Insurers Are Deserting Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen. Without insurance, it’s impossible to get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home

Christopher Flavelle reported from Silver City, N.M. Data analysis and graphics by Mira Rojanasakul. Photography and video by Paul Ratje for The New York Times.

 

The insurance crisis spreading across the United States arrived at Richard D. Zimmel’s door last week in the form of a letter.

Mr. Zimmel, who lives in the increasingly fire-prone hills outside Silver City, N.M., had done everything right. He trimmed the trees away from his house, and covered his yard in gravel to stop flames rushing in from the forest near his property. In case that buffer zone failed, he sheathed his house in fire-resistant stucco, and topped it with a noncombustible steel roof.

None of it mattered. His insurance company, Homesite Insurance, dumped him. “Property is located in a brushfire or wildfire area that no longer meets Homesite’s minimum standard for wildfire risk,” the letter read. (Homesite did not respond to a request for comment.)

Mr. Zimmel has company. Since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped — “nonrenewed,” in the parlance of the industry. In more than 200 counties, the nonrenewal rate has tripled or more, according to the findings of a congressional investigation released Wednesday.

As a warming planet delivers more wildfires, hurricanes and other threats, America’s once reliably boring home insurance market has become the place where climate shocks collide with everyday life. 

 

The home of Richard D. Zimmel on the outskirts of Silver City, N.M.

 

The consequences could be profound. Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services. As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come.

Now, for the first time, the scale of that pullback is becoming public. Last fall, the Senate Budget Committee demanded the country’s largest insurance companies provide the number of nonrenewals by county and year. The result is a map that tracks the climate crisis in a new way. 

 

Richard D. Zimmel, who did everything right, and still lost his insurance.

 

The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a trade group, said information about nonrenewals was “unsuitable for providing meaningful information about climate change impacts,” because the data doesn’t show why individual insurers made decisions. The group added that efforts to gather data from insurers “could have an anticompetitive effect on the market.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and the committee’s chairman, said the new information was crucial. In an interview, he called the new data as good an indicator as any “for predicting the likelihood and timing of a significant, systemic economic crash,” as disruption in the insurance market spreads to property values.

“The climate crisis that is coming our way is not just about polar bears, and it’s not just about green jobs,” Mr. Whitehouse said Wednesday during a hearing on the investigation’s findings. “It actually is coming through your mail slot, in the form of insurance cancellations, insurance nonrenewals and dramatic increases in insurance costs.”

The map of dropped policies shows how the crisis in the American home insurance market has spread beyond well-known problems in Florida and California. The jump in nonrenewals now extends along the Gulf Coast, through Alabama and Mississippi; up the Atlantic seaboard, through the Carolinas, Virginia and into southern New England; inland, to parts of the plains and Intermountain West; and even as far as Hawaii. 

Silver City shows how the insurance crisis is a result of several factors over decades — and how hard it is to solve.

Founded as a mining town in the 1870s, the city of 10,000 nestles up against the foothills of the Gila National Forest, 3.3 million acres of alligator juniper, ponderosa pine and Gambel oak draped across softly sloping mountains.

That forest has also become a firetrap.

Since its designation as a national forest in 1924, the U.S. government sought to protect the land by stopping forest fires. That policy failed to take into account that fires clear out vegetation, according to Adam Mendonca, the U.S. Forest Service’s Washington deputy director of fire and aviation, who lives in Silver City. The result was the buildup of decades of additional trees and brush, which means wildfires, when they do happen, now burn larger and hotter.

That threat has been exacerbated by climate change, which has brought higher temperatures and drier conditions. Wildfires are now more likely to break out any time of year.

“We used to take our wildland gear home, put it into storage about September, and then bring it back to the station in February,” said Milo Lambert, Silver City’s fire chief. “Now it doesn’t leave the trucks.” 

 

 Milo Lambert, Silver City’s fire chief.

 

 Silver City maps in Chief Lambert’s office.

