Federal policymakers can tap various options to help communities become more resilient against extreme weather events.
Special Series: Weather Volatility in the United States
Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events in the United States. In this series of blog posts, experts examine trends in extreme weather, impacts on communities, and policies that potentially could mitigate damage from extreme weather events.
In two previous blog posts in our series on weather volatility, we highlighted trends in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events in the United States and spatial patterns of these weather events across the country. Informing our analysis were 28 years of data from the Storm Events Database, which is assembled by the National Weather Service.
Our analysis revealed four high-level findings. First, property damage from extreme weather events is on the rise nationally due to a combination of climate change and population growth in high-risk areas. Second, although some types of extreme weather, such as thunderstorms, wind, and hail, occur frequently, other weather events that are less frequent, such as hurricanes, account for the lion’s share of property damage. Third, damage from weather extremes varies significantly by region; for example, counties along the Gulf Coast, especially in Texas and Louisiana, suffer the most. However, if we look at damage per capita, we see that damage also is considerable in many counties in the Midwestern United States. Finally, a single event can cause catastrophic losses. Many of the counties that experienced the largest amount of property damage over the 28-year period between 1995 and 2022 incurred most of that damage in one major storm.
What are the implications of these findings for federal policymaking that deals with climate adaptation and resilience? While we can’t cover such a big topic in a single blog post, we offer three broad recommendations for the direction that federal policy can take to reduce the cost of extreme weather events.
Providing More Money for Pre-disaster Investments in Mitigation and Resilience
Federal policy for climate resilience is scattered throughout multiple agencies, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) plays the lead. FEMA offers several hazard-mitigation and resilience grant programs; provides funding for disaster recovery; operates the National Flood Insurance Program, which provides households and businesses with insurance coverage for damage from flood events; sets requirements for local ordinances related to development in floodplains; and more.
Funding, activities, and programs that are administered by FEMA disproportionately are oriented to help communities after disasters. The frequency and severity of disasters vary from year to year, so funding for recovery does, too, but a study by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that, since 2005 (the year Hurricane Katrina occurred), spending on disaster recovery has averaged $16.5 billion annually (2022$). In 2023, FEMA spent $13.1 billion on disaster recovery. In that same year, the agency provided only $3 billion in grants to state and local governments for investments in pre-disaster resilience.
Credit: Bilanol / Shutterstock
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development also spends billions on disaster recovery. The Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program administered by the agency has provided $100 billion to communities since the creation of the program in 1993. A law that was passed in 2021 requires the agency to set aside 15 percent of funds from this program for activities that improve mitigation, but the program (like those for disaster recovery administered by FEMA) receives no annual appropriations from Congress. Funds become available only if and when a disaster strikes, even for mitigation and resilience activities. The agency has a new pre-disaster program, the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program, but this program has received less than $1 billion in funding during its two years of existence—a small amount relative to the money that communities in high-risk areas need.
We are not the first to make the point that federal policy is too focused on post-disaster recovery at the expense of pre-disaster hazard mitigation and resilience. But the point bears repeating. And although FEMA has attempted to shift its orientation in recent years—the agency has reorganized and created an Office of Resilience—the funding landscape needs to change before real progress can be made. Specifically, agencies need more funding for resilience than they currently get, and they need this funding in the form of annual appropriations, rather than an influx of cash after a disaster strikes.
Using Leverage Points to Improve State and Local Decisionmaking
Federal spending, even if orders of magnitude larger than the current level, will not move the needle on resilience by itself. Instead, the federal government needs to find ways to use various “carrots” and “sticks” to incentivize states and localities to design smart policies for adaptation and resilience.
FEMA already uses some of these kinds of incentives. For example, the agency requires that, to be eligible for the National Flood Insurance Program, communities adopt floodplain-management practices and ordinances such as minimum elevations for new buildings. The agency also administers the Community Rating System, which offers discounts on flood insurance in communities that adopt particular resilience practices. And beginning in 2021, FEMA began administering the Safeguarding Tomorrow Revolving Loan Fund, which provides states with seed funding to operate revolving loan programs for local investments in resilience.
FEMA could go further. For one thing, the agency could tighten the restrictions on development in floodplains. As examples, FEMA could stipulate that new development in those areas should be elevated higher than the current minimum expected water levels during major floods and require additional resilience features to accommodate future conditions, such as sea level rise. The agency also could better leverage its control over hazard-mitigation plans at the state and local levels. These plans are required by law for states and localities to be eligible for certain non-emergency disaster assistance, including grants for mitigation and resilience. Hazard-mitigation plans are ubiquitous; every state and virtually every local government has one. But very few specific requirements exist for what these plans should look like; requirements mainly deal with processes for developing the plans. Hazard-mitigation plans vary widely across communities as a result. Furthermore, even the best plans typically leave out critical components of resilience, such as land use planning and zoning to reduce exposure to risk (which we say more about below).
