By Kyle Reiman
The risk of having your home damaged or destroyed by a wildfire is increasing, according to a new report. As a result, homeowners are facing rising insurance costs, reconstruction costs or even no insurance coverage after devastating wildfires.
Cotality, a data research company, issues yearly wildfire risk reports assessing the state of the wildfire insurance industry and the risk of damaging wildfires for certain parts of the United States.
They found that more than 2.6 million homes across 14 states in the West face a moderate or greater risk of wildfires, with nearly half of the homes at very high wildfire risk.
Those homes would cost $1.3 trillion to replace if they were destroyed by fire, according to Cotality.
Of the homes under a moderate or higher threat of wildfires, more than 1.2 million of them are in California.
What does it mean for you?
Increasing wildfire risk, higher premiums and fewer policy options mean that owning a home in a wildfire-prone area is likely to keep getting more expensive. And even those who don’t own a home are facing risks from fires.
And the increasing wildfire risk is not only making it more expensive to own and protect a home, but also negatively impacting everyone’s health, data show. A recent report from the Air Quality Life Index reveals that air quality levels have decreased to levels not seen since 2011 for the U.S. and since 1998 in Canada due to particulate pollution from wildfire smoke.
The report also highlights that particulate pollution from wildfire smoke was the most significant external threat to human life expectancy in 2023, which has lowered the average global human life expectancy by as much as 1.9 years.
It concludes that wildfire smoke’s impact on life expectancy is “more than four times that of alcohol use, five times that of transport injuries or unsafe water, sanitation, and handwashing, and more than six times that of HIV/AIDS.”