Think Big, Act Boldly: What Los Angeles Must Do Now

VXNews Feature | Climate Resolve & Resilient Cities Catalyst

When the Eaton and Palisades fires tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, they didn't just destroy homes and neighborhoods. They exposed something harder to rebuild than a house: the accumulated failures of systems that were supposed to protect people and didn't.

The alert came too late. The water pressure wasn't there. The agencies didn't talk to each other. The insurance covered just enough to rebuild to yesterday's standard, and not tomorrow's risk. When survivors tried to navigate the recovery process, they found a maze of jurisdictions, programs, and agencies that couldn't agree on who was in charge.

Within months, fourteen separate post-fire reports from government commissions, academic institutions, community organizations, and private sector analysts had collectively generated 465 specific recommendations for what Los Angeles needed to do differently. But without a clear implementation strategy, even well-intentioned recommendations risk getting lost in the noise. What funders and decision-makers needed wasn’t more analysis but an answer to the question: Where can we have the biggest impact?

That's where Climate Resolve and Resilient Cities Catalyst came in.

The partnership brought together two distinct but complementary lenses. Climate Resolve contributed deep knowledge of Los Angeles—its political landscape, its communities, its networks. Resilient Cities Catalyst brought three decades of international disaster recovery expertise, drawn from earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and wildfires from Katrina to Paradise.

Over seven months, they didn't just read the reports. They embedded themselves in the recovery landscape: attending roundtables, meeting with fire survivors in Altadena and the Palisades, sitting with county commissions, and consulting with dozens of experts across government, philanthropy, and the private sector. Their approach was participatory by design: gathering community insight while simultaneously bridging communities' access to resources, securing grants, coordinating partners, and building capacity on the ground.

Think Big, Act Boldly: Implementing Proven Solutions on Urban Fire synthesizes 14 post-fire studies and 465 recommendations into four high-impact strategies, each with clear philanthropic entry points, implementation timelines, and notional budgets. Not another diagnosis of what went wrong. A plan for what comes next.

The following is an excerpt from the report by Climate Resolve and Resilient Cities Catalyst, released in December 2025. Climate Resolve Executive Director Jonathan Parfrey will join VX2026 to discuss the findings—and what it takes to move from report to reality.

Recommendation 1
Deploy Recovery Authorities
The first and most structurally ambitious recommendation is to establish not one, but three geographically distinct Recovery Authorities — one for the Eaton fire area, one for the City of Los Angeles covering the Palisades, and one for the unincorporated westside County and Malibu. Each would be governed by a board of local residents, appointed by local and state officials, and empowered to do what no single agency currently can: purchase and sell land, aggregate properties, negotiate with builders, issue bonds backed by tax increment financing, and coordinate the full logistics of rebuilding at scale.

The model is not new. Recovery authorities were deployed after Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. What's new is the proposition that Los Angeles, with its notoriously complex jurisdictional landscape, needs multiple, locally-rooted versions of this model rather than one unwieldy regional body.

Recommendation 2
Establish a Delta Fund
Insurance pays to rebuild to code. But code is not the same as resilient. The gap between what insurance covers and what it actually costs to build a home that can withstand the next fire is called the "resilience delta," and according to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, in California that gap is, on average, just 3%. Three percent sounds modest. But with widespread underinsurance, many uninsured losses, and households already stretched to the breaking point, that 3% is often the difference between rebuilding smart and rebuilding vulnerable. For homes that didn't suffer total loss, it costs on average $15,000 to harden an existing home to the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home Base standard.

The report recommends that philanthropy establish a comprehensive Resilience Delta Fund: a blended pool of government and philanthropic grants, low-interest loans, and impact investment capital, administered by a locally trusted Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). The fund would help homeowners close that gap, rebuilding not just to the minimum but to a standard that reduces their risk of catastrophic loss in the next event. Safer rebuilding stabilizes insurance markets, protects property values, and creates replicable models that could shift how communities across the country approach disaster recovery. A pilot program covering ten homes carries an estimated budget of $490,000. A larger program would generate efficiencies; reducing material costs and administrative overhead, and create a playbook for national adoption.

Recommendation 3
Create an LA County Resilience District
Where does the money come from, not just for today's recovery, but for the preparedness work that prevents the next disaster from becoming the next catastrophe? The Trump Administration has effectively eliminated FEMA's prevention programs. Congress has blocked disaster resilience funding for California. Most dollars deployed to date have focused on emergency response, not mitigation. And yet 95% of Los Angeles County voters say they view wildfire as a major concern, and 81% call it a crisis. The report proposes a Los Angeles County Resilience District, funded by a dedicated revenue measure; potentially a quarter-cent sales tax that would generate approximately $600 million per year. Those dollars would be sequestered for projects protecting Angelenos from wildfire, flood, heat waves, and seismic events, with a portion held in reserve to accelerate future recovery.

Establishing the district requires a four-stage process: coalition and code development, state legislation to lift the county's sales tax cap, ballot signature gathering (approximately 250,000 signatures), and an electoral campaign. Philanthropy can support the first and fourth stages; the middle two require separate organizational structures. The full estimated cost of a ballot campaign: $5 million, drawing on a mix of philanthropic and other funding. 

Recommendation 4
Fix the Warning System
On the night of January 8, a validated fire report in west Altadena came in at 12:55 a.m. By 2:18 a.m., LA County Fire personnel reported the fire moving west across Lake Avenue. Evacuation orders weren't issued until 3:25 a.m. That 90-minute gap is not an anomaly. It is the result of entrenched bureaucratic dysfunction: the City, the County, and the State Office of Emergency Services each operate proprietary alert systems that don't talk to each other, with no unified authorization framework and incompatible operational protocols between agencies. The report calls this the "Protocol Gap," and virtually all fourteen post-fire reports cite it as a major failure. The recommendation is to fund a sustained, independent advocacy effort: involving retired fire professionals, communications experts, and community organizers to compel the City and County to implement a new integrated communications and alert system. Beyond the technology itself, the report emphasizes "last-mile" infrastructure: trusted community messenger networks capable of reaching Los Angeles' diverse, multilingual neighborhoods in a crisis. The estimated budget for an 18-month advocacy effort is $1 million.

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These four recommendations represent a theory of change: that Los Angeles cannot rebuild its way out of its vulnerability one house at a time, and that the window for systemic reform will not stay open indefinitely.

Think Big, Act Boldly is available at climateresolve.org.