It’s here: the climate we’ve all been warned about. It’s frightening to anticipate more intense and devastating hurricanes like Helene and Milton. But these few weeks after a disaster are when we can make once-unimaginable moves toward adaptation and resilience for the climate reality we’re in now.

I study disasters, and I’ve also been living through them here in Houston, which has been hit by two major storms in the past six months. In August, I published the Carnegie Disaster Dollar Database, which catalogs the $114 billion in disaster funding that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development granted to individuals and local and state governments over the past decade.

The United States has a disaster recovery system that is supposed to bring together multiple kinds of federal resources — as well as the insurance industry, the charitable sector, community groups and private companies — to help people and communities recover.

But Helene and Milton reveal that the system is stretched to its limits; it simply wasn’t designed for climate change. The disaster database shows that FEMA and HUD spent $59 billion on recovery from just three 2017 hurricanes: Maria, Irma and Harvey.

Though FEMA has assured survivors that it has enough money for the immediate term, the federal system urgently needs more money. FEMA spent nearly half its $20 billion disaster relief fund in just eight days on immediate responses to Helene and Milton, and the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program has run out of money as of this week.

With the federal system under incredible strain, it’s time to reimagine how we recover. The period after a disaster is a precious time when people, the financial system and the government embody a kind of flexibility that could help support those who want to move out of harm’s way and toward a safer, more resilient way of living better suited to our current climate.

Stories coming out of Florida and North Carolina this week illustrate what researchers on global migration have long known: On sunny days, many people who live in the places most vulnerable to the climate crisis don’t move. But after disasters, they do. After Hurricane Milton, Florida resident Cin-dee Cawley told the Wall Street Journal about her desire to sell her coastal home and move back to Indiana: “It’s too much. It’s like playing Russian roulette. I don’t want to play anymore.”

Changes in the federal disaster system could help people such as Cawley who are ready to make a choice to move altogether or adapt in place. We could reimagine the system as being focused on the recovery of people rather than property.

FEMA’s largest forms of assistance to individuals are for the costs of rebuilding a home. What if FEMA continued to provide tens of thousands of dollars to those whose primary home suffered significant damage but allowed them to apply it to a different home in a less risky place? Or FEMA could identify where people are congregating after a storm and provide resources to them in that place, instead of only establishing recovery centers close to the disaster zone.

We could reimagine FEMA-funded buyout programs, which often arrive too long after a disaster event to be appealing options for the most vulnerable homeowners but are still a huge cost for local governments. At the same time, we need more ambitious solutions that leverage the private and charitable sectors to avoid a scenario in which coastal homeowners abandon risky properties en masse with no support to build their lives elsewhere.

We could apply lessons from long-standing practices of refugee resettlement to help those leaving a disaster zone integrate into new communities. For example, almost 4 percent of Puerto Ricans left the island after Hurricane Maria, many of them arriving in New York. In a people-focused recovery system, New York could have received a percentage of the $19 billion Puerto Rico received from FEMA’s public assistance program to help meet the needs of new arrivals.

Congress funds long-term housing recovery through HUD’s disaster programs only on an emergency basis, which results in extreme delays in getting funding to impacted communities. Congress could permanently authorize HUD’s disaster programs so the agency could have resources lined up for housing recovery. And lawmakers could allocate funding to build affordable housing in places that aren’t as disaster-prone, so that people have options for where to live.

We can and must bring down global air and water temperatures, which are making storms such as Helene and Milton so much worse. While we do whatever we can to prevent catastrophic temperature rise, we also have to adapt, including in how we respond to disasters.

After Hurricane Katrina, when the disaster recovery system was deeply discredited, we reimagined it. After Hurricane Sandy, we saw another major overhaul. Helene and Milton are blaring signs that it’s time to evolve again, with a focus on adapting for a future that’s already on our doorstep.

Sarah Labowitz is a nonresident scholar in the Sustainability, Climate and Geopolitics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace