Flood Insurance
The Federal Emergency Management Agency reminded Congress last week that the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) will expire at the end of May unless Congress takes action to extend or reform it. While the NFIP is one of the key tools the federal government uses to compensate victims of natural disasters, RFF Fellow Carolyn Kousky and Resident Scholar Len Shabman note that direct federal aid for disaster relief is not as generous as generally perceived. The misperception may lead people to misinterpret their ability to recover from major flooding. Kousky and Shabman recommend that flood risk communication programs be more explicit about the limits of direct aid.
Eco-Certification
Last week, the Washington Post reported on concerns about whether eco-certification programs “deliver on their promises.” RFF’s new blog, Common Resources, highlights research by Senior Fellow Allen Blackman, who finds the evidentiary base for the success of these programs is remarkably thin. The majority of the evaluations of such programs fail to properly account for “the baseline—what would have happened without the program.” Watch for more on this topic in the upcoming issue of Resources magazine.
Energy Efficiency Financing
Energy efficiency is improving in Sonoma County, California, which has one of the few successful home retrofitting programs in the country. RFF Research Directors and Senior Fellows Karen Palmer and Margaret Walls, with Todd Gerarden, took a look into why energy efficiency programs are not more successful in other parts of the country. One major reason, they contend, is a lack of demand for energy efficiency financing from property owners. Other reasons include the riskiness of home efficiency investments, substantial transaction costs, and the inability of lenders’ to distinguish high-payoff and low-payoff investments.