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$3 billion
Amount of funding provided in 2023 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for investments in pre-disaster resilience, compared to $13.1 billion for disaster recovery
These leverage points and incentives apply not only to FEMA but to other agencies, as well. As agencies allocate $550 billion in new investments from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act over the next five years, they are explicitly directed by Executive Order 14052 to incorporate infrastructure that is resilient to climate impacts as an implementation priority. This executive order is a step in the right direction, and it should apply to many more policies beyond the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Some infrastructure projects in high-risk areas may be unsustainable at some point in the future, and such projects may induce further development in those areas, which can increase the cost of extreme weather events in the future. Agencies can alleviate these concerns by stipulating considerations for resilience as part of the eligibility criteria for projects, including evidence that these projects would remain functional in future climate scenarios. Agencies also could require that states contribute a larger amount of funding to projects in high-risk areas or rely on low-interest loans rather than grants. These requirements could ensure that states (and localities) have financial skin in the game.
Promoting Policies That Reduce Exposure to Risk
In some locations, the risks from climate change are so high that investing in costly mitigation projects simply will not be cost-effective in the long run. What’s more, these investments might induce more development in the very places where the risk is highest, thereby increasing the cost of future disasters. In these high-risk places, creative solutions are needed to preempt development where it has not yet occurred and facilitate the equitable relocation of existing populations.
Congress identified one particularly creative solution for preempting development back in the 1980s. The Coastal Barrier Resources Act of 1982 prevents federal spending on infrastructure, disaster assistance, and flood insurance in designated areas called the Coastal Barrier Resources System (CBRS) along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. The Coastal Barrier Resources Act did not ban development in the CBRS; the law simply removed these three implicit subsidies for development.
In a recent study that we published with colleagues, we found the policy to be highly effective, reducing development densities on CBRS lands by up to 83 percent while generating substantial flood-protection benefits and increasing the value of developments and properties in safer neighboring areas. With careful exploration, this approach potentially could be applied to other areas and disaster contexts (e.g., areas in the western United States that are prone to wildfire).
Artificial oyster reefs, known as oyster reef balls, form part of a living shoreline on a coast in Tampa Bay, Florida. Living shorelines are resilience projects that use natural materials to help mitigate erosion and improve water quality.
Some localities are experimenting with other innovative zoning practices, such as the resilience zoning overlays of Norfolk, Virginia, which are intended to guide future development away from floodplains and toward upland areas. A few rural Western communities have adopted wildfire resilience overlays. These kinds of overlays could be coupled with programs such as transfer of development rights, which allow development to be transferred from one (risky) location to another (less risky) location. Although these are local government policies, the federal government could use grant funding to incentivize localities to run pilot programs and facilitate the exchange of knowledge across jurisdictions. The federal government also could stipulate that hazard-mitigation plans be explicitly aligned with rules for land use and zoning and work with states to develop model land use and zoning codes that incorporate these creative, resilience-oriented approaches.
Meeting the challenges of reducing exposure to risk is more difficult and costly in areas that already are developed. But programs that facilitate housing buyouts are a promising policy approach. In these programs, the government purchases homes that are at risk or have been damaged in a disaster, which allows homeowners to voluntarily migrate out of high-risk areas. Such programs have been implemented by FEMA and many state and local governments, including Harris County, Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; and the states of New Jersey, New York, and North Carolina. Some buyout programs have raised concerns from local communities about the local tax base and socioeconomic landscape, but some of our recent research has shown that New York State’s NY Rising Buyout and Acquisition Program that was implemented after Hurricane Sandy has generated positive spillover impacts in the local economy. However, researchers have cautioned that careful design and implementation of buyout programs is critical for creating equitable outcomes and community acceptance of a program.
Reducing exposure to extreme weather events by changing development patterns in communities is the most politically fraught piece of the resilience puzzle, so the wisdom bears emphasizing that these solutions need to be carefully designed and implemented together with local communities to ensure cost-effectiveness and equity. But in a world where more—and more damaging—extreme weather events occur as a result of climate change, comprehensive adaptation and resilience strategies will include some necessary shifts in where we live.
Doubling Down on Climate Resilience
Climate resilience is receiving more attention from the federal government than ever before. This attention most recently was highlighted by the White House National Climate Resilience Framework, which was released in September 2023. The framework lays out six broad objectives for resilience and opportunities for action that can help achieve those objectives. Our purpose in this blog post is to offer three suggestions for federal policy that we feel deserve greater emphasis.
First, pre-disaster resilience funding needs to be larger and more sustainable from year to year. Second, federal agencies need to better employ various leverage points in laws, regulations, and grant and loan programs to improve decisionmaking about resilience at the state and local levels. Third, the federal government should facilitate creative solutions for reducing development in the highest-risk areas to contain disaster costs in the future. In this rapidly evolving policy area, we particularly emphasize the importance of experimenting with creative approaches, and involving communities in the design of those approaches, to gain insights into the effectiveness of a given policy or program in meeting the challenges of climate change. The weather is only going to become more volatile—communities in the United States can more cost-effectively protect more people and property if they prepare in advance.
Our data and detailed documentation of our related methodology are available in the Harvard Dataverse, a free and public data repository where researchers from various disciplines share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data.
