Disaster Recovery Is a Delicate Act of Balancing Priorities

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Last Thursday marked the first anniversary of the catastrophic wildfires that ravaged Lahaina on Hawaii’s island of Maui. The blaze claimed more than 100 lives and left more than 12,000 people without housing.

As with so many disasters in a climate that’s supercharging hazards, recovery efforts have been costly and challenging. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said it’s on track to provide approximately $3 billion toward Maui recovery. A separate $4 billion settlement involving seven co-defendants including Hawaiian Electric was reached just days before the somber anniversary, resolving hundreds of lawsuits.

Accessing these funds can be a lengthy, difficult process. Maui fire victims sued several insurance companies to ensure that $4 billion settlement compensated victims first for their damages. Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said he had to “expedite the agreement” to get resources to those affected as soon as possible.

Challenges Rebuilding: Recovery can be an opportunity to address inequalities, but can also exacerbate them. In Maui, the wildfires worsened an already severe housing crisis. A staggering 60 percent of survivors have reported moving more than three times since losing their homes, with over a quarter of displaced families opting to leave Maui entirely due to a lack of affordable housing and job opportunities.

Even before the fire, researchers from the University of Hawaii found that many property owners were renting to high-paying tourists rather than the local population. “The balance of housing being used to generate revenue and housing used to shelter our residents has been thrown off long before the fire,” Maui County council member Keani Rawlins-Fernandez told Axios.

The island’s economy, which relies heavily on tourism, took a $1 billion hit this year. Government officials are now seeking to revitalize the island’s tourism industry and shifting gear from the mixed messages sent in previous months, reports Honolulu Civil Beat. Tourists were initially told to stay away from Maui altogether. Three months after the fire, government officials invited visitors to return to the island, before being met by local outrage and a petition to extend the tourism suspension. Now, Hawaii’s tourism agency has launched a marketing campaign to reassure tourists that the island is open for business, even as Lahaina remains off-limits.

Who Do We Rebuild For? As long-time residents face displacement, the specter of “disaster gentrification” looms. This phenomenon, where wealthier people capitalize on post-disaster conditions to buy property at lower prices, threatens communities affected across the globe.

In Paradise, California, recovery from a devastating wildfire that destroyed nearly 95 percent of the town in 2018 raised similar questions. While financial settlements and insurance payouts allowed some survivors to return, an influx of newcomers contributed to higher property values. What was once an affordable suburban community saw median house prices nearly double by 2023 compared to pre-fire standards. As a new Paradise rose from the ashes, former residents struggled to find where they would fit, the Guardian reported last year.

To avoid pricing out lower-income residents, the federal government allocated $55 million in disaster recovery funds for developing affordable rental units in Paradise last year. There are now seven affordable housing projects in the town, four more than before the fire.

Stalled Progress: In British Columbia, the town of Lytton presents its own set of challenges. Three years after a catastrophic fire razed the village, construction has barely progressed. Despite hundreds of millions in funding, the village has issued only a dozen building permits for single-family homes.

Lytton sits in one of North America’s oldest continuously inhabited settlements, and the fire exposed Indigenous artifacts on some of the properties. Under provincial law, archeological sites are protected, meaning that construction sites cannot be touched without a permit and assessment. But some residents refused to let archeologists onto their property for fear of costs, the Canadian Broadcasting Company reports.

While recovery stalls, temporary trailers house Lytton residents on land nearby. A grocery store is now in the works in Lytton, and water services have been restored. For now, residents still need to drive an hour for a pharmacy or medical services.

More Top Climate News

For decades, scientists have been sounding the alarm about how global warming is threatening key systems in the natural world. So, how close are we to hitting those tipping points? This week, The New York Times took a deep dive into the situation, breaking down just how near we are to critical thresholds like the death of coral reefs, the thawing of permafrost and the collapse of Greenland’s ice.

There’s already a new storm system on the horizon for the Caribbean. Tropical Storm Ernesto formed on Monday and is quickly heading toward Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, which are now under storm warnings. This marks the fifth named storm of this Atlantic hurricane season, forming barely one week after Debby made landfall, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned that 2024 could be one of the busiest seasons on record.

As the 2024 Paris Olympics wrapped up on Sunday, we are starting to look back at how the games handled the heat. When a heat dome hit Paris on July 29, national teams quickly turned to rented air conditioners, ice vests and heat monitors to keep their athletes cool, Grist reports. New protocols for outdoor sports, such as additional rest breaks, were also introduced to keep athletes safe in extreme temperatures. It’s still too soon to know how these games compare to Tokyo 2021, the hottest on record, but questions are already arising about what climate change means for the future of the Olympics.

Heat is making working conditions in Australia’s mines “like stepping inside an oven,” reports Bloomberg. While commodities producers are pouring billions of dollars into long-term mining projects in Australia’s Pilbara region, known for its iron ore, workers’ unions argue that the extreme heat poses serious risks to the more than 60,000 workers there.

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Mathilde Augustin

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Mathilde Augustin is a business journalist passionate about the intersection of climate and finance. She is a graduate of Columbia University in New York, where she received an M.A. in business and economics journalism and covered topics such as Canada’s logging industry and migrant workers building Paris Olympics facilities. She is French and Canadian and previously earned her B.A. in Political Science from McGill University.

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