Stay in the know about climate impacts and solutions. Subscribe to our newsletters.
Stay in the know about climate impacts and solutions. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.
By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.
Yale Climate Connections
Like an approaching major hurricane whose outer spiral bands are only just beginning to hit, an approaching climate change storm has begun and will soon grow to ferocious severity. This immense tempest is already exposing the precarious foundations upon which civilization is built — an inadequate infrastructure designed for the gentler climate of the 20th century.
For example, because of sea level rise and stronger storms, some coastal cities that used to flood in a hurricane expected once every 100 years can now flood in a 1-in-20-year storm. Levees and dams built to handle a worst-case flood can now be overwhelmed by rains from a new breed of superstorms. And bridges, roads, runways, and rails are cracking and buckling in heat they were not designed for.
The climate is changing, and our journalists are here to help you make sense of it. Sign up for our newsletters and never miss a story.
Transformative change will inevitably occur to bring us into balance with the new climate. The big question is: To what degree will this change be planned and orderly rather than chaotic and unplanned, resulting in great suffering?
An urgent, well-organized, well-funded adaptation effort is essential to prepare us for what lies ahead. One recent estimate found that adapting to climate change in the U.S. will cost from tens to hundreds of billions of dollars per year by 2050. For comparison, federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. currently spend over $400 billion annually on public infrastructure.
In the 1980s, there was one billion-dollar event every four months, on average. Now, there's one every ~3 weeks. Why? Three reasons: increasing exposure, increasing vulnerability, and the big one, increasing severity and/or frequency of weather extremes fueled by a warming world. https://t.co/IyDP8gj08v
This is Part 1 of a four-part series on U.S. climate change adaptation. In this part, I’ll document the steps the U.S. has already taken to adjust to our new reality, with suggestions on legislation that could further this effort. I’ll add links to the blurbs below as each post goes online.
In the past few years, after largely ignoring climate adaptation planning and funding, the U.S. government has begun to acknowledge the need to take climate adaptation seriously.
There has been a steady decline in the number of active NFIP policies in recent years.
Texas leads the way. Since March 2020, the active policy count has declined by 100,000. With the ongoing population boom, that means an even smaller % of homes with policies.
Not good.
(2/3) pic.twitter.com/9M5xfnYeFN
The Biden White House has also called upon climate adaptation experts to develop plans for managing the looming climate extremes.
For example, Chapter 9 of the March 2023 Economic Report of the President, “Opportunities for Better Managing Weather Risk in the Changing Climate,” by climate scientist Fran Moore of the University of California, Davis, presents some excellent ambitions. For example, it advocates “long-term, forward-looking planning that anticipates coming climate change,” citing a 2021 study finding that proactive adaptation efforts could reduce the costs of climate change to the U.S. road, rail, and coastal infrastructure by a factor three to six by 2090 compared with purely reactive adaptation.
The government’s March 2023 Ocean Climate Action Plan acknowledges that for many coastal communities, the best strategy for avoiding the growing risks of more severe storms and sea level rise is to gradually relocate to higher ground. The plan sets this goal: “Develop an approach for sharing government-wide resources and information to support community-driven relocation effectively.”
Read: Checklist: How to take advantage of brand-new clean energy tax credits
And in April 2023, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology put out a report, Extreme Weather Risk in a Changing Climate: Enhancing prediction and protecting communities, which laid out goals for improving models for quantifying future extreme weather risks, better sharing extreme weather data and models, developing a national adaptation plan, and funding adaptation-related research.
Biden’s 2021 Executive Order 14030 on Climate-Related Financial Risk directs the government to “identify the primary sources of Federal climate-related financial risk exposure and develop methodologies to quantify climate risk within the economic assumptions and long-term projections of the President’s Budget.” A December 2023 paper by the Council of Economic Advisors, A Progress Report on Climate-Energy-Macro Modeling, outlined more specific subsequent plans. For example, it recommends “quantify extreme event risk for the next 25 years at a high spatial resolution across the country.”
At least three bills before Congress could help improve U.S. adaptation efforts.
1) The bipartisan National Coordination on Adaptation and Resilience for Security Act of 2023. This bill would require the federal government to produce a national climate adaptation and resilience strategy and an implementation plan with federal, state, local, private sector, and nonprofit partners. A chief resilience officer would be appointed by the president and would work in the White House to implement the plan, which would be updated every three years.
2) The FEMA Independence Act, which would move FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security and make it a cabinet-level organization. According to disaster scientist Samantha Montano, author of “Disasterology” (see my review here), “There is widespread support among [emergency management] practitioners that this is needed to make emergency management more effective and efficient.” However, such a move is controversial, and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell has not expressed support or opposition to the change.
3) The 2023 bipartisan Natural Disaster Safety Board Act, which would establish a commission to study future wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters, and advocate for policy changes that would correct bad development decisions, discriminatory policies, and lack of climate change planning.
The nation’s entire disaster preparedness and response system needs a significant overhaul, as argued by Samantha Montano in “Disasterology” and in a 2023 New York Times editorial. Three potential ways to do so:
Bob Henson contributed to this post.
We help millions of people understand climate change and what to do about it. Help us reach even more people like you.
Jeff Masters, Ph.D., worked as a hurricane scientist with the NOAA Hurricane Hunters from 1986-1990. After a near-fatal flight into category 5 Hurricane Hugo, he left the Hurricane Hunters to pursue a… More by Jeff Masters 
