Society of Certified Senior Advisors: Changing U.S. Flood Zones

As flood zones creep toward homes and businesses that have historically stayed above water, don’t rely solely on traditional methods to assess your flood risk..

As the 2024 hurricane season winds down, analysts are still totaling the damages of another historic year for flooding. Last year, in the U.S., an estimated 70 people lost their lives in floods, and total losses from flooding neared $7 billion. Looking ahead, flooding will continue to affect more and more people each year. For property owners, knowing where flood zones are expanding, and how fast, is becoming key to planning for the future.

According to Yale Climate Connections, people who live in the following cities and states should expect flooding to affect their lives more often in the coming years: Miami, New York City, New Jersey, Charleston, Norfolk, Houston, New Orleans, and the Florida Keys. Other places near rivers, like Ellicott City, Maryland and small-town Vermont, will also continue to see 100-year floods much more often than once a century. The truth is that many places that don’t often flood now could become chronically inundated–i.e., unlivable–in the future.

Predicting the Future in the Age of Global Weirding

Understandably, property owners want to know whether they live in one of these soon-to-be-wetter zones. For years, homebuyers and insurers have relied on FEMA maps to assess flood risk. But those maps are no longer enough. They’re often out of date, and more importantly, all bets are off as climate change advances. Instead of global warming, scientists now often talk about global weirding to get at the unpredictable nature of climate change. Some areas will warm as others cool, and some areas will flood more frequently–or much more frequently–while other regions experience more drought.

Plus, there’s no single reason why flooding is getting worse. Warmer air translates into more inches of rain falling faster during brief storms. As glaciers melt, sea levels gradually rise. In some places, the ground itself is sinking, due to natural shifts and groundwater extraction, among other causes. This gradual sinking, called land subsidence, is happening rapidly across the East Coast.

With so many variables, pinpointing the flooding risk for one area becomes an advanced science, and no map can offer a completely accurate assessment of your flood risk. But there are a number of free online tools available that update and go beyond FEMA maps to help you make the best predictions possible.

Here are a few easy-to-use, free resources for homeowners, people thinking of moving to coastal areas, and anyone curious about how U.S. landscapes may change in the next 80 years. Consider triangulating the data for your area by comparing the output from different tools.

NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management calls its Sea Level Rise Viewer “a good place to start your flood mitigation planning.” Use the tool to visualize predictions and generate different scenarios for precise locations in your city, town, or rural property. When you know a structure needs to be built or raised higher off the ground, this data aims to help you decide: How much higher?
When Rising Seas Hit Home, from the Union of Concerned Scientists, lets you explore maps of the U.S. to see where homes are at risk of becoming chronically inundated by 2035 and 2100, based on a moderate or higher rate of sea level rise. For each area, the tool offers an estimate of how many homes will become unlivable, how many people they currently house, how much the homes are worth today, and how much they contribute to the local tax base. For example, in Virginia Beach, in 2035 with a moderate rate of sea level rise, 214 homes are at risk. Today, they house about 516 people, are worth $79,510,900, and contribute $793,763 to the local tax base.
The Coastal Risk Screening Tool from Climate Central is an interactive map that allows users to zero in on areas and view projected sea level rise based on different variables: global temperature increase, year, elevation, and melting ice sheets. Climate Central describes itself as a policy-neutral nonprofit group of scientists and says they constantly update the data powering their risk screening tool.

What about Flood Insurance?

FEMA took this data into account to develop their new Risk Rating 2.0, introduced in 2022. Before buying property, check the cost of flood insurance through FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which covers up to $250,000 for residential properties. The NFIP’s new Risk Rating 2.0 system calculates premiums based on detailed property-specific flood risks, updated with the best predictions for new flooding realities.

The NFIP introduced Risk Rating 2.0 in order to keep itself afloat amidst a deluge of claims, resulting in higher rates for 77% of policyholders. For example, premiums in Louisiana could rise by 122%, and in some Florida regions, rates could triple or more.

Homeowners can reduce their rate by reducing their flood liability. Here are a few strategies, all of which are much easier said than done.

Elevate your home.
Move expensive machinery to higher floors.
Install flood openings, which help protect walls from pressure caused by standing water.

Scientists will remind us that we can still reduce long-term flood risk by reducing emissions. “Current and future emissions matter,” says a 2022 NOAA report. Today, we’re looking at the likelihood of 2 feet of sea level rise by 2100, according to the report. By reducing emissions, we can still avoid adding 1.5 to 5 feet of sea level rise. In other words, staying on the current global emissions track could mean a total of 7 feet of sea level rise by 2100. But that worst-case scenario is not inevitable.