 

Even as the threat of wildfires has grown, home construction has pushed further into the forest. On a recent afternoon, Eric Casler, an assistant professor of natural sciences at Western New Mexico University, surveyed the neighborhoods that have grown up north of the city limits.

“See all these scattered houses out here?” Mr. Casler said. If a wildfire started to burn through the area, “it’s going to be really hard for them to stop it.”

It’s not just where people build homes that puts them at risk, experts said, but how those homes are constructed. Outside city limits, Grant County has no zoning or wildfire building restrictions, according to Roger Groves, the fire chief for the county, which includes Silver City.

Taken together, those challenges have caused insurers to pull back, according to Susan Sumrall, an insurance agent in Silver City.

Across Grant County, 51 home insurance contracts were not renewed in 2018, based on the data provided to the committee. That’s about one in 100 policies. By last year, that number had doubled to 100 nonrenewals, even as the county’s total population shrank.

One of Ms. Sumrall’s clients who has lost her insurance is Charlene Rosati. Ms. Rosati and her husband had to spend months in Houston, where he was being treated for cancer. Her insurance company, State Farm, sent an inspector to check if the home was being properly maintained, Ms. Rosati said, and concluded it was not.

Ms. Rosati’s husband died in September last year. Soon after, State Farm told her it wouldn’t renew her coverage. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Many homes in and around Silver City are mobile or manufactured homes, which can offer less protection against fires than traditional site-built houses. Lorri Williams lives in a manufactured home in a valley just outside of Silver City. She, too, got a letter from her insurer, Standard Casualty Company, based in Texas.

“Reason — unsatisfactory risk,” the company wrote in block letters. “Your home is either located inside of or in close proximity of an area that is identified as having a high risk of wildfire.”

Standard Casualty Company did not respond to a request for comment. 

 

Charlene Rosati, who was dropped by her insurer.

 

 

Lorri Williams with a letter from her insurance company.

 

 People who lose insurance often don’t have great options. Ms. Williams’s broker, Chelsea Hotchkiss, tried getting her another insurer, with no luck. Ms. Hotchkiss suggested the state-run high-risk insurance program, which offers coverage to homeowners who can’t find it on the private market. But that program is more expensive and provides less coverage.

After Mr. Zimmel got his nonrenewal letter last week, he called State Farm, which declined to cover him. His insurance agent struck out with three more carriers, including Travelers. (State Farm and Travelers did not respond to requests for comment.) Finally, a smaller company agreed to insure his house, but his premiums jumped by one-third.

Mr. Zimmel’s bigger worry, he said, is how the struggle over insurance could affect his home’s value, which his real estate agent estimates at about $725,000.

“I just don’t know what’s going to happen to the town if this keeps happening,” said Mr. Zimmel’s agent, Shelley Scarborough. 

                         Dead trees left from the 2014 Signal Fire, in the hills near Pinos Altos, N.M.

 

Officials are trying to reduce wildfire risk. The county is looking at setting building standards to cut fire exposure, Mr. Groves said. State officials are also considering ways to get more homeowners to clear the vegetation from their property, possibly through a pilot project in nearby Lincoln County that would make those steps necessary to qualify for the state high-risk insurance pool.

And the U.S. Forest Service is trying to clear out decades’ worth of thick brush and other excess vegetation — what experts call “treating” the forest. That process is anything but simple.

In the parts of the forest nearest the city, workers have cut down smaller trees, low-hanging branches and scrub oak, then stacked them into piles to dry out. After a year or so, the piles are set on fire — ideally during the winter, to reduce the risk of the fire spreading.

After those two steps, the Forest Service can perform a prescribed burn: deliberately setting fire to a patch of the forest to further clear out the vegetation. To maintain that work, the process should typically be repeated every five to 10 years.

The Forest Service has been treating between 25,000 and 30,000 of the 3.3 million acres in the Gila Forest each year, according to Mr. Mendonca. “It’s a constant struggle for the agency to try to address,” he said, citing a shortage of staffing, money and time. 

U.S. Forest Service and Conservation Corps New Mexico members refilled their drip torches while conducting a prescribed fire in Mimbres.

 

The underlying challenges that are driving insurers from Silver City can be found across the country.

In parts of Wyoming, the growing risk of wildfire is similarly pushing insurers to drop customers. Teton County, which includes Jackson Hole, saw nonrenewal rates increase 1,394 percent since 2018. Jeff Rude, the state insurance commissioner, said the state was focused on educating homeowners about how to reduce the risk on their land, because tougher building standards are unpopular in Wyoming.

In California, which has some of the country’s most stringent building codes to address wildfire risk, insurers have nonetheless been fleeing. In some counties, nonrenewal rates have increased more than 500 percent since 2018. Officials announced last week that they would make it easier for insurers to raise rates, but in exchange, those insurers must agree to keep doing business in fire-prone areas.

In Hawaii, the nonrenewal rate tripled between 2018 and 2023, one of the highest increases in the country. The growing risk from wildfires and other threats has led to what Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat, has called a “condo insurance crisis.” In August, he signed an emergency proclamation, setting up a task force to search for solutions.

In coastal South Carolina, which now has some of the highest nonrenewal rates in the country, insurers have been going out of business, reducing their exposure or just leaving the area, said Jay Taylor, an insurance agent in Beaufort County, which includes Hilton Head, an area particularly exposed to sea-level rise, hurricanes and other climate threats.

Homeowners complain about the difficulty and cost of getting insurance, he said. But the desire to live by the ocean, despite the danger, remains the stronger force.

“They may cuss us out,” Mr. Taylor said. “But they never stop building.” 

                                                                   Homes in Silver City.

 

Methodology

Data from the Senate Budget Committee includes 23 of the 41 insurers from which the committee sought information. In counties with fewer than 500 policies reported, state nonrenewal rates are displayed.

In addition to insurer decisions to end policies, nonrenewals can include homeowners shopping around due to price spikes, but committee staff members said the vast majority of the nonrenewals reported through their investigation were initiated by insurers.

Fire and hurricane risk categories are based on expected annual losses from the FEMA National Risk Index. "Relatively high" and "very high" risk categories are combined, as are "relatively low" and "very low."

Worrying signs from the Arctic

 

The Russell Glacier descending toward a lake of its own meltwater near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, in July. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

 

By David Gelles   In a year full of troubling signs that Earth’s climate is rapidly changing, some of the most alarming signals came from the Arctic. The thawing tundra has become a source of greenhouse gas emissions, instead of locking away carbon. Sea ice levels are near historic lows. Fires are getting worse. Surface air temperatures are near record highs. And, yes, the polar bears are in trouble. “There’s a lot going on in the Arctic,” said Brendan Rogers, an Arctic scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Mass. “There’s big changes in the rivers, and with salmon, and big changes in the atmosphere, and with sea ice, and ocean productivity, and the fauna.” One area of particular concern to Rogers is the increase in wildfires. Fire season is getting longer, the fires are burning bigger and hotter, and more fires are being ignited by lightning strikes. “The primary reasons are all directly tied to climate change,” he said. Some fire activity is natural, of course. But Rogers said that, because of climate change, “the fires are happening too quickly, too much; they’re also increasing in severity and intensity.” Another point of acute concern: Parts of the Arctic that have long stored carbon are now turning into sources of carbon. Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the Arctic tundra has in recent decades been “adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than it has removed, a reversal from the usual state of affairs since the peak of the last ice age,” my colleague Raymond Zhong wrote. What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic A warmer Arctic has the potential to alter global weather patterns. It’s the temperature gradient between the polar regions and the Equator that drives air currents that move high and low pressure systems around the globe. Major changes to the Arctic will most likely have far-reaching consequences, though scientists can’t yet predict exactly what they will be. “There’s a lot about the Arctic that does very directly affect the rest of the world,” Zhong told me. The thawing Arctic is also shaking up geopolitics. With sea ice melting, new shipping lanes are opening up. As a result, Russia and China have sought to project their influence in the region in recent years. That has led Canada to step up its military presence in the region and seek to work more closely with the United States. Announcing the move, the Canadian government called climate change “the overarching threat” to control of its Arctic territories. Meanwhile, tensions between Russia and the West have resulted in scientists being shut out of the Russian Arctic, compromising efforts to collect reliable data on one of the largest and most significant swaths of the Arctic on Earth. It’s too early to say we’ve hit a tipping point Scientists can’t yet say that the changes being observed in the Arctic are irreversible, or that they are accelerating and compounding. And while the tundra is now a carbon source, other permafrost areas, including beneath boreal forests, are still net carbon sinks, or natural reservoirs that store more carbon than they emit. (Though the forests are burning at an alarming rate.) Still, things are moving fast up north. The Arctic is warming four times as fast as the rest of the planet. In the waters that connect the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans in northern Canada, sea ice was the lowest ever recorded in the period from October of 2023 to September. In Canada’s Western Arctic, thawing permafrost is triggering landslides and making it a near certainty that some villages will have to move. This summer, the eastern half of Hudson Bay, home to the world’s most-studied polar bears, was ice-free a month earlier than usual. A group of scientists recently warned that the Arctic could experience its first day that is practically ice-free by 2027. And, for the 11th year in a row, the Arctic was more abnormally warm than the world as a whole. In a recent guest essay for the Times’ Opinion section, a former park ranger, Jon Waterman, revisited Arctic landscapes he first encountered 40 years ago and witnessed a world transformed by fires, landslides, new vegetation and melting permafrost. When Waterman asked a villager, sweating in the heat, what could be done about climate change, he replied, “Maybe people down south could reduce their emissions.”

