When the Palisades Fire swept through the hills above Los Angeles in January 2025, it destroyed 6,837 structures across Pacific Palisades and Malibu in a matter of hours, and the Eaton Fire burning simultaneously through Altadena added another 9,414 to the total, displacing more than 180,000 people and producing estimated economic losses between $250 billion and $275 billion. Those numbers placed the event among the most expensive natural disasters in American history, yet the financial toll only begins to describe what unfolded on the ground.
Tens of thousands of residents scattered across Southern California with whatever they could carry, overwhelming temporary housing capacity, driving rental costs up by as much as 200 per cent in surrounding areas, and creating a population of climate-displaced people whose needs extended far beyond shelter into every dimension of human welfare that crisis management exists to address. The fires demanded expertise in family assistance, personal effects recovery, information management, and community coordination at a scale that bore little resemblance to the structural firefighting operation at the centre of the headlines.
The LA wildfires were not an isolated event in an otherwise stable risk environment. They were a particularly visible example of a pattern that has been intensifying for over a decade. According to Munich Re's 2024 natural disaster review, weather-related catastrophes accounted for 93 per cent of the $320 billion in global natural disaster losses that year, and insured losses alone reached approximately $140 billion. In the United States, NOAA recorded 27 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2024, following 28 in 2023, and the average interval between billion-dollar events has narrowed from 82 days during the 1980s to 19 days over the past decade. These are not projections about what might happen in a warmer future. They describe the operating environment that crisis management professionals are working in right now, and the trajectory is toward greater frequency, greater severity, and greater complexity.
Traditional Crisis Plans Were Not Built for Climate-Driven Disasters
Many crisis management plans in active use today were designed around assumptions that climate-driven disasters have already invalidated. They assume discrete events with identifiable start and end points. They assume sequential response phases that proceed from immediate rescue through to recovery in a broadly predictable order. They assume that the scale of displacement and disruption will be bounded by the geographic footprint of the triggering event, and that mutual aid and external support will be available because neighbouring regions will not be dealing with their own simultaneous emergencies.
Climate-driven disasters violate every one of those assumptions with increasing regularity. A wildfire that burns for weeks across a shifting landscape does not present a defined incident site around which response operations can be organised. A hurricane that produces catastrophic flooding in one region while disrupting supply chains and transport networks across an entire continent creates crisis management demands that radiate far beyond the physical path of the storm. Extreme heat events that persist for days or weeks degrade infrastructure, strain healthcare systems, and create mass casualty scenarios that accumulate gradually rather than arriving in a single moment of impact, and the response frameworks that work for a discrete incident simply do not transfer to an event whose defining characteristic is that it will not end on a timeline anyone can predict.
The 2025 UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction reinforces this concern, warning that disaster costs now exceed $2.3 trillion annually when cascading and ecosystem effects are factored in, and that without significant changes to how organisations approach risk reduction, climate-driven events may reduce household income growth by between 11 and 29 per cent through to 2050. For crisis management professionals, the practical implication is that plans built around assumptions of bounded, sequential, geographically contained incidents need fundamental revision if they are to remain useful in the operating environment that already exists.
Compound Disasters Overwhelm Sequential Response Models
One of the most significant changes in the climate risk landscape is the increasing frequency of compound events, where two or more hazards occur simultaneously or in close succession, producing combined impacts that are substantially worse than either hazard would generate in isolation. Research published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment in early 2025 documents a clear upward trend in compound weather and climate events globally, with 2024 providing a concentrated demonstration of what that trend means in practice.
When Hurricane Beryl struck Texas in July 2024, it produced extensive flooding and widespread power outages across the Houston metropolitan area. Before recovery operations could gain meaningful traction, a severe heatwave followed, with temperatures exceeding 37 degrees Celsius for days on end. The combination transformed what would have been a serious flooding event into a compounding crisis, because hundreds of thousands of residents were without power and therefore without air conditioning during extreme heat, a combination that turned damaged homes from shelters into health hazards and forced a second wave of displacement on top of the first.
This pattern, one hazard creating vulnerability that the next hazard exploits, represents a fundamental challenge to crisis management frameworks built around the assumption that organisations will face one crisis at a time. Wildfire followed by mudslide in areas where fire has stripped vegetation from slopes. Flooding followed by waterborne disease in regions where sanitation infrastructure has been compromised. Drought followed by wildfire followed by flooding in a cycle that compounds damage with each iteration. These sequences are becoming more common precisely because the same warming atmosphere that intensifies individual hazards also increases the probability that those hazards will interact in ways that exceed the sum of their parts.
Organisations whose crisis plans treat each hazard as a standalone scenario, with a distinct plan for flooding and a distinct plan for extreme heat and a distinct plan for wildfire, will discover during a compound event that none of those plans accounts for the interactions between hazards, and that the resources allocated to managing one scenario have already been consumed by the time the second arrives.
