A house in flames during the Park Fire in Tehama County, Calif., July 26. (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images) This article is part of an ongoing Yahoo News series on how climate change is impacting the lives of American citizens . For Diane Wolf and many of her neighbors in the quaint, wooded hills of Berkeley, Calif., a climate change reckoning is underway. “We’ve been here 26 years, and had car/home umbrella insurance with AAA,” Wolf, faculty assistant to the vice provost of academic affairs at the University of California, Davis, told Yahoo News. “We got a notice last spring that we wouldn’t be renewed because we didn’t have fire insurance.” Wolf and her husband acted quickly, securing additional fire insurance coverage for roughly $7,000 a year, but AAA then embarked on a full policy review that required an inspection of the property. This has been a common occurrence in California, a state that has endured 16 of the 19 wildfires in U.S. history that have resulted in losses over $1 billion. “As opposed to just renewing us as old clients, they cited all kinds of problems — a wire hanging, the age of the roof, a bump in the sidewalk caused by the roots of a tree, a lopsided gate, a lack of outdoor hand-railings — and then threatened to decline coverage,” she said. Wolf approached California’s insurer of last resort, the FAIR Plan, which offers subsidized coverage when private companies won’t, but it responded with a similar list of required upgrades. Faced with losing coverage at a time when insurers are either not writing new California policies or have been raising rates dramatically to account for the increased risks posed by climate change, Wolf went ahead with the repairs, which she said cost $60,000. “That’s a big […]