Arctic Tundra Has Long Helped Cool Earth. Now, It’s Fueling Warming.

 

 

A hill with an ice core, known as a pingo, in the Mackenzie River Delta, Northwest Territories. Credit...Renaud Philippe for The New York Times

 

 Wildfires and thawing permafrost are causing the region to release more carbon dioxide than its plants remove, probably for the first time in thousands of years.

By Raymond Zhong

 

For thousands of years, the shrubs, sedges, mosses and lichens of the Arctic have performed a vital task for the planet: gulping down carbon dioxide from the air and storing the carbon in their tissues. When the plants die, this carbon is entombed in the frigid soil, where it no longer helps warm Earth’s surface.

But as fossil fuel emissions heat the planet, balmier air temperatures are thawing Arctic tundra, activating carbon-hungry microbes, and more vegetation is being burned up by wildfires.

The result, for the past two decades or so, is that the tundra has been adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than it has removed, a reversal from the usual state of affairs since the peak of the last ice age.

It’s one of many signs of rapid change in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Report Card, the agency’s yearly checkup on the polar region. The 2024 report card was issued on Tuesday in Washington at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, an association of earth and space scientists.

                                   Arctic Methane Release

 

 For the 11th year in a row, the Arctic this year was more abnormally warm than the world as a whole, the report card said. The period from October 2023 to September was the second-warmest for the region since 1900. In the Northwest Passage, the sea route that links the Atlantic and the Pacific through the islands of northern Canada, the area covered by sea ice this summer was the lowest since records began. Parts of Arctic Canada had their shortest snow season on record.

“The Arctic today, year after year, looks vastly different than the Arctic did 20 years ago,” said Twila Moon, an editor of the report card and the deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

In the Arctic tundra, there have long been signs of a shift in how much carbon is moving between the land and the air. But by incorporating more data and better methods of analysis, scientists can now describe the trend with confidence: Between 2001 and 2020, wildfires and thawing permafrost caused the tundra to release more carbon dioxide than its plants removed from the air, probably for the first time in many millenniums.

How much this gap widens depends in large part on how much nations rein in greenhouse warming, said Brendan Rogers, an Arctic scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Mass., who contributed to the report card.

“The more we can do to lower the overall temperature changes globally, the better we’re going to be able to deal with permafrost emissions,” Dr. Rogers said.

Gathering data in the vast Arctic environment is always a challenge, but Russia’s war in Ukraine has compounded the difficulties, including for scientists assessing the carbon cycle. “There are large parts of Siberia that we just don’t have any data from,” Dr. Rogers said.

