What I learned about Catastrophic Risk in 2025
Real learning is like a snowball falling on your head. Sometimes a thing has to startle or disturb you to get your attention.
In January 2025, the Los Angeles fires startled and disturbed us, prompting soul-searching about California’s growing wildfire risks.
One of the lessons I drew from this soul-searching was the difference between “fuel-dominated” and “wind-dominated” fires (Keeley and Syphard, 2019). With Santa Ana winds gusting to 100 mph, the LA fires were definitely wind-dominated, but California experiences both types of fires.
An important implication is that they often demand different risk-reduction approaches. Fuel-dominated fires prioritize fuel reduction strategies like prescribed burning, while wind-dominated fires, which are often ignited by utility lines, prioritize strategies like power shutoffs or burying utility lines.
Another startling and disturbing learning moment arrived with the flash flooding of the Guadalupe River in Central Texas in July 2025, which led to the tragic deaths of campers and counselors at Camp Mystic. This event led me to more fully appreciate the importance of early warning systems and the difficult tradeoffs they face. Timely warnings are essential but false alarms—the so-called “cry wolf” phenomenon—can reduce their effectiveness (Sawada, Kanai and Kotani, 2022).
In November 2025, a terrible fire burned seven out of eight apartment blocks in Wang Fuk Court in Hong Kong, killing 161 people and injuring 79 (Wikipedia, “Wang Fuk Court fire,” visited 12/28/2025). A New York Times investigation (Gebrekidan and Dong, 2025) found a saga of corruption, weak regulation and unattended red flags, reminding me of what Wolfgang Seibel (2022) taught me about “intended ignorance” as a root cause of man-made disasters.
I also learned something about learning in 2025. In reviewing research on how communities learn from prior disasters for the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management’s White Paper on Catastrophic Risks and System-Scale Governance, I learned that it is all too easy to forget what you’ve learned.
Let’s hope that catastrophic events in 2026 are smaller, less frequent, and more manageable than in 2025, but let’s be as wise as the owl and not forget what we’ve learned.
Chris Ansell, CCRM Faculty Director
PS: My daughter Lillian Ansell drew the owl for me. I may be biased, but I think her work is brilliant! Check it out on instagram.
References
Gebrekida, S. and Dong, J. “Deadly Inferno Fueled by Substandard Materials and Corruption,” New York Times, December 28, 2025.
Keeley, J. E., & Syphard, A. D. (2019). Twenty-first century California, USA, wildfires: fuel-dominated vs. wind-dominated fires. Fire Ecology, 15(1), 1-15.
Sawada, Y., Kanai, R., and Kotani, H. (2022). Impact of cry wolf effects on social preparedness and the efficiency of flood early warning systems, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 26, 4265–4278, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-4265-2022, 2022).
Seibel, W. (2022). Collapsing Structures and Public Mismanagement. Springer Nature.
Warm congratulations to Lillian Ansell! The owl, with snow on its head, is obviously startled into thinking...wisely! Very thoughtful set of comments about learning before, during, and after disaster. Regrettably, the pattern of 'forgetting' what the disaster events illustrated is all too common as acting on that new knowledge requires time, money, and effort....and shared support. Learning requires us to mobilize action across a range of organizations, institutions, and levels of operation....and necessarily represents a collective effort. 'Forgetting' is easier, but far more costly over time.