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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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