Not all of the news in this year’s report card was bad.

In the seas around Alaska, ice seal populations challenged by rising temperatures were deemed healthy. And a cool winter helped Greenland’s vast ice sheet shed the smallest volume of ice since 2013, around 55 billion tons, though the long-term trend is still that melting ice from the island is adding enormously to rising sea levels worldwide.

 

Por que terras férteis estão se tornando desertos

 

Plantio de árvores no deserto de Kubuqi, no norte da China, faz parte da luta contra a rápida desertificação global

 Stuart Braun

 Área equivalente a quatro campos de futebol vira deserto a cada segundo no mundo, o que, ao longo de um ano, ganha a dimensão de uma Etiópia. Os esforços para restaurar e reflorestar esse terreno árido podem dar frutos?

 

Quase metade da superfície sólida do planeta está prestes a se tornar um deserto não arável, de acordo com a Convenção das Nações Unidas para o Combate à Desertificação (UNCCD, na sigla em inglês).

Essas terras são marcadas há muito tempo pela baixa pluviosidade, e mesmo assim sustentam 45% da agricultura mundial. Agora, a seca extrema ligada ao aquecimento global causado pelo homem está ajudando a transformar essa área em um terreno baldio infértil.

Com uma em cada três pessoas do mundo vivendo nessas regiões áridas, especialistas alertam que a insegurança alimentar, a pobreza e o deslocamento em massa acompanharão a desertificação. 

O problema é tão grave que uma conferência das Nações Unidas sobre desertificação (COP16), a ser realizada na Arábia Saudita em dezembro, exige que 1,5 bilhão de hectares de terras desertificadas do mundo sejam restaurados até 2030. Pelos cálculos da ONU, essa é a porção que poderia ser reabilitada.

 

O que é desertificação?

A desertificação é uma forma de degradação pela qual a terra fértil perde grande parte de sua produtividade biológica – e econômica – e se torna um deserto.

 

Atualmente, até 40% das terras do mundo já estão degradadas, de acordo com a UNCCD.

Embora as mudanças climáticas, o desmatamento, o uso excessivo de pastagem para pecuária, práticas agrícolas insustentáveis e a expansão urbana sejam os principais fatores da desertificação, uma crise global de estiagem está exacerbando o problema.

A seca e o calor extremos provocam escassez de água e levam à degradação do solo e à perda de culturas e vegetação.

Com a previsão de que 2024 será o ano mais quente já registrado, a seca poderá afetar 75% da população mundial até 2050, de acordo com relatório da ONU divulgado nesta semana.

A escassez de água agrava ainda mais os impactos do desmatamento. Menos árvores significa menos raízes para prender o solo e evitar erosão.

Enquanto isso, questões sociais, como maior dificuldade para mulheres de possuir terras, também podem afetar a saúde da terra e do solo. A ONU observa que as mulheres investem com mais frequência em sistemas alimentares biodiversos, ao contrário dos homens, que se concentram principalmente em monoculturas de alta produtividade que podem degradar a terra rapidamente.

As areias da Arábia Saudita servem de cenário para a conferência da ONU sobre desertificação

Por que enfrentar a desertificação é importante?

A grave degradação da terra e a desertificação estão afetando a capacidade do planeta de "apoiar o bem-estar ambiental e humano", disse um relatório da UNCCD de 2024.

A terra degradada não pode mais sustentar diversos ecossistemas ou ajudar a regular o clima, os fluxos de água e a produção de nutrientes vitais para toda a vida.

A terra saudável também proporciona segurança alimentar e um sistema agrícola sustentável, aponta o estudo.

Porém, com tanta terra fértil e produtiva degradada a cada ano, a desertificação contínua está acelerando a perda de biodiversidade, a fome e a pobreza.

Migração forçada e conflitos sobre recursos em declínio serão algumas das consequências futuras.

