Climate Disaster Survivors Organize Across America, Turning Common Bonds of Loss Into Action
The flames took Erica Solove by surprise.
It was the middle of winter in Colorado. Blizzards were to be expected. A fire? Not so much.
Yet on Dec. 30, 2021, the Marshall Fire tore through the towns of Louisville and Superior in Boulder County, killing two people and destroying more than a thousand homes.
Solove’s was among them. She had fled with her husband, their two young children and their yellow lab, taking nothing but the clothes they were wearing. Wallets, passports and birth certificates were incinerated with the rest of the house. Her husband was the only one wearing shoes.
It snowed the next day. The family jumped between hotels before finding a rental in South Boulder, where they stayed until moving into their rebuilt home in the summer of 2023. The year-and-a-half construction project beat many estimates of how long rebuilding could take.
Then, that August, wildfires tore across the Hawaiian island of Maui. More than 100 people were killed and 2,200 structures damaged or destroyed, including nearly the entire town of Lahaina.
“Just seeing that footage, it hit deep,” Solove said. “There were lessons learned from how our emergency was handled, and I saw those same things repeated in Maui. I felt like I wanted to be able to help.”
With the Maui fires still smoldering, Solove created a Facebook group to connect survivors in Lahaina with Marshall Fire survivors in Colorado. She hoped to share lessons her community learned after the blaze about how to deal with insurance, mortgages, lost documents—“all the boring stuff we had to become experts in,” she said.
Little research has been done on the number of environmental advocates who have themselves endured a disaster. But interviews with more than a dozen survivors of extreme weather reveal the profound motivating effect that losing a home, or a loved one, has had for those who chose to become climate activists, lest others endure what they have.
Solove’s story is, consequently, an ever more common one. As climate change turbocharges more frequent and destructive extreme weather events, a growing number of disaster survivors are organizing across the United States to call for climate action and advocate for proactive mitigation efforts.
There were 108 major disaster and emergency declarations nationwide in 2024, impacting 137 million people—about 41 percent of the U.S. population—according to an analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development.
As the Trump administration moves to gut the Federal Emergency Management Agency and withhold disaster aid from more than a dozen states, disaster survivors and victim advocates say sharing their own experiences has become more important than ever.
About 40 people joined the group Solove created for Maui survivors. It was small, but it was her way of paying forward the kindness she received from strangers after losing her home.
And it didn’t go unnoticed. Solove soon heard from Extreme Weather Survivors, a fledgling nonprofit mobilizing its namesake community to support disaster victims and combat climate change.
Today, Solove runs what her 2023 self could only dream of—Extreme Weather Survivors’ online community of about 1,000 disaster survivors, insurance advocates, industrial hygienists, environmental health physicians and other experts sharing resources and answering questions in real time. Now on the messaging application Slack, the platform went live in January to coordinate relief efforts after the Los Angeles wildfires.
“Heartbreaking Pioneers”
There is, of course, a long history of survivors organizing within their communities after a fire or a storm, calling on elected officials to take their concerns seriously only to feel ignored or abandoned.
In Western North Carolina, many roads remain washed out and bridges unrepaired seven months after Hurricane Helene, fueling a false belief among some survivors and online conspiracists that FEMA failed to respond after the storm.
Some residents of Louisville, Colorado, who lost their homes in the Marshall Fire, protested against regulations adopted by the City Council that required new homes be built with net-zero carbon emissions, arguing the rules would raise costs by tens of thousands of dollars when most people’s top priority was rebuilding as quickly as possible.
Insurance payouts and other compensation for victims often come only after months or years of unnecessary suffering.
Extreme Weather Survivors claims to be the first organization to bring together victims of what its members call “unnatural disasters” with the express purpose of fighting climate change.
Its co-founder, Chris Kocher, got the idea for the organization after Hurricane Ida in 2021 brought torrential flooding to New York City, where he lives, killing 14 people. Kocher previously directed the survivor network at Everytown for Gun Safety and founded the organization COVID Survivors for Change.
After the storm, he said he “started thinking about whether there was something I could do, given my experience and background, to build something to support those folks not just through peer support and connections to mental health professionals, but in advocating for stronger policies.”
Extreme Weather Survivors launched in 2024. The organization provides free resources in English and Spanish, including a network of mental health professionals and connections with survivors who offer peer-to-peer support.
