Buy a house in California and the seller hands you a Natural Hazard Disclosure Statement. It's checkboxes. Is the property in a FEMA flood zone, a dam-inundation zone, a fire hazard severity zone, an earthquake fault zone?
Every box on it reports a government designation drawn on a map that already exists. The statute itself warns you the maps are estimates. There is no box for projected sea-level rise, modeled wildfire probability, extreme heat, whether an insurer will cover the place, or what adapting it might cost. The form tells you where the lines are today. It has nothing to say about where they're headed.
The statute also specifies that the disclosure may not be used by insurers, lenders, or government agencies. The paperwork the buyer signs and the underwriting that decides whether the property is financeable run in separate legal channels, on the same house, about the same hazards.
Hawaii's One Checkbox
Hawaii passed Act 179 in 2021, effective the following May. It requires a residential seller to disclose whether the property sits inside the state's mapped Sea Level Rise Exposure Area, a modeled zone built on 3.2 feet of rise, a figure state planning documents describe as possible by mid-century or sooner.
That's a forward-looking modeled condition on a transaction form, not a report of past flooding or a current federal designation. As far as I can find, it's the only one enacted anywhere in the country.
The Hawaii Association of Realtors backed it after being consulted on the map and the mechanism. That matters, because the usual assumption — that the real estate business fights risk disclosure everywhere and always — didn't hold up. Hawaii is a small market where the ocean makes an unusually difficult opponent in an argument, and the industry seems to have decided it would rather disclose than have buyers discover the water afterward and go looking for the agent.
Everywhere else, it runs the other way.
What the Market Knows
The disclosure form reports designations. The insurance market, meanwhile, is repricing climate exposure in something close to real time. The Financial Stability Oversight Council reported that average homeowners premiums rose 10.4 percent in 2024, that nonrenewals climbed by roughly half, and that policies in state residual markets — the insurers of last resort, the coverage you get when nobody else will write you — grew 77 percent between 2019 and 2024, to 3.2 million policies nationally.
California's residual market, the FAIR Plan, held 696,562 policies and $768 billion in exposure as of June 2026, a 157 percent increase in policy count since September 2022. State Farm stopped writing new California homeowners policies in May 2023, citing construction costs, catastrophe exposure, reinsurance, and the regulatory climate, and afterward dropped about 72,000 California properties.
So a buyer in a California fire zone gets a form reporting the current fire hazard severity designation. Nothing in the mandated transaction tells that buyer whether any company will insure the house, at what price, or for how long. The FAIR Plan may be the only thing available, and a FAIR Plan policy is basic coverage, not the homeowners package most people assume they're getting. The buyer finds this out after the offer, or after the closing, or when the first renewal notice shows up.
The Pushback
When private companies have tried to put climate-risk numbers in front of buyers, the industry has pushed back. The Houston Association of Realtors voted in June 2025 against adding third-party flood-risk scores to its multiple-listing service, citing questions about model accuracy and the effect on listed properties. Zillow pulled First Street climate-risk scores from prominent display on some listings after a California regional MLS raised concerns about accuracy, transparency, and property impacts.
The stated objections aren't nonsense. These models are probabilistic, their methods are proprietary, and a number stapled to a listing can move a price in ways a homeowner has no clear way to dispute or correct.
The effect doesn't depend on the merit of the objection. Information that exists doesn't reach the buyer at the moment the buyer is deciding. The accuracy concern and the property-value concern happen to point the same way.
The Federal Retreat
For a few years federal financial regulators moved toward folding climate risk into the machinery they oversee. The Federal Housing Finance Agency issued guidance directing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to build climate risk into their risk management. The banking agencies jointly issued climate-risk principles for large institutions.
Then it reversed. FHFA rescinded its climate advisory bulletin in March 2025. The banking agencies rescinded the joint principles that October, saying banks remained responsible for managing all material risks and the climate-specific guidance was unnecessary. Fannie and Freddie still work from FEMA flood-zone determinations and required insurance rather than any forward-looking assessment. Premiums do enter the borrower's monthly housing expense, so insurer repricing can affect who qualifies for a mortgage — but no federal rule requires a climate projection anywhere in the valuation or the approval. The cost arrives through the premium and stays out of the disclosure.
The Parallel
San Francisco knew which buildings were dangerous. It had the list. The list sat there because acting on it cost money, displaced tenants, raised rents, and made a political fight nobody wanted to own. The earthquake got there before the politics did.
The parallel isn't exact and it doesn't help to pretend otherwise. A fault is a physical fact you can map. A wall is reinforced or it isn't. Climate exposure is probabilistic, moves over time, and rests on models that reasonable people fight about. The hazards are plural and the clocks are longer.
But the money runs the same way. Information exists that would move property values. The parties who'd absorb the cost of disclosing it — sellers, agents, lenders, local governments living on property tax — have reasons not to. The party who'd benefit is the buyer, who tends to encounter it, when he encounters it at all, after signing.
Hawaii put one modeled future condition on its form and the market kept functioning. Everywhere else the boxes report where the government drew lines on today's map, while the lines move and the insurance companies quietly price what the form leaves out.