"São a terra e o solo sob nossos pés que cultivam o algodão para as roupas que vestimos, garantem a comida em nossos pratos e ancoram as economias das quais dependemos", observou Ibrahim Thiaw, secretário executivo da UNCCD.

Árvores estão sendo plantadas no Senegal, na África Ocidental, para conter o avanço do deserto

O que pode ser feito?

Um tema fundamental dos esforços para combater a desertificação é a restauração do solo e a promoção de uma agricultura e de um manejo de pastagens mais sustentáveis e "positivos para a natureza", de acordo com Susan Gardner, diretora da divisão de ecossistemas do Programa das Nações Unidas para o Meio Ambiente (Pnuma).

Isso anda de mãos dadas com a conservação de "bacias hidrográficas" que armazenam água.

O Programa Mundial de Alimentos da ONU, por exemplo, tem trabalhado para melhorar a resiliência da água na Mauritânia e no Níger, no oeste da África, construindo "meias-luas" que retêm a água da chuva.

Os lagos semicirculares ajudam solos degradados a reter a água por mais tempo e a sustentar a vegetação. Além disso, eles são práticos e econômicos para a população local construir.

Mas medidas mais drásticas também estão sendo tomadas para impedir a expansão dos desertos.

Em 2007, as nações da região do Sahel, na África, decidiram impedir a expansão do deserto do Saara para o norte, alimentada pela seca e pela mudança climática, cultivando árvores, pastagens e vegetação para criar a Grande Muralha Verde.

Bilhões de árvores seriam plantadas ao longo de quase 8.000 km, do litoral oeste ao leste da África, para criar zonas de amortecimento e evitar mais desertificação.

De acordo com os números mais atualizados da ONU, um quinto da restauração desejada foi alcançado, com o progresso paralisado devido à falta de financiamento. No entanto, novas iniciativas estão avançando com o objetivo de tornar mais verdes 100 milhões de hectares de terras degradadas em toda a África.

Uma iniciativa semelhante de replantio na China e no deserto de Gobi, na Mongólia, também conhecida como a "Grande Muralha Verde", inclui esforços para reduzir o o uso excessivo de pasto entre os pastores da Mongólia.

Quase 80% das terras da Mongólia foram afetadas pela degradação até 2020, e uma iniciativa da ONU buscou combater a desertificação por meio do gerenciamento sustentável da terra, incluindo a proteção de quase 850 mil hectares na região sul de Gobi como corredores de biodiversidade.

 

 

 

Ocean Heat Wiped Out Half These Seabirds Around Alaska - About four million common murres were killed by a domino effect of ecosystem changes, and the population is showing no signs of recovery, according to new research.

 Rescued common murres were placed into a special enclosure to dry after examination at a bird rescue center in Cordelia, Calif., in 2015.Credit...Randall Benton/The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press

 

By Catrin Einhorn

 

The first evidence was the feathered bodies washing up on Alaskan beaches. They were common murres, sleek black-and-white seabirds that typically spend months at a time away from land. But in 2015 and 2016, officials tallied 62,000 emaciated corpses from California to Alaska.

Since then, scientists have been piecing together what happened to the birds, along with other species in the northeast Pacific that suddenly died or disappeared. It became clear that the culprit was an record-breaking marine heat wave, a mass of warm water that would come to be known as the Blob. New findings on its effect on murres, published on Thursday in the journal Science, are a stark sign of the perils facing ecosystems in a warming world.

 “What we learned was that it was just way worse than we thought,” said Heather Renner, one of the study’s authors and a supervisory wildlife biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

 

About half of Alaska’s common murres, some four million birds, died as a result of the marine heat wave, the scientists found. They believe it is the largest documented die-off of a single species of wild birds or mammals. The state is home to about a quarter of the world’s common murres, scientists say.

Murres were the victims of a domino effect of oceanic changes tied to the warm water, according to a growing body of research. It affected marine life from plankton to humpback whales. Critically for the murres, it led to a collapse in the fish they depend on.

 One of the most sobering revelations in the new study is that the birds have not even begun to rebound.

