Buying a home is a significant investment and a decision that requires careful consideration of various factors. While factors such as location, price, and amenities are commonly assessed, one crucial aspect that is often overlooked is the natural disaster risk rating of the area.
Understanding and assessing the natural disaster risk ratings before purchasing a property is of paramount importance to ensure the safety and security of your investment and the well-being of your family.
In this article, we will delve into the significance of evaluating natural disaster risk rating data when searching for a home.

1. Protecting Your Investment
Natural disasters can cause extensive damage to properties, resulting in financial loss for homeowners. Assessing the natural disaster risk ratings of an area allows you to gauge the vulnerability of the location to specific hazards such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, or wildfires. By understanding the risk associated with each potential hazard, you can make informed decisions about the level of risk you are willing to take on and take necessary precautions, such as obtaining insurance coverage specific to those risks.
2. Ensuring Personal Safety
The safety and well-being of your family should always be a top priority. Evaluating the natural disaster risk ratings provides valuable insights into the potential threats that an area may face. This information enables you to assess whether the local infrastructure, emergency response systems, and community resilience are equipped to handle such events. Knowing the risks involved in the area allows you to prepare adequately, develop emergency plans, and make informed decisions about evacuation routes or the need for additional safety measures.
3. Long-Term Livability
When considering buying a home, it's important to think about long-term livability. Climate change is leading to increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters in many regions. By examining natural disaster risk ratings, you can gain an understanding of how the area may be impacted in the future. Rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, and other environmental factors can significantly affect the livability of a place. Evaluating the potential risks enables you to make an informed decision about the suitability of the location for your long-term plans.
4. Insurance Considerations
Insurance plays a crucial role in protecting your investment and mitigating potential losses from natural disasters. Insurance providers often consider the natural disaster risk ratings when determining coverage options and premiums. Higher-risk areas may require additional coverage or result in higher insurance costs. By understanding the risk profile of the area, you can make accurate assessments of insurance requirements and budget accordingly. Increasingly, some areas may no longer be insurable. This is mainly oriented toward flood and wildfire prone area.
5. Researching and Utilizing Resources
There are many free resources available to assist in assessing natural disaster risk ratings for specific locations, and seemingly new ones coming online weekly. Local government websites, geological surveys, meteorological organizations, and emergency management agencies provide valuable information on historical data, hazard maps, and risk assessments. I’ve provided several resources below.
Utilizing these resources can help you evaluate current climate / natural disaster issues and potential risks of an area you’re looking to purchase a home in. This will help you better understand the steps that have been taken by local and national authorities to mitigate those risks, as well as current and future efforts that may be underway.
However, it must be understood that local and national efforts (if such exists) may not be sufficient to protect against all natural disaster risk as our climate continues to change. Therefore, if climate risk is important to you and your family, it’s imperative to consider an area of the country (or even world), that will be insulated (or at least where there’s less risk, or current impact) from the changing climate and natural disasters that experts seem to agree is ever-increasing.
A region's climate and natural disaster risks are a growing concern for home buyers. This will only increase as the risks and issues continue to accumulate, and potentially worsen. An October 2022 article from Redfin, Nearly Two-Thirds of Homebuyers and Sellers Are Hesitant to Move Somewhere With Climate Risk: Survey, is qute telling.
These are real issues impacting people and families now - from the thousands who have been impacted by wildfires and floods, to those who can no longer obtain homeowners insurance due to the high risk area they reside in.
Climate risk should be a key consideration for those looking for their “forever” home, a vacation getaway, or that home to raise the kids, not to mention real estate investors. The risk of loss, as well as the additional cost to insure should be a prioritized criteria in your quest for real property.
Conversely, if you currently live in a high risk area (or one that will become riskier in the coming years), perhaps you want to begin formulating a plan to move into a less risky area.
Following are several resources that provide information on climate and natural disaster risk by region, county, and even by address. Use one of these resources, or use a combination of several to assess areas you’re looking to purchase into (or move away from).

Putting It All Together
Incorporating an assessment of climate risk and natural disaster potential into your home buying process is crucial to ensure the safety of your investment and the well-being of your family. By considering the potential hazards, researching historical data, and utilizing available resources, you can make an informed decision about the level of risk you are willing to accept and take appropriate measures to protect yourself and your property.
Remember, a thorough evaluation of climate and natural disaster risks is an essential component of responsible homeownership in an ever-changing, and riskier world.
Further reading from Brookings.edu
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note: this podcast is AI created from my blog article.
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