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King Charles III has been called “the real deal” — and also a climate fraud.

At the very least, you’ve got to admit — the “Green King” has a nice ring to it.
This Saturday, for the first time in 70 years, Britain will formally crown a new sovereign, setting off a three-day weekend of celebrations that will cost taxpayers a rumored $125 million. But while King Charles III is tied with his wife, Camilla, as Americans’ second-least-favorite royal — behind only the notorious Prince Andrew — his ascension has also drawn praise from climate activists and historians worldwide, who’ve dubbed him Britain’s “environmentalist king-in-waiting.”
Charles’ more than a half-century of environmental activism will undoubtedly be tempered by what The New Yorker calls the monarchical “convention to not publicly register his own views on matters of political policy, and, indeed, to accept the policies of the government.” But his credentials as the once and future Green King of the United Kingdom are also mixed; for every illegally fished Patagonian toothfish he’d defended in the name of “the poor old albatross,” there’s also a wind turbine he’s blasted as a “blot.”
Here’s an overview of Charles’ mixed green bona fides, in passages from 10 helpful articles from around the web.
It may be tempting to think of the new King, with his bespoke Savile Row suits, Edwardian manners, and royal retinue, as an icon of a previous age. But his speeches, books, and projects do suggest a man ahead of his time. He was advocating concepts such as the circular economy and natural capital years before they captured the public’s imagination, and he’s clearly followed his own principles, converting his farm to organic practices more than 30 years ago.
“Some of these ideas were radical and literally decades ahead of their time. Some you could reprint today and they would be very much of the moment. It’s hard to overstate the role he played in putting these subjects on the agenda,” says Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England, a fellow with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and former executive director of Friends of the Earth and president of the Wildlife Trusts.
From “Prince Charles Was an Environment Radical. What Happens Now He’s King?” by Jonathan Manning for National Geographic, Sept. 23, 2022
[...The] 73-year-old monarch has dedicated a large part of his life to doing something about the environmental issues that, as a youth, so occupied his mind. He has been an outspoken supporter of sustainability, organic farming, renewable energy, and biodiversity. He’s encouraged others to rethink urban design and corporate production. He skips meat a few days a week. His vintage Aston Martin runs on surplus wine and excess cheese whey. Clarence House, where he lived in London as the Prince of Wales, has solar panels. Balmoral, the summer home of the Royal Family in Aberdeenshire in Scotland, features hydroelectric turbines and biomass boilers. And at last year’s COP26, the king warned world leaders that “after billions of years of evolution, nature is our best teacher” when it comes to reducing emissions and capturing carbon, noting that “restoring natural capital, accelerating nature-based solutions, and leveraging the circular bioeconomy will be vital to our efforts.”
[...Unlike] other world figureheads touting climate issues, when it comes to actually believing in the need to tackle climate change, King Charles is the real deal, argues Piers Forster, professor of climate physics at the University of Leeds and a trustee of the United Bank of Carbon.
From “What Charles the ‘Activist King’ Means for the Climate” by Tom Ward for Wired, Sept. 14, 2022
Charles — like his father, Prince Philip, before him — has at times waded into the sticky morass of population growth. In a speech given at the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford University in 2010, then-Prince Charles noted: “When I was born in 1948, a city like Lagos in Nigeria had a population of just 300,000; today, just over 60 years later, it is home to 20 million.”
With population increasing rapidly in Mumbai, Cairo, Mexico City, and cities in other developing countries around the world, Charles said Earth cannot “sustain us all, when the pressures on her bounty are so great.”
[…] There may seem to be a simple logic in laying the blame for climate change on global population, which is now inching toward 8 billion. But there is a long and fraught history of thinkers in developed countries critiquing population growth in developing ones. Betsy Hartman, a professor emerita of development studies at Hampshire College, has said, “In this ideology of ‘too many people,’ it’s always certain people who are ‘too many.’”
