Ten Across Conversations – Détails, épisodes et analyse

The insurance industry's bottom line offers the clearest, least political evidence that a stable economy and livable communities are increasingly dependent on strategies to address extreme weather impacts. California, Louisiana, and Florida have become harbingers of a spreading issue: disaster-related property losses that continuously exceed underwriting profitability. The resulting gaps in affordability and availability are driving property owners to states' insurer-of-last-resort programs or, more and more often, to forgo coverage for their greatest risks.  

As warmer ocean water and sea level rise fuel more destructive Atlantic hurricane seasons, Florida homeowner's insurance costs more than three times the national average, and an estimated 15-20% of property owners are uninsured. In Louisiana, the withdrawal of the insurance industry has caused the state's FAIR plan enrollment to grow 400% in just four years.  

Wildfire risk has grown as well. The fires in Los Angeles earlier this year are projected to become the costliest natural disaster in the nation’s history, around $50 billion more than the total damages from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Major insurers had already dropped 2.8 million policies in fire-prone areas of the state since 2020. Now, the state's FAIR plan is struggling to bear the weight of its own growing exposure as homeowners find themselves without other options for coverage.  

In the Ten Across region and beyond, there is growing interest in insurance mechanisms and governance which, rather than simply reflecting and reacting to risk, can be adapted as tools for better preparation and response.    

Carolyn Kousky founded the nonprofit Insurance for Good to meet this need. Listen in to learn more about how Carolyn’s work connects local leaders to deep industry knowledge and encourages the industry to participate actively in global climate resilience and energy transition efforts.   

About our guest: 

Carolyn Kousky is the founder of Insurance for Good, a nonprofit focused on improving equity in disaster recovery, accelerating the energy transition, and driving investments in resilience. She is also the author of Understanding Disaster Insurance: New Tools for a More Resilient Future and the Associate Vice President for Economics and Policy at Environmental Defense Fund. Prior to that, Carolyn was Executive Director of the Wharton Risk Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She currently serves on a number of public and private advisory boards, including on the U.S. Treasury’s Federal Advisory Committee on Insurance.


Related articles and resources:

Insurance for Good  

Hear from other experts on insurance in the 10X geography: Dave Jones, Latisha Nixon-Jones, Jesse Keenan, Amy Bach  

“Improving household and community disaster recovery: Evidence on the role of insurance” (Xuesong You, Carolyn Kousky, Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2024)  

“Leveraging insurance for decarbonization” (Carolyn Kousky, Joseph W. Lockwood, Journal of Catastrophe Risk and Resilience, 2024)  

“REPORT: The 2024 Miami-Dade Property Insurance Strategy Forum” (The Miami Foundation, 2024)   https://grist.org/politics/fema-moves-to-end-one-of-its-biggest-disaster-adaptation-programs/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic/climate

"FEMA moves to end one of its biggest disaster adaptation programs” (Grist, April 2025)  

Credits:

Host: Duke Reiter  

Producer and editor: Taylor Griffith  

Music by: Lennon Hutton  

Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler

Given a looming negotiation deadline and recent changes in federal operations, this is an apt time for us to check back in on how things are going with Colorado River management. Frequent listeners and 10X Summit attendees alike will be well acquainted with how clearly this topic illustrates our collective responsibility to be proactive in the face of the "knowable future".  

A 100-year-old miscalculation of water availability and the recent multi-decade drought have put our use of the Colorado River on an unsustainable path. This became apparent in 2021, as critical reservoirs at Lakes Mead and Powell approached a deadpool low-water scenario that would endanger hydropower generation at major dams and water deliveries to users further south. The risk level triggered immediate federal intervention and the renegotiation of a basin-wide agreement for sharing and conserving this vital resource.  

Stakeholders now have less than a month to submit a joint management proposal to the Bureau of Reclamation in time to be vetted for a new interstate compact. If this September, 2026 deadline is missed, the cooperative systems and oversight that have protected the Colorado River since 1944 may expire without an immediate replacement.  

Meanwhile, major layoffs are planned or underway at the Bureau and the Department of the Interior, and federal funding for river conservation has been frozen. Anne Castle, former U.S. commissioner and chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission is among those employees to have lost their positions in this transition.