“In many ways they are, heartbreakingly, pioneers,” Kocher said of Extreme Weather Survivors’ members. “They are among the first of a growing number of Americans to understand what it means that climate change is here, it’s impacting people, and it’s going to get more severe.”
The organization also offers trainings in media literacy, storytelling and legislative advocacy. Interest in activism isn’t a prerequisite to access other services, but about half of members want to get more involved, Kocher said.
The organization’s first foray into legislative advocacy was in Vermont, where last year Extreme Weather Survivors partnered with victims of a devastating 2023 flood to support the Climate Superfund Act, which forces fossil fuel companies to pay for damage caused by climate change in the state. Funds raised by the law, which passed the state legislature in May 2024 and is being challenged in federal court, would be used to support climate adaptation projects.
“They are among the first of a growing number of Americans to understand what it means that climate change is here, it’s impacting people, and it’s going to get more severe.”
— Chris Kocher, Extreme Weather Survivors
Less than two months after the law was enacted, and a year to the day after the 2023 deluge, another major flood inundated wide swaths of Vermont. Two people died, and some of the same people who had spent the last year rebuilding were forced to start from scratch.
Extreme Weather Survivors is also supporting California’s Senate Bill 222, which, if adopted, would create a legal pathway for insurers to recover climate-related losses from fossil fuel companies.
“A Sad Credibility”
In practice, Extreme Weather Survivors has primarily served as a vessel for storytelling.
“Humans are wired to understand stories,” Kocher said. “Understanding one person’s story is easier for people to comprehend than ‘Climate change is going to disrupt our entire way of life.’”
Members have fanned out across the country with their stories, writing opinion pieces and speaking at town halls and conferences. The organization’s website invites visitors to “share with us how you or your family have been directly impacted by extreme weather.” A panel last fall at New York City’s climate week that featured four disaster survivors generated a flurry of media attention for the budding organization.
Steve Koller, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, said an emphasis on storytelling was smart because people who weren’t already attuned to climate news may see themselves reflected in a personal story of loss that could happen to anyone.
“There’s a sad credibility that comes with that,” he said, “as opposed to another policy paper from an academic.”
Koller himself was drawn to his line of work—he studies flooding, federal disaster programs, decarbonization and more—after surviving Hurricane Sandy in 2012. He described the storm as an “inflection point” in his life; whereas before he knew of storms and climate change only in the abstract, he suddenly had friends and neighbors without homes. He credits that experience with shaping the trajectory of his career.
The same is true for Nabila Wilson, whose neighborhood in Houston had flooded three years in a row by the time she was 13. The third time was Hurricane Harvey, in 2017. Her family was evacuated by the National Guard; their house was damaged beyond repair. Harvey killed at least 89 people and destroyed more than 200,000 homes and businesses, dumping more than 50 inches of rain in some places.
Wilson took a leading role in a climate education group during high school. But it wasn’t until she moved to South Carolina for college that she realized how many of her peers thought of climate change as something far away, if they thought about it at all.
“That was shocking to me at first, because I’ve experienced multiple hurricanes,” she said. “I realized a lot of people don’t have the basis I do to think about my own experiences when I talk about climate change.”
And as the Trump administration embraces climate denialism and turns sharply away from environmental protection, Wilson said she’s gotten back to her roots, focusing on change she can make in her own community.
“My goal doesn’t have to be to change the whole federal government,” said Wilson, who leads two environmental groups at Furman University, where she’s a sophomore. “Sometimes it can be to empower and help train my fellow youth.”
Alicia Cooperman, a political scientist at George Washington University who studies natural disasters, said getting involved in local politics—speaking at city council meetings, talking to county commissioners, participating in public comment sessions—is among the most effective ways disaster survivors can bring about change. And because cities often learn and improve upon each other’s policies, local activism can reach far beyond one community, she said.
Still, to speak at a meeting you have to know it’s happening. That’s where online groups, such as Extreme Weather Survivors’ Slack, can be highly effective at mobilizing large numbers of people to show up at a public meeting or protest, Cooperman said.
One major challenge, however, is that while “most adaptation is local, a lot of the funding is federal,” Cooperman said. The Trump administration has eliminated billions of dollars in grants for climate-resilient infrastructure and research, laid off thousands of federal employees at agencies that historically worked to protect the environment, and targeted for elimination funding to support communities disproportionately harmed by climate change.
On Monday, the Trump administration dismissed all of the scientists working on the sixth National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s flagship report on the impacts of climate change in the United States.
“They Have Been Failing Us Again and Again”
Finn Does remembers looking out his bedroom window on Sept. 9, 2020, and seeing “a fiery, apocalyptic, burning glow.” The North Complex Fire was burning about 200 miles north of his home in San Rafael, California, and smoke from the fire had turned the sky over the San Francisco Bay Area a smoldering deep orange.
Does was just 15 at the time. He called the experience “a wake-up call that elected officials would rather take money to line their own pockets than actually drive the solutions we so desperately need to reverse this crisis.
“That was the pivotal moment I needed to realize I’m not going to wait around for an elected official or some person in a seat of power to make the right decision,” Does said, “because clearly they have been failing us again and again.”
He joined a climate-action club at his high school, and by 2023 was co-chair of the Bay Area Youth Climate Summit, a nonprofit run by and for high school students to organize around climate justice and solutions.
Now 19 and a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, Does is studying environmental law and policy and is involved in several climate groups on and off campus. And, he said, he’s still meeting young people “probably every week” who decided to get involved in climate organizing after Orange Day.
“That was a front row seat into what young Americans’ futures will look like if we don’t take action right now,” he said.
For Annie Barbour, the inciting moment came at age 55, when the Tubbs Fire in 2017 engulfed her tract home in the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa, California.
As the recovery effort got underway, Barbour volunteered to be a “block captain,” collecting neighbors’ information and helping find answers to their questions—and her own—about the rebuilding process. The community soon formed a group called Coffey Strong to share advice and hold elected officials accountable.
“You’re now rudderless,” Barbour said of the experience of losing one’s home and belongings. “Your path forward in life has just been waylaid, and you’re not really sure how to get back on track.”
But after a 33-year career in the grocery industry, Barbour had found a new calling. Dedicating herself to the neighborhood’s recovery, she said, “just felt right.”
When the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, California, the following year, Barbour and her neighbors traveled there to speak with survivors and local officials, “letting them know that there was a path forward and that they could navigate it—that it was doable,” she said.
That work turned into a job at United Policyholders, a nonprofit that guides disaster survivors through their insurance claims. After a fire, Barbour would set up a table at the local assistance center to meet with residents, many of whom had just lost everything.
“So many people would just break down and cry in front of us because somebody finally was on the other side of the table who got it, who knew what they were going through,” she said.
She went to Colorado after the Marshall Fire. To Lahaina. To Los Angeles.
An Invisible Killer
Fires and storms attract a lot of attention. They’re violent and messy. They can trash a town in minutes, leaving nothing but twisted metal and wood charred to a crisp. They change the color of the sky.
Then there’s extreme heat.
In 2024, Phoenix endured 113 consecutive days of temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. At least 602 people died from heat in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, throughout the year—a decline from the record 645 heat-related deaths in the county in 2023.
Heat is a silent killer. Instead of flattened neighborhoods, a heat wave conjures images of empty streets, as residents, as much as possible, stay indoors. Those who are homeless or work outside are particularly vulnerable.
The Stafford Act, the law that governs most federal disaster response, doesn’t count extreme heat as a “major disaster.”
Amy Dishion joined Extreme Weather Survivors after her husband, Evan, died of heatstroke on a hike in the hills north of Phoenix in 2022. He was 32; their daughter, Chloe, had been born three months earlier.
Dishion was involved in climate activism before Evan’s death, volunteering her time for the organization Moms Clean Air Force. After he died, she felt a newfound anger at policymakers who knew climate change was coming and did nothing to stop it.
“My entire life was turned upside down by an unseasonably hot day in September,” she said. “I hope that by speaking about this I can put a human face on what is so often just a bunch of statistics.”
Dishion moved back to Salem, Oregon, where she and Evan grew up, shortly after Evan’s death. When she shares his story, she said, she’s often thinking of the future that their daughter will inherit.
“I hope policymakers will listen to my story and say, ‘That could so easily have been me or my spouse or my child,’” Dishion said. “I want them to feel the pain that I have gone through because of climate change, and I want them to make a different decision.”
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