Mayor Karen Bass’ adminstration quietly appointed a new chief heat officer over a month ago, The Times has confirmed.

Daniela Simunovic took on the role May 31 after the administration discreetly fired Marta Segura, the first person to hold the position. Simunovic previously served as Bass’ senior director of climate and sustainability for three years.

The chief heat officer is responsible for overseeing the city’s response to extreme heat, one of the deadliest climate risks facing California. Like her predecessor, Simunovic will also head the city’s Climate Emergency Mobilization Office.

The move comes after Bass proposed eliminating the office entirely when facing a $1-billion budget shortfall. The L.A. City Council rejected the move, and the final budget ultimately moved the office from Public Works to the Emergency Management Department.

Los Angeles created the office in early 2021 to coordinate city efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect Angelenos from climate disasters worsened by global warming. Then-Mayor Eric Garcetti appointed Segura as its director.

The following year, L.A. moved to also name the office’s director as the city’s chief heat officer, making it the third city in the country — after Phoenix and Miami — to create such a position.

On the hottest days, heat-related illness can account for nearly 1 in every 100 emergency department visits in L.A. County. In 2025, the County recorded 10 heat-related deaths, according to a new dashboard.

Segura was paid about $222,0000 in 2025 according to payroll data from the city controller. Simunovic, while in her role as senior director of climate and sustainability, was paid about $161,000 last year.

Before joining L.A. City government, Simunovic was a senior advisor for the California Air Resources Board, which is responsible for protecting the public from air pollution.

The Substack Climate Colored Goggles first reported Simunovic’s appointment Thursday. A spokesperson with Mayor Bass’s office confirmed it in a statement to The Times.

“Many stakeholders and City partners have been working closely with her and are excited to have her lead the office, including during the current Extreme Heat Warning in effect for the City of L.A.,” the statement said.

The Climate Emergency Mobilization Office has been “working with community partners on the development of the City’s Heat Action and Resilience Plan,” it read, “which should be completed by early 2027.”

Despite Bass’ proposal to cut the office last year, the mayor has reaffirmed and advanced several L.A. climate goals, including reaching 100% renewable energy by 2035.

Bass’s Climate Action Plan, released in April, called for doubling local solar power by 2030, reducing the use of fossil fuels in buildings and city buses, and addressing heat risk by planting more trees to increase shade, establishing “cooling centers” to provide relief during hot days and developing the Heat Action and Resilience Plan.

On a sweltering spring day in South Carolina, a worker they call the “Burn Boss” stands by a house, holding a torch. The radio crackles with a countdown, “3, 2, 1!”

And the Burn Boss sets the house on fire.

Within minutes, flames breach the walls and enter the building. They set alight a sofa, a bed, a closet full of clothes and a kitchen stocked with cooking oil and potato chips — all fuels for an accelerating blaze. Moments later, the light and heat roar outward from shattered windows, forcing onlookers to step back.

This is a test.

A nonprofit in South Carolina is in the unusual business of intentionally burning down houses built for this purpose in order to learn how best to protect people and their property against catastrophic wildfires.

As climate change amplifies heat waves and droughts, it is priming wildfires to burn bigger and faster. At the same time, people continue to move into areas more vulnerable to fire. This one-two punch is driving record financial losses as homes and entire communities burn.

Controlled experiments like these are contributing to a growing body of evidence suggesting that losing entire communities to fire is not inevitable, if the right steps are taken when designing homes and neighborhoods. If you can “prevent this house from igniting, you’ve likely prevented the next one from igniting,” said Murray Morrison, the Managing Director of Research at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, or IBHS, the organization running the test.

Disastrous wildfires used to be thought of as relatively isolated events, but there’s been a significant change in their frequency, said Michael J. Gollner, the director of the fire research laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “We have to start recognizing that our communities are no longer safe,” he said.

Tests like the one in South Carolina are an acknowledgment that climate change is already affecting people’s lives in potentially devastating ways.

After the test house ignites, IBHS employees track the flames as they burrow under the roof, shatter windows and send a torrent of embers toward a second building downwind. While they’re studying the blaze, a wall of industrial turbines fan the flames with gusts up to 50 miles per hour — roughly the same wind speeds that helped to fuel the wildfires in 2018 that destroyed Paradise, Calif., one of the most devastating disasters in recent years.

By the end of the experiment, millions of data points will capture exactly how a fire might spread from house to house. This is precisely the kind of blaze that’s becoming more common as wildfires reach into dense neighborhoods.