From “The Many Paradoxes of Charles III as ‘Climate King’” by Shannon Osaka for The Washington Post, Sept. 13, 2022
[...There] has long been respect for Charles among Indigenous people stretching back more than two decades to April 2001, when the prince traveled to Saskatchewan for a Cree ceremony that bestowed upon him the name Kīsikāwipīsimwa miyo ōhcikanawāpamik, or, “The Sun Watches Over Him in a Good Way.”
Our new monarch has made efforts to visit with Canadian Indigenous leaders in subsequent trips. In 2019, he invited [Perry Bellegarde, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations] to London and [asked] him to be a part of the Sustainable Markets Initiative, which attempts to push the private sector to make the transition to low-carbon operations.
Charles even consulted with First Nations elders over Zoom during the pandemic to talk about elders’ traditional knowledge.
“He’s got it in terms of sustainable development — that we’re all connected to the land and to the water, and that what affects the animals affects us, and what affects the plants affects us, and what affects the water affects us as human beings,” Bellegarde said.
“I teased him one time in a meeting: ‘I swear to goodness, your Majesty, that you were First Nations in another life.’”
From “Call Him the Green King. Charles Will Have an Environmental Agenda. How Far Can He Push It?” by Allan Woods for The Toronto Star, April 30, 2023
Charles has never acknowledged the monarchy’s full responsibility for the climate crisis. Asked by the BBC last year if the U.K. was doing enough to combat climate change, he replied: ”I couldn’t possibly comment.” And while Charles has acknowledged the general injustice of the monarchy’s colonial legacy, he has not connected that legacy to growing climate injustice around the world.
Climate justice activists from colonized nations say this connection is important, because the very institution that gives Charles a powerful platform to speak on climate change is responsible for creating global crisis conditions in the first place. To truly be considered a “climate king,” they say, Charles would have to not only acknowledge the climate harm done by the monarchy, but take steps to repair it.
From “Stop Calling Charles the ‘Climate King’” by Emily Atkin for Heated, Sept. 14, 2022
The Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI), which Charles launched in 2020 when he was Prince of Wales, granted BP a “Terra Carta Seal” even though the oil and gas giant had failed to achieve a top score from the sustainability ranking company assessing applicants for the awards.
[…] Clive Russell, a spokesperson for Ocean Rebellion, an activist group that spun out of Extinction Rebellion, said giving BP a seal undermined SMI’s credibility: “How can an initiative co-founded by a world-renowned polluter like BP – a company currently investing £300m in renewables and £3.8bn in new oil and gas – be taken seriously? The SMI should be disbanded. Those involved should hang their heads in shame. This is blatant greenwashing.”
From “King Charles Accused of Helping BP ‘Greenwash’ Its Image With Royal Seal” by Dimitris Dimitraidis and Ben Webster for OpenDemocracy, Nov. 4, 2022
On the eve of today’s Countryside Alliance march in London, it was revealed that the heir to the throne wrote to Tony Blair expressing anger at the government for pursuing plans to outlaw the bloodsport in England.
It is understood the Prince, a passionate hunt supporter, told Blair that he “would not dare attack an ethnic minority in the way that supporters of fox hunting were being persecuted.”
From “Prince: I’ll Leave Britain Over Fox Hunt Ban,” by The Scotsman, Sept. 22, 2002
Addressing a conference of conservationists at St James’s Palace in London, the Prince of Wales announced a meeting of heads of state to take place this autumn in London under government auspices to combat what he described as an emerging, militarised crisis.
“We face one of the most serious threats to wildlife ever, and we must treat it as a battle — because it is precisely that,” said Charles. “Organised bands of criminals are stealing and slaughtering elephants, rhinoceros, and tigers, as well as large numbers of other species, in a way that has never been seen before. They are taking these animals, sometimes in unimaginably high numbers, using the weapons of war — assault rifles, silencers, night-vision equipment, and helicopters.”
