Background: climate hazards and rural areas

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) defines natural hazards as “environmental phenomena that have the potential to impact societies and the human environment” (FEMA 2025).Footnote ¹ The environmental phenomena themselves are routine occurrences as part of Earth’s natural climate. Climate disasters, on the other hand, occur when these natural hazards intersect with human systems. The consequences of these clashes are often significant. Between 1980 and 2024, 403 climate hazard disaster events have been estimated to have impacts each exceeding one billion dollars. Of those, severe storms and tropical cyclones, flooding, and drought are the most common (NOAA 2025a).

Both rural and urban areas are meaningfully affected by climate disasters. The way that rural and urban areas prepare for, experience, and recover from climate disasters, however, is influenced by their differing economic organization, geographic distribution, and physical characteristics. Rural populations differ from urban populations in employment, education, natural amenities, access to healthcare, and broadband connectivity (Davis et al. Reference Davis, Rupasingha, Cromartie and Sanders2022). Smaller populations in rural areas make it harder to share the cost of disaster preparation and recovery. As working age populations in rural areas shrink, a larger share of the community (both the very young and very old) depends on a smaller workforce (Farrigan et al. Reference Farrigan, Genetin, Sanders, Pender, Winkler and Cromartie2024). Additionally, rural areas are more likely than urban areas to have local economies built around place-based industries such as agriculture, recreation, or resource extraction. Across the United States, 17 percent of non-metropolitan counties are farming dependent, 15 percent are recreation dependent, and four percent are mining dependent (USDA-ERS 2025b). In total, 60 percent of non-metropolitan counties are categorized as dependent on a single industry. In contrast, only 33 percent of metropolitan counties are industry dependent.Footnote ² High levels of dependence, particularly in place-based industries, makes rural counties especially vulnerable to climate disasters.

In the remainder of this section, we highlight some of the ways in which two climate disasters – drought and flooding – impact rural areas. While not the only climate disasters to affect rural areas, drought and flooding are among the most frequent and capture important elements of the challenge of building resilience in rural areas.

Like all of the hazards identified above, drought is a natural phenomenon, only becoming a disaster when it interacts with the demands placed on water and other natural resources by human use systems (Wilhite, Svoboda and Hayes Reference Wilhite, Svoboda and Hayes2007). All regions of the United States are affected by drought and, since 1980, drought ranks as the third most common cause of billion-dollar disaster events (NOAA 2025a). The scope of drought events, often affecting entire regions of a country and persisting for multiple years, poses a particular challenge: it is extremely hard for individuals and communities to support one another when everyone faces a shock at the same time. For example, the drought conditions that began in the Western region of the United States in 2012 persisted in some states, most notably in California, until 2016 (NOAA 2025a). As their geographic impact peaked in September of 2012, 65.5 percent of land in the Lower 48 states faced drought conditions according the the U.S. Drought Monitor.Footnote ³

For rural communities, both the direct and indirect consequences of drought can be significant. The direct effects of drought include reduced crop, rangeland, and forest productivity, increased wildfire risk, reduced water availability, increased livestock and wildlife mortality, and deteriorated fish and wildlife habitats (Fu et al. Reference Fu, Tang, Wu and McMillan2013; Wilhite, Svoboda and Hayes Reference Wilhite, Svoboda and Hayes2007). Indirectly, decreased farm incomes due to drought mean less spending in associated industries and local communities, higher food prices, higher unemployment, and reduced tax revenues (Wilhite, Svoboda and Hayes Reference Wilhite, Svoboda and Hayes2007). As a concrete example, the negative economic impact of the 2014–2016 drought on California agriculture was estimated at $3.8 billion (Lund et al. Reference Lund, Medellin-Azuara, Durand and Stone2018). In 2015 alone, the drought was estimated to have caused 21,000 lost jobs in California agricultural production and associated industries. Severe drought events routinely have consequences of or exceeding this magnitude. Across the 32 droughts resulting in billion-dollar drought disasters recorded by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since 1980, the average estimated cost was $11.5 billion per event. What’s more, while drought is most commonly associated with effects on agriculture, its impacts on tourism, industry, and social welfare are believed to be under-estimated (Fu et al. Reference Fu, Tang, Wu and McMillan2013).

Surface water, river, and coastal flooding are also common and costly. Approximately 75 percent of Presidential disaster declarations are associated with flooding (NOAA 2025b). Flooding is the most common source of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters (NOAA 2025a) and is estimated to have contributed 7.4 percent of total economic losses associated with natural disasters in the United States between 1980 and 2023 (Abegaz, Wang and Xu Reference Abegaz, Wang and Xu2024).

Heavy rain and flooding can impose large costs on rural residents, even in counties with well-diversified local economies, by damaging dispersed infrastructure and reducing water quality (Abegaz, Wang and Xu Reference Abegaz, Wang and Xu2024). While the 2020 United States Census reports that only 20 percent of the nation’s population live in rural areas, those areas hold 71 percent of the country’s road miles and 72 percent of bridges (USDT 2024). In addition to more road miles, roads in rural census tracts are more likely to be categorized as slightly, moderately, or highly rugged than roads in urban census tracts (USDA-ERS 2025a). Both the extent of road infrastructure and its topography in rural areas have implications for moving goods, accessing services, and even evacuating populations during flood events and other disasters.