Few organizations have the funding and facilities to study fire in this way. In a series of experiments, researchers have burned down 14 “test” homes. They tweak the building materials, wind speeds and other variables to mimic real-world conditions. The video above shows the downwind building, equipped with a half-million dollars of sensors and equipment, as it measured the danger posed by its fiery neighbor under one of these scenarios.

These and other experiments have taught valuable lessons. For example, use building materials and methods designed to withstand embers, heat and flames. Remove flammable things in the yard, particularly within five feet of a building, to lower the chance of fire reaching it at all.

An analysis found that communities combining these strategies were twice as likely to survive a major conflagration.

The insurance industry, which is the primary source of funding for IBHS, is using its research. California requires insurers to offer discounts if homeowners upgrade their properties to be more fire-resistant. Some of the biggest savings come from meeting a collection of standards that qualify for a certification under the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home program, rather than making individual changes. California’s fifth-largest insurer, CSAA, now guarantees policies to anyone with the certification.

Studies also show that the distance between buildings is important. Ideally, according to IBHS research, homes would have 30 feet or more between them to minimize the chance that one becomes fuel to burn the other.

Of course, the distance between homes is impossible to modify once a neighborhood has been built. But “can we reduce the exposure enough that the hardened materials on the neighbor’s structure actually prevent your home from igniting?” asked Dr. Morrison. “What you’re trying to do is stop the catastrophe, not achieve perfection,” he said.

Even though California has some of the country’s strongest standards for new construction, it has struggled to keep pace with the wildfire threat. After devastating fire seasons in 2017 and 2018, private insurers began rapidly dropping customers, pushing more than 500,000 homeowners onto the state’s costly, bare-bones insurer of last resort. Many people have decided to forgo coverage altogether.

In an effort to lure insurance companies back into the state, California lawmakers have taken steps to require people to reduce their fire risk.

In 2020, the state legislature passed a bill requiring people in particularly fire-prone places to clear flammable materials from the first five feet around their house. However, some local officials and neighborhood organizations objected, and implementation of the plan has been delayed.

Unwilling to wait, the city of Berkeley, Calif., enacted its own local version of the rules. They took effect in January. “This is an area where there is a strong body of research,” said Colin Arnold, the assistant fire chief at Berkeley Fire.

As this map shows, homes in Berkeley with starkly different fire risks can exist on the very same street, depending on construction methods, vegetation nearby and proximity to other houses. By focusing on the blocks closest to the fire-prone hills to the east, Berkeley officials hope to lower the threat posed to the rest of the city.

To ease the transition, fire officials started with voluntary inspections and community groups are helping clear brush for neighbors at no cost. And local landscape architects are helping residents adapt their yards in ways that they still find attractive.

Wildfire isn’t a new threat; it’s been affecting humanity for millennia, said Roy Wright, the president of IBHS. “I don’t want us to ever assert that we can somehow design ourselves out of this risk,” he said. The goal, instead, is to put people in a place where “the risk doesn’t feel catastrophic.”

Employers are bracing for what could be the highest rise in health insurance premiums in 16 years in 2027, driving up the average cost of family coverage in California to more than $30,000 — the price of a new compact car.

Health insurance companies expect the cost of medical services and prescription drugs to soar by 9% in 2027, according to a new survey by PwC, the highest rise the researchers have found since 2011. Insurers use those expected medical costs to calculate the price of premiums in the coming year. Many employers require workers to pay part of that cost.

Experts say the escalating costs of employers’ premiums are reducing workers’ wages and take-home pay, while raising the prices of goods and services in California and across the country.

“It’s going to erode the standard of living for lots of California families,” said Glenn Melnick, a USC professor of healthcare finance.

Melnick said when employers are forced to spend more on health insurance, there is less money available for wages. The skyrocketing premiums, he said, are like a hidden pay cut for working families.

The higher cost also has small-business owners wondering whether they can continue paying for their workers’ health insurance.

This year, premiums for staff at the Booksmith, an independent bookstore on Haight Street in San Francisco, leaped by 17%, said Christin Evans, the store’s owner. Next year could bring even more pain. The monthly premium for four employees is $3,250.

To try to cope, Evans said, she has reduced staff hours by closing the store earlier.

“We have to absorb it,” she said. “We’re not paying the wages we want to pay or delivering the customer service we’d like to deliver.”

Seventeen million Californians receive health benefits from an employer. Those premiums have been rising faster in California than the national average.