From “Prince Charles Calls for a War on Animal Poachers” by Fiona Harvey for The Guardian, May 21, 2013
“[Charles] is understood to be strongly opposed to onshore wind turbines that rise higher than 100 metres because of their visual impact, and none have been erected on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, the £700m estate that provides him with a private income. He has lobbied government officials to subsidize other renewable energy sources and is reported to believe that if windfarms should be built at all, they should be far out at sea.
[...] In the past few years, the crown estate has signed a 25-year lease with the renewable energy company RWE for turbines at Little Cheyne Court windfarm in Kent and has agreed lease options with Renewable Energy Systems, which wants to erect 15 turbines in Carmarthenshire, with RWE npower for four turbines in Powys, and with E.ON for 17 turbines on the Billingborough estate in Lincolnshire
[...] “It is hypocrisy,” said Leanne Wood, a candidate for the Plaid Cymru leadership who is campaigning for Welsh energy independence. “[The prince] stands to benefit from wind projects on land in Wales, but opposes them himself. If that is his position there shouldn’t be windfarms on crown estate land.”
From “Prince Charles To Get Funding From ‘Blot on the Landscape’ Windfarms” by Robert Booth for The Guardian, Feb. 28, 2012
From now on, what the King says is less important than what he is seen to do. He now runs a multibillion-pound private corporation and has one of the world’s greatest personal fortunes. How our billionaire king spends his money and what he does with his vast properties and land holdings may fundamentally change the way Britain sees itself – and how the world regards us.
[... He] could start his green reforms of the monarchy by publicly divesting the institution of all fossil fuel interests [...] He could [offer] to the state or the National Trust most of his cold, largely empty, useless castles, palaces and mansions, such as Balmoral and Sandringham. He could then slash the estimated £90,000-a-month heating bills of any that are left – Windsor or Sandringham, for example – by investing heavily in heat pumps, solar power and insulation and then switching his bills to renewable energy providers such as Ecotricity or Good Energy.
[...He could] clear out the old rollers and Bentleys, go entirely electric, and take to bicycles and rail like other modern monarchies [...] If he was brave and fair-minded he could offer the 16 private hectares (39 acres) of Buckingham Palace to London as a new public park [...]
[...] Charles could happily dispose of most of the many thousands of great diamonds, rubies, and other jewels that have been handed personally to royalty over 200 years without anyone caring. The billions of pounds raised from such a sale could be used to establish academies of sustainable farming or permaculture in the Commonwealth countries from which most jewels were looted in colonial times and many of which are still struggling to feed themselves.
Aside from shedding most of his relations, abandoning archaic British empire medals, and generally living less lavishly, he could start hosting vegetarian banquets and end hunting on all royal lands.
At which point, he could do the decent thing and abolish himself.
From “Here’s a Plan for Green King Charles: Sell the Family Silver and Use the Cash to Save the Planet” by John Vidal for The Guardian, Oct. 6, 2022
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On China’s rare earths, Bill Gates’ nuclear dream, and Texas renewables
Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa exploded in intensity over the warm Caribbean waters and has now strengthened into a major storm, potentially slamming into Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica as a Category 5 in the coming days • The Northeast is bracing for a potential nor’easter, which will be followed by a plunge in temperatures of as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit lower than average • The northern Australian town of Julia Creek saw temperatures soar as high as 106 degrees.
Exxon Mobil filed a lawsuit against California late Friday on the grounds that two landmark new climate laws violate the oil giant’s free speech rights, The New York Times reported. The two laws would require thousands of large companies doing business in the state to calculate and report the greenhouse gas pollution created by the use of their products, so-called Scope 3 emissions. “The statutes compel Exxon Mobil to trumpet California’s preferred message even though Exxon Mobil believes the speech is misleading and misguided,” Exxon complained through its lawyers. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office said the statutes “have already been upheld in court and we continue to have confidence in them.” He condemned the lawsuit, calling it “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency.”
China will delay introducing export controls on rare earths, an unnamed U.S. official told the Financial Times following two days of talks in Malaysia. For years, Beijing has been ratcheting up trade restrictions on the global supply of metals its industry dominates. But this month, China slapped the harshest controls yet on rare earths. In response, stocks in rare earth mining and refining companies soared. Despite what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called the “paradox of Trump’s critical mineral crusade” to mine even as he reduced demand from electric vehicle factories, “everybody wants to invest in critical minerals startups,” Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote. That — as frequent readers of this newsletter will recall — includes the federal government, which under the Trump administration has been taking equity stakes in major projects as part of deals for federal funding.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission rewarded Bill Gates’ next-generation reactor company, TerraPower, with its final environment impact statement last week. The next step in the construction permit process is a final safety evaluation that the company expects to receive by the end of this year. If everything goes according to plan, TerraPower could end up winning the race to build the nation’s first commercial reactor to use a coolant other than water, and do so at a former coal-fired plant in the country’s top coal-producing state. “The Natrium plant in Wyoming, Kemmerer Unit 1, is now the first advanced reactor technology to successfully complete an environmental impact statement for the NRC, bringing us another step closer to delivering America’s next nuclear power plant,” said TerraPower president and CEO Chris Levesque.
A judge gave New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration until February 6 to issue rules for its long-delayed cap-and-invest program, the Albany Times-Union reported. The government was supposed to issue the guidelines that would launch the program as early as 2024, but continuously pushed back the release. “Early outlines of New York’s cap and invest program indicate that regulators were considering a relatively low price ceiling on pollution, making it easier for companies to buy their way out of compliance with the cap,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote in January.

The Texas data center boom is being powered primarily with new wind, solar, and batteries, according to new analysis by the Energy Information Administration. Since 2021, electricity demand on the independent statewide grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has soared. Over the past year, wind, solar, and batteries have been supplying that rising demand. Utility-scale solar generated 45 terawatt-hours of electricity in the first nine months of 2025. That’s 50% more than the same period in 2024 and nearly four times more than the same period in 2021. Wind generation, meanwhile, totaled 87 terawatt-hours for the first nine months of this year, up 4% from last year and 36% since 2021. “Together,” the analysis stated, “wind and solar generation met 36% of ERCOT’s electricity demand in the first nine months of 2025.”
The question isn’t whether the flames will come — it’s when, and what it will take to recover.
In the two decades following the turn of the millennium, wildfires came within three miles of an estimated 21.8 million Americans’ homes. That number — which has no doubt grown substantially in the five years since — represents about 6% of the nation’s population, including the survivors of some of the deadliest and most destructive fires in the country’s history. But it also includes millions of stories that never made headlines.
For every Paradise, California, and Lahaina, Hawaii, there were also dozens of uneventful evacuations, in which regular people attempted to navigate the confusing jargon of government notices and warnings. Others lost their homes in fires that were too insignificant to meet the thresholds for federal aid. And there are countless others who have decided, after too many close calls, to move somewhere else.
By any metric, costly, catastrophic, and increasingly urban wildfires are on the rise. Nearly a third of the U.S. population, however, lives in a county with a high or very high risk of wildfire, including over 60% of the counties in the West. But the shape of the recovery from those disasters in the weeks and months that follow is often that of a maze, featuring heart-rending decisions and forced hands. Understanding wildfire recovery is critical, though, for when the next disaster follows — which is why we’ve set out to explore the topic in depth.
The most immediate concerns for many in the weeks following a wildfire are financial. Homeowners are still required to pay the mortgage on homes that are nothing more than piles of ash — one study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that 90-day delinquencies rose 4% and prepayments rose 16% on properties that were damaged by wildfires. Because properties destroyed in fires often receive insurance settlements that are lower than the cost to fully replace their home, “households face strong incentives to apply insurance funds toward the mortgage balance instead of rebuilding, and the observed increase in prepayment represents a symptom of broader frictions in insurance markets that leave households with large financial losses in the aftermath of a natural disaster,” the researchers explain.