 

A murre colony in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, seen before and after the 2015-16 marine heat wave.Credit...U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

 

 “If the foraging conditions are good, I think there’s hope,” Ms. Renner said. “Our fear is that events like this are predicted to become much more common, and we haven’t seen any signs of recovery at all yet, eight years after the event.”

 

 

For decades, the world’s oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat produced as humans burn fossil fuels and destroy ecosystems like forests. That heat has taken a severe toll on coral reefs, kelp forests and other marine ecosystems. Last year and into this year, the ocean’s surface temperature shattered records.

For the murres, earlier mortality estimates from the Blob were lower. In 2020, a team of some of the same scientists estimated that half a million to a million of the birds had died in Alaska. But the new research uses a different and far more reliable method, leveraging earlier data to analyze before and after counts at 13 breeding colonies throughout the Gulf of Alaska and the Eastern Bering Sea. The authors then extrapolated those declines across the entire population.

“We saw exactly the same really clear signal at every single colony,” Ms. Renner said. “It wasn’t some of them, it was all of them.”

Avian flu has had huge impacts on some bird populations around the world, but researchers have not seen much to date in Alaska, Ms. Renner said, so it does not appear to be playing a major role.

Notably, while various species were pummeled by the Pacific marine heat wave, including some fisheries stocks, not all showed declines. That suggests the oceanographic changes created “pinch points” in the food web rather than, say, taking out all predators.

 

Mark Mallory, a seabird biologist and professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who was not involved with the study, said the research highlighted the critical importance of long-term monitoring data in allowing scientists to understand the extraordinary changes underway on Earth.

The finding that murres, typically a resilient species, are not regaining their numbers, reminded him of what happened when people overfished Atlantic cod stocks off Newfoundland, which had once been thought virtually inexhaustible.

“Here we are decades after that catastrophic event, and that marine ecosystem has not recovered,” Dr. Mallory said. “It’s entirely conceivable to me that we are witnessing the early stages of a similar effect, caused by a different catastrophe, in these Alaskan waters.”

Catrin Einhorn covers biodiversity, climate and the environment for The Times. More about Catrin Einhorn

 

Farm Drought - One thing that’s not getting hotter

 

Dried up chili peppers at a farm in Vinh Chau Town, Vietnam. Photographer: Linh Pham/Bloomberg

 Feel like your favorite spicy dish is missing some heat? Extreme weather is making chilis less fiery, and chefs are being forced to improvise in the kitchen. 

 

By Bernadette Toh

For three generations, Ken Koh’s family has bought a specific variety of chili peppers from the same Southeast Asian supplier to make its bestselling sauces.

A team of four chops, blends and cooks the peppers at a modest three-story factory in Singapore. Inside, a sign written in Chinese characters plays on a popular idiom: “Food is the life of people, sauce is the life of food.”

But last quarter Koh was forced to cut production of his chili sauces by 25%. He’s struggling to restock local supermarket outlets and his company Nanyang Sauce had to discontinue a special gift set of three chili sauces, named the “Spice of Life.”

The culprit? Climate change. Extreme weather across major chili planting regions this year has disrupted supply, pushed up prices and, worst of all, made the peppers taste milder.

Scientists say it’s not a one-off, but a long-term trend that’s impacting other foodstuffs as well: Coffee blends are growing more bitter and coconuts more bland due to erratic rainfall, while rising temperatures are impacting the quality and quantity of Napa cabbage, the key ingredient of the beloved Korean dish kimchi.

“Enjoy your chili while it lasts because we don’t know when it’ll be gone,” said Koh, 40, shaking his head in exasperation.

 

Chilis are the berries or fruits of plants from the genus Capsicum and are used as a spice in cuisines all over the world. There are an estimated 4,000 varieties, including jalapeño, habanero and bird’s eye, ranging in color, size and heat.

From the peppers grown by small farmers in Mexico and India to those for giant producers such as California-based Huy Fong Foods Inc., which makes the famous Sriracha hot sauce, the chili trade is worth an estimated $9 billion a year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Asia accounts for almost 70% of global chili supply, FAO data show.