Three years after their first Ten Across Conversations appearance together, today Anne and fellow renowned Western water policy expert John Fleck revisit the key themes and offer their thoughts on progress toward a positive policy future in the Colorado Basin.  

Related articles and resources:

https://10across.org/getting-honest-about-the-colorado-river-crisis-with-anne-castle-and-john-fleck/ Listen to our first episode with Anne and John from 2022  

Learn more about the 1994 U.S.-Mexico water treaty in this Ten Across Conversations podcast

“Trump admin rejects Colorado River water request from Mexico in first since 1944” (The Hill, March 2025)  

“Green Light for Adaptive Policies on the Colorado River” (Anne Castle and John Fleck, 2021)

“The Risk of Curtailment under the Colorado River Compact” (Anne Castle and John Fleck, 2019)

“Closing the Water Access Gap in the United States: A National Action Plan” (US Water Alliance, 2019)  

“Essay: Lessons for the End of the World” (Hanif Abdurraqib, The New Yorker, Feb. 2025)  

Credits:  
Host: Duke Reiter  

Producer and editor: Taylor Griffith  

Music by: Lupus Nocte, Tellsonic, and Pearce Roswell  

Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler  

About our guests:  

Anne Castle is a senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at the University of Colorado Law School. She is a founding member of the Water Policy Group and co-founder of the initiative on Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities. From 2022 to 2025, she served as U.S. Commissioner and Chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission and was Assistant Secretary for Water and Science at the U.S. Department of the Interior from 2009 to 2014.  

John Fleck is a writer in residence for the Utton Transboundary Resources Center and professor of practice in water policy and governance at the University of Mexico’s Department of Economics. He is also the co-author of Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River and author of Water is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West. John is the former director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program, where he continues to teach and advise graduate students.

Our examination of the conditions that exacerbated the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this month continues today with perspective from author and environmental historian Char Miller.  

Southern California received some much-needed rain over this past weekend, allowing firefighters to better contain the Palisades, Eaton, and Hughes fires. At the same time, the burned hillsides now bear much greater risk of mudslides and floods.  

These communities and individual residents must make complicated decisions about how to securely rebuild for the future.  California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have both advocated for eliminating some regulatory hurdles to help fast-track the reconstruction of Pacific Palisades and Altadena.  

Having carefully studied California’s fire history, Char argues that haste could lead to repeats of the same land use, zoning, and construction mistakes that have increased residential fire risk across the state to begin with.  

Climate change aside, land use policies that discount long-term environmental awareness are common contributing factors in nearly every type of disaster risk found in the Ten Across geography. Listen in as Ten Across founder Duke Reiter talks with Char Miller about the developing events in Los Angeles and how they relate to many other risk and adaptation stories across Interstate 10 in recent history.  

Related articles and resources:  

Books by Char Miller referenced in this discussion:  

Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning  

West Side Rising: How San Antonio’s 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked an Environmental Justice Movement  

Not So Golden State: Sustainability vs. the California Dream  

Ten Across Conversations podcasts referenced in this discussion:  

“Urban Expert Bill Fulton’s Perspective of How LA Can Rebuild Following the Fires” (Ten Across Conversations podcast, January 15, 2025)  

“State Preemption is on the Rise: What it Means for Cities” (Ten Across Conversations podcast, April 6, 2023)  

“Leading the Country’s 2nd Largest City with LA Mayor Eric Garcetti” (Ten Across Conversations podcast, November 17, 2022)  

Other:  

The Fragmented Metropolis (Robert M. Fogelson, 1993)

In the hottest year in recorded history, extreme heat corresponded to several notable weather events and ongoing public health impacts in the Ten Across geography. Evidence shows warming ocean temperatures were behind an especially destructive Atlantic hurricane season for the Gulf. Nearly all states along this transect saw their rates of private insurance nonrenewal increase among the most at-risk communities, as a result of storms, wildfires and other extreme weather. Lastly, all but four US cities that saw the most significant jump in their number of extremely hot days last year are along Interstate 10.  

It would not be unreasonable to feel some uneasiness and uncertainty as the new year begins. We are living in a fast-paced, highly connected period of volatility for humanity at large. And many of the decisions and actions taken now will have more immediate consequences here in the Ten Across geography, where the evidence of climate change is felt most profoundly.  

A loss of insurance or homeownership; loss of recreation or thermal comfort due to extended heat waves; or loss of communities as we once knew them from disaster, places a significant mental toll on those in the immediate and surrounding environment, as well as observers. However, a study by George Mason University finds most Americans (65%) ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ talk about the topic of climate change with friends or family.    

In this episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and Dr. Sophie Nicholls, principal investigator for the Feeling Planet research study, discuss the importance of naming and reflecting on difficult feelings about our environment. Sophie’s study seeks to demonstrate how this process is critical in tending to ourselves and others, and for generating action and hope for the future.  

Related resources and articles:  

Download Feeling Planet workshop materials and read more about the study HERE.  

“LA-area wildfires taking toll on mental health of disaster survivors” (NPR, January 14, 2025)  

What If We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures, written by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson  

The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains, written by Clayton Page Aldern  

The events of the past year have reinforced the logic of the Ten Across initiative. In the context of the hottest year in recorded history, the Ten Across geography witnessed ongoing drought, a supercharged Atlantic hurricane season, devastating wildfires, and a significant loss of homeownership or insurance safety nets for its residents.  

As we enter 2025, with staggering urban wildfires still raging in the Los Angeles area and a new federal administration soon to be sworn in; it is evident that this year will be a complex, unpredictable, if not historic year. This underscores the urgency of continuing our dialogues and collaborations on climate resilience. We believe the Ten Across region holds critical insights to understanding our present challenges and the foreseeable future as a nation as climate change and other global forces converge.  

In this episode, we contextualize major issues surfaced in 2024 and their significance within our region to set the stage for conversations in the year ahead. While we cannot highlight every guest and topic, we would like to sincerely thank all who engaged with us and shared their insights last year. We hope this summary will inspire you to revisit and share some of your favorite conversations of the show, so that we may connect with more of you in the new year.  

Thank you for listening along and stay tuned for more!  

Featured podcasts by order of appearance in this recording:  

“Why Phoenix is the ‘Most American City’ with George Packer”  

“How the 10X Region Can Plan for Climate Migration with Abrahm Lustgarten”
 
“Future Cities: How Mayors Are Leading U.S. Progress with Clarence Anthony”   

“James Fallows on How the News Media Influence U.S. Democracy and Elections”  

“New America’s Anne-Marie Slaughter on the Importance of Local and Regional Governance”  

Related articles and resources:  

Link to subscribe to the Ten Across newsletter

George Packer on Washington Week with The Atlantic, 12/27/24   “As a Climate Scientist, I Knew It Was Time to Leave Los Angeles” (Peter Kalmus, NYTimes Opinion, January 10, 2025)  

“The Great Climate Migration Has Begun” (Abrahm Lustgarten, New York Times Magazine, July 23, 2020)  

Our Towns Civic Foundation  

New America’s Co-Governance Project

On January 10, a sudden urban fire began in Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, immediately scorching 200 acres. Two hours later, evacuations were ordered for the 23,000 people in the community. By morning, all Los Angeles firefighters were called to duty, prepared for the worst as 50 to 80-mph winds began to pick up and carry embers from the fire for miles.  

Then the worst happened—firefighting aircraft became grounded due to the strong Santa Ana winds and hydrants, not designed for a fire of this scale, ran dry after constant use for 24 hours leaving homes and first responders defenseless. Within a short period of time, the Palisades fire razed 5,000 structures and counting to the ground.  

A little over a week since the blaze began, the Palisades and nearby Eaton fire in the Angeles National Forest, remain largely uncontained. Smaller fires in the conflagration—including Hurst and Kenneth on the northeast side of LA—are nearly or 100% contained. However 90,000 residents remain under evacuation orders and another 84,000 are under a warning. Life has come to a standstill in this portion of the nation’s second largest city and the path to recovery is uncertain.  

For years, the insurance industry has been anticipating an event like this. In fact, just last summer, 70% of Palisades residents had their home policies dropped because companies determined wildfire rebuilding cost would be insurmountable. The absence of private insurance coverage, and the speed with which the fire consumed billions of dollars’ worth of property, has raised urgent questions about how and where we will choose to develop housing, businesses, and necessary institutions in a climate changed world.  

In this timely episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and Bill Fulton, the former mayor of Ventura, California and former director of planning and economic development for the City of San Diego, discuss the future of homeownership, insurance, and residential development in Los Angeles while this singularly tragic event continues to play out.  

Related articles and resources:   

“As L.A. considers rebuilding, here’s what people say they’re willing to change” (The Washington Post, Jan. 15, 2025)  

“How climate change is reshaping home insurance in California—and the rest of the U.S.” (NPR, Jan. 14, 2025)  

“We Will All Be Paying For L.A’s Wildfires” (The Lever, Jan. 14, 2025)

"It’s not just trust, it’s agency. Going back to this election—that anger is so often connected to people who feel like they are at the mercy of forces they cannot control." —Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America

As we enter 2025, perspectives increasingly diverge on issues of the economy, national and international politics, energy and artificial intelligence, and management of the environment. The greatest uncertainty may be whether the world at large will rally to the urgency of climate change. Yet in the face of such complex, large-scale challenges, effective local action remains as one of the most important determinants of our collective future.  

Washington, D.C.-based New America, a “think-and-action tank,” was founded in 1999 on the belief that the nation needed research and policy recommendations that could better support the more mobile and informed American public of the digital age. Their work elevates the stories of people closest to the public problems they seek to solve; investing in the next generation of leaders; and intentionally engaging with local perspectives. The organization has generated guidance and driven activity toward building resilience and public trust at all levels of government, serving as a platform for emerging social, technological and political thought leaders including Abrahm Lustgarten and Jeff Goodell.  

Under the leadership of Anne-Marie Slaughter, a renowned international law scholar and former first woman director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department, New America has infused these areas of study and problem-solving with an increasingly global outlook.  

Listen in as Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and Anne-Marie Slaughter reflect on the evolution of New America’s role in helping to provide evidence-based ideas, policies, and solutions to help inform governmental response to the future and to external conflict. They also explore the local, state, and regional leadership alternatives available in the Ten Across geography if the global community cannot effectively collaborate on mitigating climate change impacts in 2025.

Relevant links and resources:  

Anne-Marie is also the author or editor of nine books, including... A New World Order… The Idea that Is America, and… most recently...Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics.   

Friends or fellows of New America that have also been on the podcast:  

“James Fallows on How the News Media Influence U.S. Democracy and Elections”  
“How the 10X Region Can Plan for Climate Migration with Abrahm Lustgarten”  
“10X Heat Series: Covering Climate Change as it Unfolds with Jeff Goodell”
https://10across.com/state-preemption-is-on-the-rise-what-it-means-for-cities/ “State Preemption is on the Rise: What it Means for Cities”  

Guest Bio: Anne-Marie Slaughter is a global leader, scholar, and public commentator. She is currently CEO of New America, a think and action tank dedicated to renewing the promise of America in a period of rapid demographic, technological, and global change. She previously served as a professor of international, foreign, and comparative law at Harvard Law School; dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and as the director of policy planning for the United States Department of State.  

Louisiana’s coast sits at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The largest discharge basin in the United States, the Mississippi collects runoff from 41% of the nation’s rivers and delivers it into the Gulf of Mexico. Where this freshwater meets the ocean, randomly deposited mounds of river sediment form a large, well-inhabited delta that is constantly reordering itself.   

To assert permanence upon this fluid landform and to stop severe flooding of riverine communities, the US Army Corps of Engineers introduced the Mississippi River Tributaries Program in 1927. Over the course of four decades, a labyrinth of concrete levees, floodways, reservoirs and pumping stations were constructed in an attempt to control the river.    

Today, these interventions along the Mississippi are inadvertently leading to greater flooding by preventing the natural process of sediment flow and the formation of new wetlands. Faced with this challenge, as well as the fastest rate of climate-induced sea level rise in the world—the Louisiana delta is quickly receding. In fact as Beaux Jones, president and CEO of The Water Institute shared, the state “loses roughly the equivalent of a football field every 100 minutes.”  

This land loss is so great, that the nation’s first official climate refugees hail from a now-deserted island in southern Louisiana: Isle de Jean Charles. Louisiana resident and writer Nathaniel Rich recently commented in The New York Times that evidence suggests New Orleans may not be far behind.  

The urgent challenge of protecting the habitation of Louisiana’s coast reminds us that climate change impacts are not a far-off abstraction or that resilience is a distant need; it is a daily reality for those in Gulf Coast.  