Between 2022 and 2025, the average family premium for employers in the state rose by 24% to $28,397, according to a survey by KFF and the California Healthcare Foundation. That was nearly double the 12.2% increase in consumer prices during those years.

Hospital, pharmaceutical and other medical costs escalated even faster after 2025.

PwC’s annual survey of insurers last year found an expected rise of 8.5% in 2026, which its researchers later revised to 9%.

A key driver of the rising medical costs, according to experts, is prices charged by hospitals. In recent years, some health systems, including UCLA and Cedars-Sinai, have grown larger by buying nearby hospitals and expanding their clinics, becoming more dominant in the community and reducing competition.

Melnick said the expansion of some health systems into giant organizations means that they can “tell insurance companies what the price will be.”

A Cedars-Sinai spokesperson pointed to a 2022 paper that found that for-profit health system prices had escalated faster than those at nonprofit systems like Cedars. The paper was partly funded by Cedars.

“Cedars-Sinai Health System’s growth in recent years has expanded access to the highest levels of patient care and medical innovation across the Los Angeles region,” the spokesperson said.

UCLA did not respond to requests for comment.

Another factor is the rising cost of prescription drugs. Spending on cancer drugs, the most costly category, reached $143 billion in 2025, an annual increase of 12%, the PwC survey found.

The nation’s spending on obesity medicines, including GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, soared by 81% last year, PwC said. A 30-day supply of the drugs lists for more than $1,000.

An Ozempic injection pen.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

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Gallup said this month that its survey found that 11% of U.S. adults are now taking the GLP-1 drugs for weight loss.

The obesity drug manufacturers say the medicines can reduce medical expenses by preventing other costly conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, but data don’t yet show such reductions, PwC said.

Researchers at the California Healthcare Foundation say a large part of the problem is that hospital operating costs, prescription drug prices and doctor fees have been allowed to grow unchecked for decades.

The foundation estimated in a report last year that 25 cents of every dollar spent in California — more than $73 billion each year — does nothing to help patients. Instead it goes to excessive profits for providers, administrative red tape and other waste, the foundation found.

California employer premiums are expected to rise next year for another reason: Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers agreed in June to raise taxes on the private plans to help pay for the cost of Medi-Cal, which covers the medical costs for the poor, and to help balance the state budget.

The California Assn. of Health Plans said insurers will add the tax to next year’s premiums. The trade group estimates the higher tax will cost each insured person $100 next year or $400 for a family of four.

The higher tax must still be approved by the Trump administration. Republicans in the state Assembly wrote a letter to the administration this month, asking officials to deny the request.

Researchers also expect a jump in premiums for families without employer insurance who purchase policies on state marketplaces such as Covered California. Some of those families faced double-digit increases this year because of rising medical costs and the end of enhanced federal subsidies that Congress had approved as a temporary measure during the pandemic. Almost 400,000 Californians dropped their Obamacare plans this year as prices soared.

To deal with the higher premiums, some employers are changing the design of their health plans to shift more of the cost to workers by raising deductibles and co-pays.

Those higher out-of-pocket costs are just the beginning of the fallout. Twenty-two percent of chief financial officers surveyed by Mercer in February said the high price of health benefits had forced them to stop hiring or led to layoffs. Thirty-six percent of those executives said the rising premium costs have harmed workers’ wages and raises.

Candice Elliott, a human resources consultant in Santa Cruz, said smaller businesses such as restaurants struggle to find ways to cover the higher costs.

Many restaurants, Elliott said, already have a slim margin between their revenues and expenses. When premiums rise, she said, some restaurants have added a fee to the customer bill to help cover workers’ health costs. Others have hiked menu prices.

“That impacts affordability for the consumer,” Elliott said. “It makes inflation greater.”

Some small businesses have moved from so-called silver plans to the lower-priced bronze plans, she said, which cover less of the employee’s monthly premium. “It’s effectively a decrease in pay for the employee,” she said.

Others are hiring employees overseas, Elliott said. “You can pay someone in the global south half of what you pay an American and still afford them a good standard of living and benefits that are unaffordable in the U.S.,” she said.

Melnick, the USC professor, said many workers don’t realize how much they are losing as their employers’ premiums rise. He tells people to look at their W-2 tax form from last year, where employers are required to report the cost of the employee’s premium in box 12, under “Code DD.”

He said USC’s premium for his family of four is $45,000.

“The base is so high that even a small increase has a big impact,” he said. The continuing annual increases, he said, are “bad news for everybody.”