Indeed, many people who believed they had adequate insurance only discover after a fire that their coverage limits are lower than 75% of their home’s actual replacement costs, putting them in the category of the underinsured. Homeowners still grappling with the loss of their residence and possessions are also left to navigate reams of required paperwork to get their money, a project one fire victim likened to having a “part-time job.” It’s not uncommon for fire survivors to wait months or even years for payouts, or to find that necessary steps to rebuilding, such as asbestos testing and dead tree removals, aren’t covered. Just last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law requiring insurers to pay at least 60% of a homeowner’s personal property coverage on a total loss without a detailed inventory, up to $350,000. The original proposal called for a 100% payout, but faced intense insurance industry blowback .
Even if your home doesn’t burn to the ground, you might be affected by the aftermath of a nearby fire. In California, a fifth of homes in the highest-risk wildfire areas have lost insurance coverage since 2019, while premiums in those same regions have increased by 42%. Insurers’ jitters have overflowedspilled over into other Western states like Washington, where there are fewer at-risk properties than in California — 16% compared to 41% — but premiums have similarly doubled in some cases due to the perceived hazardrisks.
Some experts argue that people should be priced out of the wildland-urban interface and that managed retreat will help prevent future tragedies. But as I report in my story on fire victims who’ve decided not to rebuild, that’s easier said than done. There are only three states where insured homeowners have the legal right to replace a wildfire-destroyed home by buying a new property instead of rebuilding, meaning many survivors end up shackled to a property that is likely to burn again.
The financial maze, of course, is only one aspect of recovery — the physical and mental health repercussions can also reverberate for years. A study that followed survivors of Australia’s Black Saturday bush fires in 2009, which killed over 170 people, found that five years after the disaster, a fifth of survivors still suffered from “serious mental health challenges” like post-traumatic stress disorder. In Lahaina, two years after the fire, nearly half of the children aged 10 to 17 who survived are suspected of coping with PTSD.
Federal firefighting practices continue to focus on containing fires as quickly as possible, to the detriment of less showy but possibly more effective solutions such as prescribed burns and limits on development in fire-prone areas. Some of this is due to the long history of fire suppression in the West, but it persists due to ongoing political and public pressure. Still, you can find small and promising steps forward for forest management in places like Paradise, where the recreation and park district director has scraped together funds to begin to build a buffer between an ecosystem that is meant to burn and survivors of one of the worst fires in California’s history.
In the four pieces that follow, I’ve attempted to explore the challenges of wildfire recovery in the weeks and months after the disaster itself. In doing so, I’ve spoken to firefighters, victims, researchers, and many others to learn more about what can be done to make future recoveries easier and more effective.
The bottom line, though, is that there is no way to fully prevent wildfires. We have to learn to live alongside them, and that means recovering smarter, too. It’s not the kind of glamorous work that attracts TV cameras and headlines; often, the real work of recovery occurs in the many months after the fire is extinguished. But it also might just make the difference.
Wildfire evacuation notices are notoriously confusing, and the stakes are life or death. But how to make them better is far from obvious.
How many different ways are there to say “go”? In the emergency management world, it can seem at times like there are dozens.
Does a “level 2” alert during a wildfire, for example, mean it’s time to get out? How about a “level II” alert? Most people understand that an “evacuation order” means “you better leave now,” but how is an “evacuation warning” any different? And does a text warning that “these zones should EVACUATE NOW: SIS-5111, SIS-5108, SIS-5117…” even apply to you?
As someone who covers wildfires, I’ve been baffled not only by how difficult evacuation notices can be to parse, but also by the extent to which they vary in form and content across the United States. There is no centralized place to look up evacuation information, and even trying to follow how a single fire develops can require hopping among jargon-filled fire management websites, regional Facebook pages, and emergency department X accounts — with some anxious looking-out-the-window-at-the-approaching-pillar-of-smoke mixed in.
Google and Apple Maps don’t incorporate evacuation zone data. Third-party emergency alert programs have low subscriber rates, and official government-issued Wireless Emergency Alerts, or WEAs — messages that trigger a loud tone and vibration to all enabled phones in a specific geographic region — are often delayed, faulty, or contain bad information, none of which is ideal in a scenario where people are making life-or-death decisions. The difficulty in accessing reliable information during fast-moving disasters like wildfires is especially aggravating when you consider that nearly everyone in America owns a smartphone, i.e. a portal to all the information in the world.
