A record $3.5B in resilience funds OK’d
White House: Grants to help states gird for climate effects
WASHINGTON >> The Biden administration Thursday announced a record injection of money to help communities gird against the effects of climate change, as disasters continue to pummel the United States.
The new funds — $3.5 billion in grants to states to protect against floods, wildfires and other threats — mark a shift in U.S. disaster policy as climate change gets worse: Rather than smaller, more targeted investments, the government is throwing huge sums at disaster preparation as fast as it can.
“The risks that we are seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation,” said Deanne Criswell, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is administering the money.
The goal of the new money is to get local and state officials to broaden their approach to put less emphasis on small-scale projects that fortify individual homes or buildings, and more attention on ways to protect entire communities, she said.
“We’ve had a very incremental approach to how we’ve been doing climate risk mitigation,” Criswell said. “We really want to start to shift the focus.”
The announcement is the latest example of federal money going toward climate resilience and adaptation at levels that would have previously been hard to imagine.
In May, President Joe Biden said he would double funding, to $1 billion, for another FEMA program called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC which also gives state and local governments money for projects such as sea walls and drainage or for helping people relocate away from vulnerable areas.
And a bipartisan infrastructure bill pending in Congress would provide tens of billions of dollars in climate resilience funding, the most in American history. That package includes an additional $1 billion for BRIC and $3.5 billion for a separate flood-protection program at FEMA.
The explosion of new money reflects the growing toll that climate change is putting on communities around the country.
Starting with a string of hurricanes and wildfires in 2017, the United States has suffered devastating disasters every year since: Hurricane Michael wiping out towns in the Florida Panhandle in 2018, Midwest flooding in 2019 and a record 12 major storms making landfall in 2020. Last year, 22 disasters that struck the country each caused at least $1 billion in damage, another record.
The new willingness to spend heavily also reflects the growing toll on the federal budget. Between 2005 and 2019 alone, the federal government spent almost a half-trillion dollars on disaster assistance, according to the Government Accountability Office, which considers climate change a threat to the government’s financial health.