How does climate change affect where and how we live?

Stories from NPR's Climate Solutions Week: Rethinking Home

View this email online by Neela Banerjee June 15, 2025 You Power Our Work This week, we’ve examined how people are devising solutions to deal with climate change's effects on housing. It takes time and resources to tell the stories you can’t find anywhere else. We depend on people like you to sustain our journalists, so we can keep reporting the facts about our changing planet. Can you help power Climate Solutions Week and more with a donation today? When NPR’s Climate Solutions Week launched a few days ago, it was almost six months to the day since wildfires tore through vast stretches of Los Angeles. The timing was a coincidence, but one that echoes through our theme this year: a week of solutions stories about how we can build homes and communities to stay safe as the planet gets hotter and the weather, more unstable. Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images The L.A. fires killed at least 30 people, forced tens of thousands to evacuate and burned more than 16,000 homes and buildings. All that came three months after the remnants of Hurricane Helene washed away homes and lives in North Carolina. NPR’s climate reporters frequently bear witness to the sadness and fear among disaster survivors on the ground. The science shows that no place is truly safe from climate change. So that often has us asking, how can people keep living where they do? What are the ideas out there that take the future climate into account? We know lots of other people have those urgent questions, too. So for NPR’s 2025 Climate Solutions Week, we decided to bring audiences rich, detailed coverage of ways people are building houses and communities to better withstand drought, heat, fire and floods. And we’re showing how people can reduce the climate pollution from the energy used to build and operate their homes. Newsletter continues after sponsor message This year, we’re proud to say that NPR Climate Solutions Week draws mostly from what our vast network of station reporters are seeing in their communities. Solutions Week takes you to St. George, Utah, where the growing town is using innovative technology to address water scarcity. We travel to southern New Jersey, where residents are elevating their homes in areas with chronic flooding. We visit a neighborhood in Louisville, Colorado where survivors of a 2021 wildfire are working together to better protect their community from the next one. That’s a big lesson we drew from the stories that came in: that when people work together, they can do a lot in the face of climate change.  Climate Solutions Week also offers audiences ideas they can try on their own. There are relatively affordable ways to reduce electricity consumption in your home that I plan to use in my Washington, DC row house, including covering my roof with reflective paint. If you live in a flood-prone area, we have a story, written by a reporter whose own Florida home was inundated, about how to safeguard your house.  LA Johnson/NPR We know that climate change is worsening this country’s housing affordability crisis, in part because disasters can reduce the housing stock. So NPR’s Climate Solutions Correspondent Julia Simon takes audiences to Vienna, Austria, where the city government has spent a century building and subsidizing beautiful, affordable public housing that also protects people better from climate change. And American cities like Chicago are starting to use the Viennese blueprint.  Finally, we show that solutions that are supposed to exist for Americans – such as homeowners insurance – can be threatened by the scale of climate-fueled damage. And the solutions to that problem lie with the government and corporations.  NPR doesn’t approach climate solutions naively. We know there are limits, there are failed ideas, and there is no one-size-fits all. But we also see people learning from those constraints – and from each other. We hope that the stories from Climate Solutions Week give audiences useful ideas and a sense of agency as the Earth changes. Sustain The Journalism You Count On This week, we’ve examined how people deal with the ways climate change has affected homes and communities — and how our housing decisions affect the climate. You count on us for information about our planet and inspiration for how to navigate its shifting landscape. But we don't do it alone. Supporters like you make this journalism possible. Can you donate to sustain our work today? Donate Now ➔ Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Music, Politics, Health and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Life Kit emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy