This spring, the Southeast faced severe drought and fires burning through Hurricane Helene blowdown debris from a year and a half ago. Disaster intervals are collapsing, with catastrophes following each other so quickly that recovery systems cannot keep pace. Climate whiplash — extreme drought followed by historic rainfall — worsens flooding as baked soil repels water. Wildfires denude hillsides, causing lethal mudslides; heavy rains can even fuel fires by nurturing vegetation that later burns. In the Himalayas, glacier loss and heat triggered landslides resembling a magnitude 5.2 earthquake. Texas hill country endured a thousand-year flood drowning 139 people at Camp Mystic, followed by another flood 12 months later. Disasters once scarred communities for generations, allowing decades for rebuilding. Now they arrive within years or months.

Juliette Kayyem, former Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary under Barack Obama and now a scholar at Harvard's Kennedy School, says recovery systems assume disasters are random and rare. "Nobody really knows what real recovery looks like," she notes. The original sin is failing to recognize what disasters reveal about needed resilience. Public attention pulls toward restoration rather than adaptation. While decarbonization has flattened global emissions, warming is accelerating past temperature thresholds once considered safe.