States must consider climate change threats to be eligible for FEMA disaster preparation funds

States must consider climate change threats to be eligible for FEMA disaster preparation funds

Published 19 March 2015

Roughly every five years, states publish reports detailing their vulnerability to natural disasters, qualifying them for part of the nearly $1 billion aid money administered annually by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). States looking to receive grants from the federal Hazard Mitigation Assistanceprogram to help them prepare for natural disasters such as floods, storms, and wildfires will have,beginning next year, to consider the threats posed by climate change.

States looking to receive grants from the federal Hazard Mitigation Assistance program to help them prepare for natural disasters such as floods, storms, and wildfires will have,beginning next year, to consider the threats posed by climate change.

Roughly every five years, states publish reports detailing their vulnerability to natural disasters, qualifying them for part of the nearly $1 billion aid money administered annually by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The Kitsap Sun reports that those plans rarely consider climate change impacts in detail, but FEMA is now requiring state disaster plans to describe how the likelihood and intensity of natural hazards could be affected by growing levels of greenhouse gas pollution. “The risk assessment must provide a summary of the probability of future hazard events,” the new guidelines state. “Probability must include considerations of changing future conditions, including the effects of long-term changes in weather patterns and climate.”
California, Connecticut, and a few other states already consider climate change in their plans, said Rebecca Hammer, a Natural Resources Defense Council attorney who has been pushing FEMA to adopt the measure for several years. She cautions that many states fail to adequately consider climate change in their disaster planning including Florida, Texas, and “a lot of the states in the middle of the country.”
Florida has been criticized for not adopting climate change and sea-level rise warnings in its disaster forecasts but Aaron Gallaher, a spokesman for Florida’s emergency management division, said his agency, if required, would comply with FEMA’s new guidelines in the state’s next plan, which is due in 2018. “As far as FEMA is concerned, they’re a federal partner to us,” he said. “Whatever guidance they issue, we will follow those rules.”
Adam Sobel, director of Columbia University’s Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate, welcomes the change but said FEMA could have gone much further. “It’s good that they’re doing this,” Sobel said. “FEMA has lot of power - they’re the federal agency that has the most direct mandate for this kind of stuff, and they haven’t included climate change that much in the way they require state and local governments and the federal government to plan and prepare.”
FEMA’s new measure is the agency’s latest step in incorporating climate change science into its operations, but critics say the agency needs to be more prescriptive in the new guidelines about how states should address climate change. “They’re saying, ‘You have to account for climate change, but you have total freedom in how to do that,’” Sobel said. “It sounds like it’s a pretty lax standard.”