While characteristics like dispersed infrastructure and a concentrated economic base contribute to the vulnerability of rural areas to climate disasters, they also help define opportunities for growth and improved resilience. For example, focused economic drivers present clear targets for investments in infrastructure and workforce development. The location and lower population density of rural areas also create inherent amenities that may increase rural areas’ attractiveness as migration destinations when urban areas experience downturns or disasters. This was visible as nonmetropolitan areas in the United States reversed nearly a decade of population decline following the COVID-19 pandemic, not only growing but growing at a faster rate than metropolitan areas (Davis et al. Reference Davis, Rupasingha, Cromartie and Sanders2022; Johnson and Lichter Reference Johnson and Lichter2019). The largest increases in population were seen in areas that also offered desirable amenities, such as robust infrastructure to support remote work, recreation opportunities, and retirement destinations (Davis et al. Reference Davis, Rupasingha, Cromartie and Sanders2022), again creating clear targets for strategic investment.

Climate disasters in urban areas may result in similar migration patterns to those observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the country, rural counties are estimated to have lower overall risk of coastal and river flooding, heat waves, hurricanes, ice storms, and strong winds than urban counties (Zuzak et al. Reference Zuzak, Goodenough, Stanton, Mowrer, Sheehan, Roberts, McGuire and Rozelle2023). While in-migration to rural areas in response to these disasters may tax existing infrastructure in the short run, the additional workforce and spending power may help provide much-needed resources to in the long run.

As every rural community is unique, it is important that resilience planning take into account a community’s specific strengths and vulnerabilities. Hazard mitigation plans built on community-specific characteristics have proven effective at generating more robust mitigation programming and disaster response (Burby Reference Burby2005). At the same time, such planning efforts have largely been shown to be incomplete, despite policymakers’ awareness of areas for improvement (Horney et al. Reference Horney, Nguyen, Salvesen, Dwyer, Cooper and Berke2017).

Research insights: defining resilience and identifying evolving data needs

The papers in this special issue section highlight a number of challenges associated with defining resilience in the context of rural communities and evaluating policies meant to boost rural resilience. In the simplest of scenarios, designing effective policies and evaluating the programs created under those policies is challenging. It is necessary to precisely enumerate goals and define clear metrics for evaluation. Even then, well-matched data is required to put evaluation plans into practice. As noted throughout this special issue, however, supporting rural communities in becoming and remaining resilient is far from the simplest of scenarios.

Policy relevance and future research priorities

Research into rural resilience, particularly in the context of climate-related threats, remains extremely relevant. In CPI-adjusted dollars, the 1980s saw a total of 33 “billion-dollar” climate disasters. That number rose to 57 in the 1990s, 67 in the 2000s, and 131 in the 2010s (NOAA 2025a). Many of these events directly affected rural communities, often in devastating ways. Even when disaster events take place outside rural areas, inter-connected supply chains and changing migration patterns transmit their influence across the country and around the globe.

The four papers in this special issue section highlight some of the challenges and opportunities facing policy makers working to improve the resilience of rural communities in the United States. Each paper reiterates the multidimensional nature of resilience and the unique characteristics of rural communities, providing important reminders for effective policy design. To conclude this introductory article, we note three promising areas for future research related to rural resilience stemming from the papers in this special issue section.

1. 1. Resilience is multidimensional. Programs aimed at increasing resilience often target single outcomes that support a community’s overall resilience, such as infrastructure, economic diversification, or food access. Future research can explore how different dimensions of resilience interact. For example, both economic institutions and social institutions play key roles in preparing for and recovering from climate disasters. Research into how these institutions reinforce or substitute for each other in generating resilience is warranted.

2. 2. The unique characteristics of rural areas shape both their vulnerability and adaptive capacity. The impacts of negative shock events can be direct (on individuals and communities where they occur) or indirect (such as impacts on communities connected or adjacent to those experiencing shocks). For example, farming-dependent counties might experience shocks directly from drought, while other counties experience indirect shocks from supply chain disruptions. The economic profile of these counties shapes the consequences of the drought. Future research might study how unique characteristics of rural areas, such as economic connectivity and geographic isolation, influence their vulnerability and adaptive capacity.

3. 3. Evidence-based policy design and evaluation requires well-matched data. Reliable data and well-executed evaluations are needed to demonstrate program efficacy and identify opportunities to improve program design or targeting. Future research might prioritize the collection, integration, and use of data sources to inform the development of targeted and evidence-based policies. Such data can additionally be used to learn from communities that demonstrate a high level of resilience, despite the vulnerabilities they face.

The points highlighted in this introductory article are by no means a complete summary of the insights contained in the issue’s papers. Each paper makes its own contribution by providing data-driven insights of use to researchers and policymakers alike. In both the results they provide and discussion they facilitate, the papers that follow further the goal of creating effective, evidence-based polices that enhance the resilience of rural communities to climate related threats.