So why is it still so hard to learn when and where specific evacuation notices are in place, or if they even apply to you? The answer comes down to the decentralized nature of emergency management in the United States.
A downed power line sparks a fire on a day with a Red Flag Warning. A family driving nearby notices the column of smoke and calls to report it to 911. The first responders on the scene realize that the winds are fanning the flames toward a neighborhood, and the sheriff decides to issue a wildfire warning, communicating to the residents that they should be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. She radios her office — which is now fielding multiple calls asking for information about the smoke column — and asks for the one person in the office that day with training on the alert system to compose the message.
Scenarios like these are all too common. “The people who are put in the position of issuing the messages are doing 20 other things at the same time,” Jeannette Sutton, a researcher at the University at Albany’s Emergency and Risk Communication Message Testing Lab, told me. “They might have limited training and may not have had the opportunity to think about what the messages might contain — and then they’re told by an incident commander, Send this, and they’re like, Oh my God, what do I do?”
The primary way of issuing wildfire alerts is through WEAs, with 78,000 messages sent since 2012. Although partnerships between local emergency management officials, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, and cellular and internet providers facilitate the technology, it’s local departments that determine the actual content of the message. Messaging limits force some departments to condense the details of complicated and evolving fire events into 90 characters or fewer. Typos, confusing wording, and jargon inevitably abound.
Emergency management teams often prefer to err on the side of sending too few messages rather than too many for fear of inducing information overload. “We’re so attached to our devices, whether it’s Instagram or Facebook or text messages, that it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak — to make sure that we are getting the right information out there,” John Rabin, the vice president of disaster management at the consulting firm ICF International and a former assistant administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told me. “One of the challenges for local and state governments is how to bring [pertinent information] up and out, so that when they send those really important notifications for evacuations, they really resonate.”
But while writing an emergency alert is a bit of an art, active prose alone doesn’t ensure an effective evacuation message.
California’s Cal Fire has found success with the “Ready, Set, Go” program, designed by the International Association of Fire Chiefs, which uses an intuitive traffic light framework — “ready” is the prep work of putting together a go-bag and waiting for more news if a fire is in the vicinity, escalating to the “go” of the actual evacuation order. Parts of Washington and Oregon use similar three-tiered systems of evacuation “levels” ranging from 1 to 3. Other places, like Montana, rely on two-step “evacuation warnings” and “evacuation orders.”
Watch Duty, a website and app that surged in popularity during the Los Angeles fires earlier this year, doesn’t worry about oversharing. Most information on Watch Duty comes from volunteers, who monitor radio scanners, check wildfire cameras, and review official law enforcement announcements, then funnel the information to the organization’s small staff, who vet it before posting. Though WatchDuty volunteers and staff — many of whom are former emergency managers or fire personnel themselves — actively review and curate the information on the app, the organization still publishes far more frequent and iterative updates than most people are used to seeing and interpreting. As a result, some users and emergency managers have criticized Watch Duty for having too much information available, as a result.
The fact that Watch Duty was downloaded more than 2 million times during the L.A. fires, though, would seem to testify to the fact that people really are hungry for information in one easy-to-locate place. The app is now available in 22 states, with more than 250 volunteers working around the clock to keep wildfire information on the app up to date. John Clarke Mills, the app’s CEO and co-founder, has said he created the app out of “spite” over the fact that the government doesn’t have a better system in place for keeping people informed on wildfires.
“I’ve not known too many situations where not having information makes it better,” Katlyn Cummings, the community manager at Watch Duty, told me. But while the app’s philosophy is “rooted in transparency and trust with our users,” Cummings stressed to me that the app’s volunteers only use official and public sources of information for their updates and never include hearsay, separating it from other crowd-sourced community apps that have proved to be less than reliable.
