In response to my last newsletter, a reader asked me to define the term climate resilience and how I used that perspective to find a new home. This kind of curiosity makes my heart soar. As if I needed further proof that my readers are the smartest of the interwebs.

But rather than focusing on finding a new place to live (a future newsletter topic for sure), I want to explore what climate resilience looks like right now. The topic is particularly timely in light of the likely historic El Niño that is emerging.

I won’t go into the science, but here are some links if you’d like a refresher on what the El Niño weather pattern is and why this one is particularly concerning.

Even as I write the phrase, “particularly concerning,” I feel like I’m doing you a disservice. We basically have a gobsmackingly strong El Niño layered on top of historic global warming. You might see some people arguing about the relative importance of the El Niño weather pattern compared to “ordinary” global warming. Ignore them, as the distinction simply isn’t worth debating.

What is important are the real world consequences we’re already seeing due to the combination—heatwaves in Europe that shut down nuclear power plants and hospitals, water shortages along the Colorado River that threaten the structural integrity of dams (among other dangers), not one but four once-in-a-thousand year storms across the U.S. in just one week, and unhealthy air from wildfires stretching across much of northern North America. (My apologies for a rather U.S.-centric perspective here—there are truly too many global catastrophes to list them all and so I’ve focused on the location I know the best.)

And that’s with El Niño just getting started last month. I can’t stress enough how urgent climate resilience is right now and sadly, will be, for the rest of our lives. There’s a lot to say on this topic, so I’m breaking this into two parts. In this newsletter I’ll focus on the big picture, so you are grounded in the concept of climate resilience before we jump into action in Part 2 (which will come out two weeks from now).

Climate resilience is essentially the ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from the impacts of climate change. A lot of factors go into what makes a person or place climate resilient, and those factors can vary. In other words, my climate resilience probably doesn’t look the same as yours.

When I think about climate resilience factors, I like to break it into three levels

Level 1 - Personal: This includes things like the breadth and depth of your skills, the size and fluidity of your personal finances, the size of your personal and professional networks, whether you rent or own, the energy efficiency of your home, your ability to create and store energy, your insurance levels, and your personal exposure to natural disasters like floods or wildfires, which can vary from home to home, even on the same street.

Level 2 - Community: This includes things like whether your utility lines are buried or on poles, the source of your water and electricity, the degree of diversity in professional skillsets, cost of living, the quality and quantity of public infrastructure (parks/pools/public transit), and how much political clout the community has with state and federal officials.

Level 3 - Regional: This includes exposure to specific disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, etc), the political landscape regarding climate change, the range of transportation options in case of emergency, the mix of urban and agricultural communities, as well as how easily resources can be diverted and shared between communities.

This list of factors isn’t comprehensive, but it gives you an idea of how complicated climate resilience can be. Here are some examples to show you how these factors might play off one another:

• Owning a home gives you flexibility in your preparations, but also puts you at financial risk due to rising insurance premiums and repeated damage from storms
• A place where you have a strong network or places where mutual aid has already been established, as in response to immigration raids, or in small towns where everyone already knows everyone else, will have significant advantages over communities that are more isolated. As the saying goes, it takes a village!
• A community with multiple modes and nodes of transportation in and out will be safer than one dependent on one major thoroughfare
• A region surrounded by abundant water might be better poised to avoid droughts, but could struggle with energy generation (if significantly reliant on hydropower) and flooding
• Rural communities may have a greater percentage of people who can fix/build/MacGyver things and better access to agriculture, but may lack sufficient health care and alternate forms of transportation in emergencies
• A high cost of living area may make it difficult to invest in climate technology (like air conditioning or solar panels), but wealthier communities tend to get faster and better recovery services in the aftermath of a disaster

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One thing I hope this makes clear is that there’s no such thing as a “safe haven,” although some places are inherently more or less risky than others. In that vein, don’t think of these factors as a scorecard so much as a checklist. Your goal is to improve factors at each level as much as you can over time. Or in cases where you can’t improve a factor, to find a creative trade-off.

I also hope that looking at this list, while perhaps overwhelming, feels doable. These are things that are largely in our control. The media focuses our attention on state level politics, but a lot can be accomplished on your own and in collaboration with others at the local level. We’ll talk about this in detail in two weeks.

While you’re waiting, why not start drafting a climate resilience improvement plan for yourself? It doesn’t have to be fancy or complete. You can make it a dinner table topic over the next several days, invite some friends and neighbors over for a climate talk (kind of like a book club but with a mission), or you can even go full corporate and perform a household SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats/Vulnerabilities) using the factors I’ve listed and any others that feel applicable.

Whatever you come up with, whether it’s possibilities or questions, I’d love to hear about it. (Especially if you do a personal SWOT analysis. I love a geek out. Ha!)

The point is to start seeing the world through a lens of climate resilience. You can’t stop global warming (though you can help slow it down—yet another topic for a future newsletter). Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

What you can do is make educated choices that put you in a better position to thrive in a changing and challenging world.

Resilience doesn’t mean you’ll get everything right or always know what to do. Resilience is about having lots of safeguards in place that mean you can protect yourself and your loved ones in a variety of situations, many of which will be unprecedented and thus hard to imagine ahead of time.

It also means looking for places in your community where resilience is already being born. Maybe it’s the friend with bees who shares their honey and is restoring our pollinators one hive at a time. Maybe it’s the neighbor who organizes tree trimming parties to reduce wildfire risk. Maybe it’s the community college professor who runs an appliance repair clinic at the local library. Or the church with air conditioning that provides a literal sanctuary for the unhoused on a hot day.

And if you don’t see what you’re looking for, create it. Think of yourself as the proverbial pebble in the pond, where your actions ripple into the world, spurring others in kind.

Except you aren't being thrown into the lake by some invisible hand, you are throwing yourself. And you are not a rock that will sink to the bottom, but a drop of rain, finding kinship in the waves that you both make and successfully ride.