Listen in as Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and Beaux Jones, president and CEO of The Water Institute, explore how this Baton Rouge-based research center is gathering the best coastal hydrologic data and experts, and sharing their methodologies with the US Army Corps of Engineers and many impacted communities in the I-10 corridor to assist them in critical decision making and resilience planning.  

Relevant links and resources:  

Learn more about how The Water Institute is helping the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers update their benefit-cost analysis for climate adaptive infrastructure.  

Resilient Jacksonville: the award-winning resilience plan from the City of Jacksonville, with research support provided by the Institute  

Learn more about The Water Institute’s work at the forefront of quantifying the impacts of compound flooding.

The U.S. Atlantic hurricane season has changed. A recent study by Climate Central found that over the last six years, manmade warming amplified the average Atlantic hurricane’s strength by as much as 18 miles per hour. For context: it only takes an increase of 16 miles per hour to advance a hurricane from "minimal" Category 1 to "major" Category 3 — but the difference in damage is 140 times greater. Evidence of such a potent connection between climate-warmed ocean temperatures and the energy of tropical cyclones has many meteorologists raising alarms.  

In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published their ‘most aggressive season outlook’ ever, according to the Washington Post. The agency projected 17 to 25 named storms, up to 13 of which were likely to strengthen into hurricanes. Of those, it was predicted that four to seven would rank as Category 3 or above. With just a week left in the standard June-through-November hurricane season, the forecast has proven devastatingly accurate.  

The southeastern portion of the Ten Across geography and north into Central Appalachia saw the greatest human and property loss this season from one Category 4 and two Category 5 storms that rolled into the Gulf Coast region.  

This episode of the podcast discusses the greatest impacts from these events, as well as the advances that NOAA, the National Weather Service, and National Hurricane Center are making to limit harm from extreme weather as much as possible during both hurricane season and the rest of the year.  

Listen in as Ten Across founder Duke Reiter talks with National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan and the National Weather Service’s Southern Region Director Michael Coyne to explore the evolving responsibilities of meteorologic sciences and communications in a changing climate landscape. 

Extreme heat, when compared to other natural disasters, can be slow-moving and hard to observe. There aren’t homes to repair or debris to clear following a heat wave, but the devastation is revealed in the rising number of heat-related fatalities and declining public health measures across many vulnerable populations within Ten Across communities like Phoenix, Los Angeles, Tucson and San Antonio.  

Rising temperatures already pose a risk to this region's critical physical infrastructure, as reported by nonprofit Climate Central: the US experienced 60% more hot season power outages during the last 10 years than in the period from 2000 to 2009. And the risk of heat-related grid failures across California, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas is expected to grow quickly, according to findings released earlier this year by global advisory firm ICF.  

Federal, state, and local leaders are now focused on mitigating the most severe outcomes for heat-vulnerable communities. This summer the Biden Administration hosted the first ever White House Summit on Extreme Heat, pulling together more than 100 experts on the cutting edge of heat research and adaptation to develop shovel-ready resilience projects. Topping the list of priorities were long-term interventions like improved tree canopy and installation of cooling infrastructure in the most at-risk cities and suburbs.  

In this episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter speaks with Dr. V Kelly Turner, assistant professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, who participated in the White House Summit and has been a leading voice in reimagining the built environment for a hotter climate.   Earlier this year, Kelly was appointed director of the National Integrated Heat Health Information System’s (NIHHIS) Center for Heat Resilient Communities. The Center will begin accepting applications on November 20, 2024, from communities in need of technical assistance to determine the best locally tailored heat solutions.  

Listen in as Duke and Kelly discuss what these strategies might look like and why they are so immediately needed in the Ten Across region.  

Relevant links and resources:  

Information for cities and tribes to apply for heat mitigation grant technical assistance (APPLICATIONS DUE January 24, 2025): https://cpo.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/CHRC-Application-Supplement-10-31-2.pdf

https://www.icf.com/insights/climate/report-how-justice40-communities-adapt-extreme-heat?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template “New climate projections show rising exposure to extreme heat in disadvantaged communities” (ICF, May 2024)  

“What Some of the Hottest Cities on The 10 Are Doing to Address Deadly Heat” (Ten Across Conversations, August 2024)  

“10X Heat Series: Covering Climate Change as It Unfolds with Jeff Goodell” (Ten Across Conversations, July 2023)