Structures continue to burn in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood after a wildfire broke out in Los Angeles County. USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect

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LA fires show the growing security threat of climate change

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Photo Credit: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect

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The tragic fires consuming Los Angeles have crystalized two inconvenient truths facing local, state, and national governments as the effects of climate change mount. First, climate-driven disasters pose a clear and present danger to national security, yet they defy the conventional threat and response paradigms that dominate our security thinking. This disconnect hampers our ability to address the challenges of climate change with the same urgency as traditional, immediate threats. Second, increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters may undermine the government legitimacy necessary for improving disaster preparedness and response.

As of January 13, 2025, the Los Angeles County wildfires have claimed 24 lives, displaced nearly 200,000 Angelenos, and burned more than 12,000 homes and other structures. Though still ongoing, all signs point to the LA fires being among the costliest disasters—if not the costliest—in US history, with estimates of total loss and damage ranging up to $150 billion, which will put immense stress on California’s private and public insurance markets. As one of the tentpoles of the US media ecosystem and home to countless celebrities, these staggering numbers have been given a prominent human face via their effects on some of the nation’s most well-known celebrities. The fires have destroyed the homes of stars like Jeff Bridges, Billy Crystal, Bella Hadid, Paris Hilton, Anthony Hopkins, and Miles Teller.

Whatever literally sparked these fires, they have been made worse and harder to fight by climate change. After two wetter than normal winters, Los Angeles County has been bone dry since May 2024. The rapid alternation between wet and dry conditions—what some climate scientists are calling “hydroclimate whiplash”—led to overgrowth of vegetation that turned into kindling for these blazes once the rains dried up. This whiplash, related in part to increasingly wide swings in the El Niño Southern Oscillation cycle—has been demonstrated to be an increasingly frequent trigger of natural disasters. The same dynamic was at play in the 2023 wildfires that devastated Hawaii, and the inverse—drought and wildfires followed by intense rains that caused landslides and flooding—compounded the damage caused by wildfires in Australia, China, and the Horn of Africa

The Santa Ana winds are a persistent feature of Southern California’s climate and are thought to be less affected by climate change. But their unusual strength this January—with winds exceeding 100 miles per hour—caused the fires to spread rapidly and have stymied efforts at containment. The confluence of strong Santa Anas and hydroclimate whiplash is an example of how climate change (whiplash) is amplifying known hazards (Santa Anas)—an effect often referred to in climate security circles as a “threat multiplier.”[1]

Climate change is an unconventional, often actorless security threat that challenges the way we think about national security. Both at home and abroad, national security strategy has been dominated by an emphasis on identifying, deterring, and/or compelling armed, intentional actors. It is designed to affect the risk/reward calculations of friends and foes alike.

To state the obvious, wildfires are not strategic actors. You can’t threaten a wildfire with nuclear annihilation or a targeted decapitation strike. If you could, the United States would be the world leader in disaster risk management. Many if not most of the capabilities a $800 billion annual defense budget supports—the nuclear umbrella, special forces, 11 carrier strike groups—are next to useless in securing the homeland against climate-related disasters.

As a thought experiment, imagine the LA fires were the result of intentional acts of arson and firebombing by a foreign military or terrorist organization like the Islamic State. Under those circumstances, the United States would already be mounting a response designed to punish that actor and deter similar actions in the future. It would have at its disposal the collective might of the US military and its various allies to implement it. And as with other deliberate attacks on the US homeland, it would most likely lead Americans to rally around the flag (and the president) even in these highly partisan times, providing political support to match the vast tangible resources at the government’s disposal.

At least so far, the LA fires are not materializing as a galvanizing Pearl Harbor or 9/11 moment. With no Imperial Japan or al-Qaeda to hold responsible, the LA fires have already devolved into political finger-pointing, becoming a political Rorschach test in which people assign blame seemingly based on their political leanings.

For some, the fires are evidence of statewide and local government mismanagement under California governor Gavin Newsom and LA mayor Karen Bass. For others, including Elon Musk, they are evidence of misguided environmental management, in particular related to regulations regarding brush-clearing that might have slowed the fires’ advance. For others, they are evidence of the massive challenges of updating and climate-proofing basic infrastructure, a challenge that extends far beyond Los Angeles County. For others still, the fires are evidence of underfunding of fire departments and other first responders relative to the police. The fires may be evidence of all of these things—or none. It is too soon to know. But the starkly political and divisive nature of the fallout—and its rapid onset, literally while the fires are still burning—is ominous.

Reasonable people do not hold the government accountable for natural disasters. Reasonable people do, however, hold the government accountable for disaster preparedness and response.[2] This responsibility to prepare and protect cuts both ways. When disaster response is effective, it produces dividends for the parties in power. When it is ineffective or worse, seized upon as an opportunity for graft and corruption, it can lead to political upheaval. Absent political consensus about the threats posed by climate change (or even the existence of climate change), the mounting costs of climate-related natural disasters are undermining political support for incumbent politicians, a tendency already evident with respect to warming temperatures. The effect will be to shorten the time horizons of elected leaders, which will further undermine incentives to plan for and dedicate resources to building climate resilience over the long haul. And that will be a bad thing, regardless of what caused the fires in the first place.

Notes

1. More mature readers will remember BASF’s old tagline: “We don’t make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better.” The threat multiplier framing flips that on its head: “Climate change isn’t the cause of all problems, but it makes a lot of the existing problems and risks worse.”

2. Though they appear to do so asymmetrically: Alexander Healy and Neil Malhotra found American voters tend to reward the incumbent presidential party electorally for providing disaster relief spending but not for investing in disaster preparedness. The perverse incentive this state of affairs engenders is obvious: Even if an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, there’s no electoral upside to the ounce of prevention.

Data Disclosure

This publication does not include a replication package.

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