in serious doubt. This leaves the prospect that many homeowners in Los Angeles, a cultural and economic hub of the United States, may not be able to obtain property insurance at a price they are willing to pay. 

It is not just the United States that has a growing property insurance crisis attributable to climate change. Research has shown that by 2030, one in twenty-five of all structures in Australia could become uninsurable due to climate change. To mitigate this crisis, some countries have acted at the national level. Starting January 1, Italy has begun to require all companies to purchase disaster insurance. Similarly, France has a mandatory requirement that all property damage insurance policies cover natural disasters, including flooding. It is funded through a 12 percent surcharge on insurance policies. Canada is collaborating with the Insurance Bureau of Canada to develop low-cost national flood insurance in response to rising flood damage. 

In the absence of national disaster insurance, it is up to Los Angeles to rebuild an insurable city. Like the survivors of history’s other massive fires, today’s survivors have a choice. The climate change threat is not going away. Angelenos can no longer claim surprise at the scope and intensity of future fires. It is up to them, working with state and federal governments, to embrace the lessons from this fire and find the courage to build a city fit to thrive even in the face of future climate-charged conflagrations.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.