Still, it takes an army of a dozen full-time staff and over 200 part-time volunteers, plus an obsessively orchestrated Slack channel to centralize the wildfire and evacuation updates — which might suggest why a more official version doesn’t exist yet, either from the government or a major tech company. Google Maps currently uses AI to visualize the boundaries of wildfires, but stops short of showing users the borders of local evacuation zones (though it will route you around known road closures). A spokesperson for Google also pointed me toward a feature in Maps that shares news articles, information from local authorities, and emergency numbers when users are in “the immediate vicinity” of an actively unfolding natural disaster — a kind of do-it-yourself Watch Duty. The company declined to comment on the record about why Maps specifically excludes evacuation zones. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
There is, of course, a major caveat to the usefulness of Watch Duty.
Users of the app tend to be a self-selecting group of hyper-plugged-in digital natives who are savvy enough to download it or otherwise know to visit the website during an unfolding emergency. As Rabin, the former FEMA official, pointed out, Watch Duty users aren’t the population that first responders are most concerned about — they’re like “Boy Scouts,” he said, because they’re “always prepared.” They’re the ones who already know what’s going on. “It’s reaching the folks that aren’t paying attention that is the big challenge,” he told me.
The older adult population is the most vulnerable in cases of wildfire. Death tolls often skew disproportionately toward the elderly; of the 30 people who died in the Los Angeles fires in January, for example, all but two were over 60 or disabled, with the average age of the deceased 77, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Part of that is because adults 65 and older are more likely to have physical impairments that make quick or unplanned evacuations challenging. Social and technological isolation are also factors — yes, almost everyone in America has a smartphone, but that includes just 80% of those 65 and older, and only 26% of the older adult population feels “very confident” using computers or smartphones. According to an extensive 2024 report on how extreme weather impacts older adults by CNA, an independent, nonprofit research organization, “Evacuation information, including orders, is not uniformly communicated in ways and via media that are accessible to older adults or those with access and functional needs.”
Sutton, the emergency warning researcher, also cautioned that more information isn’t always better. Similar to the way scary medical test results might appear in a health portal before a doctor has a chance to review them with you (and calm you down), wildfire information shared without context or interpretation from emergency management officials means the public is “making assumptions based upon what they see on Watch Duty without actually having those official messages coming from the public officials who are responsible for issuing those messages,” she said. One role of emergency managers is to translate the raw, on-the-ground information into actionable guidance. Absent that filter, panic is probable, which could lead to uncontrollable evacuation traffic or exacerbate alert fatigue. Alternatively, people might choose to opt out of future alerts or stop checking for updates.
Sutton, though she’s a strong advocate of creating standardized language for emergency alerts — “It would be wonderful if we had consistent language that was agreed upon” between departments, she told me — was ultimately skeptical of centralizing the emergency alert system under a large agency like FEMA. “The movement of wildfires is so fast, and it requires knowledge of the local communities and the local terrain as well as meteorological knowledge,” she said. “Alerts and warnings really should be local.”
The greater emphasis, Sutton stressed, should be on providing emergency managers with the training they need to communicate quickly, concisely, and effectively with the tools they already have.
The high wire act of emergency communications, though, is that while clear and regionally informed messages are critical during life-or-death situations, it also falls on residents in fire-risk areas to be ready to receive them. California first adopted the “Ready, Set, Go” framework in 2009, and it has spent an undisclosed amount of money over the years on a sustained messaging blitz to the public. (Cal Fire’s “land use planning and public education budget is estimated at $16 million, and funds things like the updated ad spots it released as recently as this August.) Still, there is evidence that even that has not been enough — and Cal Fire is the best-resourced firefighting agency in the country, setting the gold standard for an evacuation messaging campaign.
Drills and test messages are one way to bring residents up to speed, but participation is typically very low. Many communities and residents living in wildfire-risk areas continue to treat the threat with low urgency — something to get around to one day. But whether they’re coming from your local emergency management department or the White House itself, emergency notices are only as effective as the public is willing and able to heed them.