Rising seas complicate Los Angeles wildfire rebuilding

• Los Angeles wildfire victims debate rebuilding
• Climate change adaptation, rising sea levels key issues
• 'Managed retreat' not part of City of Malibu plans

LOS ANGELES - Since the Palisades Fire destroyed the two-bedroom house that Joan and Laurie Zoloth's parents bought on the California coast in the 1960s, the cleared lot is a hollowed-out patch of sand and fragments of charred wood.

Joan wants to rebuild the Malibu home, just outside Los Angeles. Her sister Laurie, citing climate change, does not.

The siblings' opposing views reflect a larger conflict facing communities up and down the picturesque California coast.

With rising sea levels and more severe and frequent flooding and storms linked to climate change, communities are debating if people should rebuild and remain along the sandy shoreline.

The City of Malibu says it is committed to helping fire victims rebuild as quickly as possible and has plans to protect its multi-billion dollar shoreline from the effects of climate change.

But its plans do not include so-called managed retreat, which proactively helps residents move away from the shore.

The concept of managed retreat is controversial and can be complicated, but planning and policy experts say Malibu could be missing a critical window for looking at how it adapts to rising seas.

The question of retreat lies at the heart of private property rights and layers of city, county and state laws that can work at cross purposes in terms of climate-change adaptation.

Politically speaking, “you're not allowed to say the words ‘managed retreat.’ I get it,” said Anne Guerry, lead scientist with the Natural Capital Project at California's Stanford University.

While it may sound like a good idea, “in practice you're talking about real people and their homes and their life savings, and it's really hard to have those conversations,” she said.

The numbers are clear. A nonpartisan analysis by the state in 2020 found $8 billion to $10 billion of California coastal property is “expected to be underwater” within the next 30 years.

If the highest sea level projections manifest, the report said “up to two thirds of Southern California beaches may become completely eroded by 2100.”

Global sea levels are rising at more than double the pace they did in the first decade of measurements in 1993-2002 and hit a record high in 2023, according to the World Meteorological Organization, a U.N. agency.

Extreme glacier melt and record ocean heat levels - which cause water to expand - contributed to an average rise in sea levels of 4.62mm a year between 2013-2022.

The Zoloth sisters’ land, which was left to them by their parents, sits at the heart of the controversy.

"I consider climate change the central moral issue of our time," said Laurie Zoloth, an ethicist at the University of Chicago, who has written on climate change as an ethical problem.

Joan Zoloth is well aware of the climate risks, and three generations of the Zoloth family lost houses in the Palisades Fire.

Yet she wants her children to have a home in Malibu.

"I have fears about it," said Zoloth, a retired journalist. “I've talked to my children about it, and they're aware of it, they believe in science.

"But they still talk about wanting to rebuild.”

Laurie Zoloth acknowledged it is one thing to write theoretically about catastrophes, but “it's quite another to be sifting through the ashes of one’s entire childhood.”

Even so, she thinks they should sell.

Changing coastline

Even if Malibu wanted to acquire destroyed properties, and there is no plan to do so, said city spokesman Matt Myerhoff, “where would the money come from?”

Intact homes along the Malibu shore range from about $5 million to $20 million. Hundreds of homes were destroyed by the wildfire, and the empty lots still sell for millions of dollars.

The city's total revenue for fiscal year 2024-2025 was $85.9 million.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022 vetoed legislation offering low-interest loans to municipalities to buy vulnerable properties and lease them back to residents.

Although he acknowledged the plan might be useful in dealing with a changing coastline, he said it lacked "statewide" context.

Malibu officials declined Context's request for an interview but wrote in a statement that the city is “rebuilding with resilience, safety, and sustainability," including ensuring that coastal rebuilding will meet Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sea-level rise projection requirements.

Retreating communities

For communities that do choose retreat, financial options exist.

FEMA has a grant program that helps municipalities buy at-risk property from owners on a voluntary basis.

Zachary Lamb, a professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at University of California, Berkeley, said rolling easements are another long-term tool.

An easement allows a city or land trust to buy a right to a property that is triggered by certain physical thresholds such as insurmountable sea level rise, Lamb said.

“You could buy it in advance," he said. "That easement gives the owner some capital that they could use somewhere else."

Buy-and-lease-back schemes are more controversial because cities are reliant on property taxes, “so there's a real incentive for them not to reduce their property tax rolls” by becoming landlords themselves, Lamb said.

He added, though, that retreat in Malibu and other coastal communities, managed or haphazard, is "inevitable."

Eventually, the insurance industry will force retreat by refusing to insure beachfront property as sea levels continue to rise, Guerry said.

(Reporting by Rachel Parsons; Editing by Anastasia Moloney and Ellen Wulfhorst.)