A chili’s pungency is derived from a group of heat-producing alkaloids including capsaicin in the fruit, with hotter, drier conditions typically increasing spiciness. The perfect growing conditions are becoming harder to find as climate change increases the frequency of weather extremes such as drought and floods and intensifies rainfall.

“As the crop absorbs a lot of this extra moisture, it puts it in the flesh of the fruit of the chili pepper,” said Kraig Kraft, 46, an Oregon-based agroecologist and co-author of Chasing Chiles, which examines global warming’s impact on the crop. “All of a sudden, the pungency becomes diluted.”

Drought and extreme heat can also stress young plants, preventing a crop from even blossoming. A severe drought in Mexico this year caused a shortage of red winter jalapeños, forcing Huy Fong Foods to halt production in May, the Washington Post reported.

Chilis are “very sensitive to any changes in the weather,” said Karma Bhutia, 37, a scientist at the Dr. Rajendra Prasad Central Agricultural University in India who has researched the impact of climate change on the growth and development of chili plants. Chilis typically thrive in temperatures between 25C and 30C (77F and 86F), he said.

Unpredictable weather has been a curse for farmers like Srinath Arumugam, 29, in northwest Malaysia. His first order of business during planting season is to check the weather forecast. The next is to pray for a sunny day. Torrential rain can wash away the fertilizer needed to sustain his two acres of chili crops.

It’s a similar story in parts of China, the world’s largest chili producer, where a summer of typhoons and flooding has impacted crops. Monthly wholesale prices for red chilis hit a two-year high in October, data from Beijing agricultural market Xinfadi show.

Scientists are creating new varieties of chilis that are more resistant to climate change and disease. Yet the challenge lies in retaining the same flavors.

“It sounds terrible, but once these peppers are gone, you cannot recreate their original taste,” said Jorge Berny, 44, an agronomist who is working with farmers in Yucatan, Mexico, on producing indigenous and commercial varieties of chili. “You can replace them with something else, but it’s not the same.”

Commercial kitchens are having to adapt to the changing flavors.

Daniel Sia, executive chef of Singapore-based The Coconut Club, buys as much as 20% more stock of chili peppers now versus a few years ago to make up for the lower heat.

“Sometimes you need to add a little bit more chili, sometimes you need to change the blend,” said Sia, whose signature dish of fragrant rice cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaf — nasi lemak — features a chili paste called sambal. “It all comes down to adjusting the taste to what it is supposed to be.”

At nearby Thai restaurant Un-Yang-Kor-Dai, head chef Chitsanucha Tanawong, 42, said it isn’t as simple as increasing the amount of chilis in a dish — sometimes she combines different chilis to get the desired heat.

“I must mix the chilis,” Tanawong said, gesturing to a bowl of clear tom yum, a type of hot and sour soup made with lemongrass, tomatoes and, in this case, prawns. “If not, this whole bowl will be covered with only chopped chilis.”

The restaurant, recognized with a Michelin Bib Gourmand award for good quality, good value cooking, is now paying at least S$1 (75 US cents) more for every kilogram of hot pepper from Thailand due to the recent flash floods.

Underdeveloped red chilis in Chimayo, New Mexico. Photographer: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

 

Ultimately, chefs will be forced to innovate and find workarounds as climate change impacts the flavors of food, said Chasing Chiles co-author Kraft. But that deep cultural connection with a cuisine, or taste of place, is at risk.

“When you’re looking at something like chilis and its food traditions, the taste of place is so dependent on one spice,” he said. “If its availability is limited, it’s not like you can just go and substitute with something else to replicate the same taste.”

For Tamara Chavez, a Mexican chef based in Singapore, chilis are more than an ingredient. They are a way of life.

“When you eat a chili, you start to feel the heat in your lips, and then you start to sweat, and you feel warm in your body,” said Chavez, 34, who co-owns Canchita Peruvian Cuisine and Spanish restaurant Tinto with her husband, Daniel. “But this morning, I ate six chili padis and felt nothing.”