Climate Risk and Aviation Intersect in Ways the Industry Is Still Learning to Manage
The aviation sector faces a distinctive set of climate-related vulnerabilities that extend well beyond the operational inconvenience of weather delays. Extreme heat reduces air density, which directly affects aircraft lift performance and can force weight restrictions or outright cancellations during the hottest parts of the day at airports already operating near their design temperature limits. Wildfire smoke degrades visibility across vast areas, triggers instrument approach requirements at airports that may not have the capacity to handle reduced throughput, and introduces particulate matter that raises concerns about engine ingestion. Airport flooding has moved from a theoretical vulnerability to a demonstrated operational risk, as Porto Alegre's Salgado Filho International Airport in Brazil showed when it remained closed for approximately five months in 2024 after unprecedented flooding damaged runways and terminal infrastructure.
The financial scale of these disruptions is significant and growing. Analysis from MITRE and the World Economic Forum indicates that the costs of weather-related flight cancellations, diversions, airport closures, and cargo disruptions could reach $500 billion by 2050 if current trends continue. An intense nor'easter in October 2025 caused more than 8,000 flight delays and approximately 800 cancellations across major East Coast airports over multiple days, illustrating how a single weather system can propagate disruption across an entire network.
For crisis managers within the aviation industry, these trends mean that weather-related disruption planning can no longer be treated as an operational scheduling problem to be managed by flight operations departments alone. When an airport closes for months rather than hours, when smoke from a wildfire hundreds of kilometres away grounds flights across an entire region, when heat restrictions become a recurring feature of summer operations rather than an occasional inconvenience, the consequences spill into territory that requires crisis management coordination, including passenger welfare, workforce deployment, supply chain continuity, and reputational management under sustained public scrutiny.
Supply Chains Transmit Climate Crises Across Borders
Climate events in one region routinely create crisis management challenges in regions that experienced no physical damage at all, because global supply chains transmit disruption with remarkable efficiency. The Panama Canal drought of 2023 and 2024 forced authorities to slash transit capacity by a third, costing Panama an estimated $700 million and creating bottlenecks that affected shipping routes serving the entire Western Hemisphere. Simultaneously, the Red Sea crisis forced nearly 80 per cent of container ships to divert around the Cape of Good Hope, adding seven to ten days and approximately $1 million per voyage to Asia-Europe trade routes. Port performance declined globally in 2024 as a direct result of these combined disruptions.
For organisations with crisis management responsibilities, supply chain vulnerability represents a category of climate risk that is easy to overlook during planning but devastating when it materialises. A hospital that sources critical medical supplies through a logistics chain dependent on a single port is exposed to climate events occurring thousands of kilometres from its location. An airline that relies on a just-in-time fuel supply arrangement is one hurricane-related refinery shutdown away from operational disruption. Building climate resilience into supply chain planning requires mapping not just first-tier suppliers, but the infrastructure corridors and logistics nodes on which those suppliers depend, and stress-testing procurement pathways against disruption scenarios that may originate far from the organisation's own operations.
Personal Effects and Property Management at a Scale Crisis Plans Rarely Anticipate
Crisis management professionals have deep experience in personal effects recovery and return. It is one of the most sensitive and logistically demanding elements of any response operation, whether following an aviation disaster, a maritime incident, or a terrorist attack. Climate-driven disasters, however, are creating personal effects challenges at a scale that many crisis plans were never designed to address.
The LA wildfires destroyed more than 11,600 homes, along with approximately 200 commercial buildings and over 100 schools. Each of those structures contained the personal belongings of the people who lived or worked there, and the process of recovering, cataloguing, and returning those items, or helping families come to terms with their permanent loss, played out across thousands of cases simultaneously. Complicating matters further, the ash and debris left behind by the fires constituted what public health officials described as a toxic mixture of incinerated vehicles, electronics, paints, and household materials, meaning that personal belongings salvaged from standing structures near the burn zones required assessment for chemical contamination before they could safely be returned to their owners. Residents found themselves inspecting their possessions one by one, uncertain which items could be cleaned and which had been rendered permanently hazardous.
When a wildfire, flood, or hurricane destroys thousands of homes in a single event, the personal effects dimension of the response scales in a way that can overwhelm organisations accustomed to managing this process for incidents involving dozens or hundreds of affected individuals. The emotional weight of personal belongings does not diminish because the disaster is large. A family that has lost everything in a wildfire experiences the loss of irreplaceable photographs, heirlooms, and documents with the same intensity as the family of an air disaster victim receiving a recovered wedding ring. The difference is that climate-driven events produce thousands of these cases at once, and the organisations responsible for community recovery rarely have the specialist personal effects management capability that crisis response professionals bring to aviation and maritime contexts.
Building Climate Resilience into Crisis Management Frameworks
Adapting crisis management to the realities of climate-driven disasters requires more than updating hazard assessments and revising scenario libraries. It requires a shift in how organisations think about the temporal, geographic, and systemic dimensions of crisis.
Planning assumptions need to accommodate prolonged events rather than discrete incidents. A crisis that unfolds over weeks or months demands rotation plans for response personnel, sustained rather than surge-based logistics, and communication strategies designed for endurance rather than a single news cycle.
