Abstract
Intensifying climate-related damages across the United States underscore the importance of climate-resilient housing, which requires coordination across diverse actors in the housing sector. Here, we assess the challenges and opportunities for reducing climate impacts on housing within U.S. coastal communities, based on 64 interviews with experts across housing-relevant public, private, and nonprofit sectors. We provide an overview of risk reduction actions being implemented as well as barriers and enablers to scaling up these responses. We find that current risk reduction actions focus on small-scale property-level adjustments or early-stage advocacy, though experts desire solutions that enable systems-wide reductions of climate–housing risks. Path dependencies, financing, and other entrenched multi-sectoral challenges currently limit resilient housing development. Experts perceive government interventions as essential in enabling resilient housing, and we find that government-led, multi-stakeholder collaborations have already catalyzed action. Understanding these cross-sectoral dynamics can inform actions and pathways to increase climate–housing resilience nationwide.
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Data availability
Data are not publicly available due to them containing information that could compromise research participant privacy or consent. The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, NAS. Please allow up to 4 weeks for a response. Interviews were conducted with approval from the Institutional Review Board at Columbia University.
Code availability
Code available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1792369356.
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Acknowledgments
N.S. acknowledges support from The Climate School at Columbia University. N.S. and R.H. acknowledge support from the Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Adaptation Partnerships Program (Award NA21OAR4310313), formerly known as the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Program. T.C. acknowledges support from the U.S. Geological Survey, Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (NE CASC) through Grant No. G19AC00091. We thank Elena Hartley | elabarts.com for the illustration in Fig. 2.
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N.S. conceptualized the study. N.S., L.S., K.M., A.C., and R.H. developed the methodology. N.S. conducted data collection. N.S., T.C., and A.G. conducted the analysis. N.S., L.S., K.M., and R.H. interpreted the results. N.S. and T.C. created data visualizations. N.S. drafted the original manuscript, and L.S., K.M., and R.H. assisted with the writing process. All authors reviewed and edited the manuscript.
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Seeteram, N.A., Shi, L., Mach, K.J. et al. Challenges and opportunities in scaling climate-resilient housing solutions in the United States. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68595-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68595-x
