About
You can protect yourself!
This site is designed to help you climate-proof your finances, your lifestyle, and your hometown.
– You’ll read how individuals and communities are taking specific actions to adapt to the effects of climate-change. Our writers highlight what residents are doing to safeguard themselves and their towns. We examine cost threats from rising State & Local Taxes and Fees, Federal Taxes, Costs for Health, Food, Energy, and Transportation. And we cover threats to your Income and Savings.
– You can see how climate-proof your hometown is – or isn’t – and where you might prefer to live. Our data crew curate authoritative measurements and produce detailed ratings and comparisons of your hometown – and every other town in America. Our Where-To-Live Scorecards are the only compilation of these hard-to-find data sources. They’re an important supplement to the usual Best Places to Live articles you read. Check the FAQ to learn more about our Scorecards.
– Our handbook offers over 100 actions you or your community can take to climate-proof your income, costs and savings. Climate-Proof Your Personal Finances gives extensive coverage to changes in spending habits. Simple adjustments to today’s lifestyles can keep you from sending the bill to your children. Beyond actions, the book discusses attitudes that are likely to help protect you.
Since 2010 Climate-Proof has been gauging and reporting the personal and community costs of climate change. We’ve offered advice and examples of protective tactics and attitudes you can take. And we’ve monitored the sustainability of 20,000 hometowns across the country.
Climate-Proof is supported by the Stookey family and is non-commercial, with no direct or indirect revenues from any source except royalties on our book, Climate-Proof Your Personal Finances. These we donate each year to a climate-related charity.
What’s at stake
Climate change will be a slow-motion train wreck of financial costs and lifestyle disruptions. Cost increases from climate change – some dramatic, most hidden – are beginning to remove thousands of dollars a year from the average American’s wallet.
Although our jobs, health, and savings are factors, by far the biggest potential threat involves where you live. Some hometowns are in the crosshairs of global warming. Others are well-protected by nature or by the local community.
Climate migration within the US is real and growing. 1,686,000 Americans were displaced in 2017 thanks to natural disasters. Even without disasters, by the end of this century the financial costs of rising seas alone are predicted to push 13 million Americans to leave the coasts and move inland.
Climate-Proof is all about helping you see what’s coming, where you want to live, and what you can do to protect yourself and your community.
You can see our Privacy, Copyright, and Liability policies here.
Our editor
David Stookey is the author of Climate-Proof Your Personal Finances and founder of the Savvy Families Institute. He worries and asks questions about how to make his family resilient in the face of many growing costs from climate change. Back in 2010 he began collecting and publishing stories and advice, measuring how climate-proof specific American towns are, and speaking on these topics.
David’s previous roles have included CEO of venture-backed firms in software, AIDS research, and medical diagnostic systems, VP of an economic forecasting service, Hong Kong’s leading debt collector, consultant in Tehran, solo transatlantic sailboat racer, and Harvard MBA. He has lived off the grid for a few years. His urge to find and spread useful ideas pushed him to become a business-literacy trainer to Fortune 500 firms, editor and publisher of a little magazine on open-water rowing, and compiler of an online directory for cruising sailors.
A few of the endorsements for David’s writing:
“Using a ‘no-regrets’ approach, Stookey provides page after page of easily overlooked, practical guidance so that you, your family and fiends, will be more financially secure in an insecure world. Includes lots of references and links for more information.” JOHN ENGLANDER, author of High Tide on Main Street
“David Stookey’s primary argument, that climate change is coming out of the political realm and into our daily lives, is one of which we would all do well to be better aware.” U.S. Senator SHELDON WHITEHOUSE
“Think there’s nothing you can do to protect yourself from climate change? Nonsense. David Stookey lays out in simple, accessible language dozens of easy steps you can take that boost your personal bottom line. This should be required reading for financial advisers coast to coast.” MICHAEL H. SHUMAN, author of Local Dollars, Local Sense.