Geographic scope needs to expand beyond the physical footprint of the triggering event. Supply chain mapping, mutual aid agreements, and resource pre-positioning all need to reflect the reality that climate events create cascading effects across regions and borders. An organisation that has planned only for the direct impact of a hurricane on its own facilities, without considering what happens when the same hurricane disrupts the fuel supply, the power grid, and the availability of contractors and materials needed for recovery, has planned for a fraction of the crisis it will actually face.
Compound event scenarios need to be integrated into exercise programmes. Tabletop exercises that present a single hazard in isolation may build familiarity with individual response procedures, yet they do not test an organisation's ability to manage the interactions between simultaneous or sequential hazards that define the emerging risk environment. Exercising a flooding scenario followed immediately by an extreme heat scenario, or a wildfire scenario that degrades air quality while simultaneously disrupting aviation operations, produces far more useful learning about organisational resilience than exercising either hazard on its own.
Partnerships with specialist crisis management and response organisations need to be established before the crisis arrives, not during it. Our experience across more than 700 incidents consistently demonstrates that organisations with pre-existing crisis response relationships activate faster, coordinate more effectively, and deliver better outcomes for affected populations than those attempting to identify and engage specialist support after the event is already underway. In an environment where climate-driven disasters are becoming more frequent, more intense, and more complex, that advance preparation is no longer an optional enhancement to an organisation's crisis management posture. It is a fundamental requirement.
If you’d like to discuss how we can support your organisation’s preparedness and response capabilities, please get in touch.
Frequently Asked Questions
How are climate-driven disasters different from traditional crisis management scenarios?
Climate-driven disasters differ from the discrete incidents that most crisis plans were designed around in three critical ways. They tend to be prolonged rather than instantaneous, unfolding over days or weeks rather than occurring in a single moment. They frequently produce compound effects, where one hazard creates conditions that amplify the impact of subsequent hazards, as when flooding followed by extreme heat in Texas in 2024 transformed a serious weather event into a cascading humanitarian crisis. And they can generate consequences that radiate far beyond the physical footprint of the triggering event, disrupting supply chains, displacing populations across wide areas, and creating resource competition between affected regions that undermines the mutual aid assumptions embedded in many response plans.
Why do traditional crisis management plans struggle with climate events?
Many crisis management plans assume a bounded incident with identifiable start and end points, a defined geographic footprint, sequential response phases that progress from rescue through to recovery, and the availability of external support from unaffected neighbouring areas. Climate-driven disasters routinely violate these assumptions. A wildfire that burns across a shifting landscape for weeks does not present a defined incident site. A hurricane that disrupts supply chains and transport networks across an entire continent creates challenges far beyond the storm's physical path. When multiple regions face simultaneous emergencies, the mutual aid that plans depend upon may simply not be available.
What is a compound climate disaster, and why does it matter for crisis preparedness?
A compound disaster occurs when two or more climate-related hazards occur simultaneously or in close succession, producing combined impacts that exceed what either hazard would generate on its own. These events matter for crisis preparedness because they overwhelm response models designed to handle one hazard at a time. Organisations that maintain separate plans for separate hazards will find during a compound event that neither plan accounts for the interactions between hazards, and that resources allocated to the first response have been consumed before the second crisis arrives. Building compound scenarios into exercise programmes and planning assumptions is essential for organisations operating in the current risk environment.
How does the insurance industry retreat affect crisis response?
The withdrawal of major insurers from climate-exposed regions removes one of the primary mechanisms through which affected communities historically funded their recovery. When large numbers of displaced residents lack insurance coverage, the humanitarian assistance burden on crisis responders increases substantially, the duration of the response extends because recovery stalls without funding, and the psychological toll on affected populations deepens as financial stress compounds the trauma of displacement. Crisis management frameworks need to account for this shift by planning for response scenarios in which a significant proportion of the affected population has no insurance and limited financial resources to support their own recovery.
What should organisations do now to prepare for climate-driven crises?
Organisations should begin by stress-testing their existing crisis plans against prolonged, compound, and geographically distributed scenarios rather than the discrete, single-hazard incidents that most plans were designed around. They should map supply chain vulnerabilities to identify exposure to climate events in distant regions. They should establish relationships with specialist crisis management and response providers before a crisis occurs, rather than attempting to source that expertise under pressure. And they should invest in exercise programmes that test compound scenarios, sustained response capacity, and the ability to manage cascading effects, because the gap between what traditional plans were designed for and what climate-driven disasters actually demand is growing with each passing year.
How does Kenyon help organisations prepare for climate-driven crises?
Kenyon is TrustFlight's crisis management and response capability, with more than 120 years of experience across 700 incidents. Kenyon works with organisations to build crisis management frameworks that account for the prolonged, compound, and geographically distributed nature of climate-driven events, including personal effects management at scale, family assistance coordination, and crisis communications under sustained public scrutiny. Our global network of 2,500 specialist responders provides the surge capacity that climate-driven disasters demand, and its pre-established relationships with clients ensure that response activation begins within hours rather than days when an event occurs.