President Biden will announce Monday afternoon that he is doubling the amount of money the U.S. government will spend helping communities prepare for
extreme weather events, while launching a new effort at NASA to collect more sophisticated climate data.
While the $1 billion in funding is a fraction of what taxpayers spend each year on disasters, it underscores a broader effort to account for the damage wrought by climate change and curb it. Last week the president signed an
executive orderinstructing federal agencies to identify and disclose the perils a warming world poses to federal programs, assets and liabilities, while also requiring federal suppliers to reveal their own climate-related risks.
The president will make the announcement during a visit to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s headquarters Monday afternoon, where he will receive a briefing on this year’s outlook for the Atlantic hurricane season.
The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program helps communities prepare in advance for hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters. The administration will target roughly 40 percent of the additional money to disadvantaged areas.
In a phone interview Monday, White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy said that Biden’s actions will help convey to Americans how the climate has already changed and what the United States must do to respond to it.
“That’s really going to make this climate issue real and relevant to people,” she said. “We just have to prepare for this, and the president is a realist. This is the world we’re living in.”
Monday’s hurricane briefing, McCarthy said, marked a sharp departure from how President Donald Trump approached extreme weather events. In a 2019 incident known as “Sharpiegate,” Trump and his deputies
pressured the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to contradict its own experts and say the path of Hurricane Dorian would severely impact Alabama. He also
repeatedly questioned the link between rising temperatures and more frequent and intense wildfires.
“This meeting is not just sitting around talking about policies. It’s all about listening to what science tells us, and how we can be prepared for those real-world impacts,” McCarthy said. “It’s telling people what they need to hear about what’s happening in their world, but also responding with a robust whole-of-government approach.”
Brock Long, who headed FEMA from June 2017 to March 2019, praised the decision to increase funding for a program that he helped launch under the Trump administration. But he cautioned the administration would have to do more to bolster everything from digital systems to private supply chains in the face of more intense extreme weather.
“We’re stuck in this unsustainable disaster-recovery cycle. We’re putting out massive amounts of money to help communities recover, instead of preparing for disasters,” he said in a phone interview Monday, adding that under current law the administration could direct up to $3.7 billion to the BRIC program. “While I applaud the increase in funding, providing $1 billion to mitigating our nation’s infrastructure is just scratching the surface.”
Last week, NOAA said it expects another hectic hurricane season — one that will come on the heels of the
busiest such season on record in 2020.
The past year saw a startling 30 named storms, including a half-dozen major hurricanes, surpassing a record set in 2005. A dozen tropical storms and hurricanes made landfall in the United States during the past year. Five of those made landfall in Louisiana, leaving multibillion dollar disasters and plenty of heartache in their wake.
But emergency officials will probably have little time to catch their breath. NOAA’s
outlook last week said a 60 percent chance exists for an above-average storm season this year, with a 70 percent probability of 13 to 20 named storms.
Biden’ orders federal agencies, vendors to assess their climate-related risk
The administration will also start developing a new NASA mission concept for an Earth System Observatory, which will deploy advanced technology in space so scientists and policymakers can better understand the interactions between Earth’s atmosphere, land, ocean and ice.
"If you want to mitigate climate change, you’ve got to measure it,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview Monday.
Nelson said the agency plans to assemble a “comprehensive observatory” in coming years that will give scientists unprecedented insight into what is happening on Earth — and how to better anticipate and react to key shifts.
Nelson said the planned satellite system will measure a broad range of things, from sea level rise to other land changes such as deforestation, landslides, the melting of glaciers and the impact of wildfires. The system also plans to track aerosols in the atmosphere, as well as help to better predict droughts, monitor water use and improve weather forecasting.
Satellites orbiting our planet, some owned by the U.S. government, already track many of those elements. But Nelson said the administration aims to give scientists an entirely deeper level of insight in the years to come.
“If we want to understand where things are headed with climate-change impacts, understanding and forecasting extreme events is where we need to go,” he said, adding that one of the complications is that some climate-related events, such as wildfires, have multiple causes.
2020 not only marked a record hurricane season, it also saw a
startling number of billion-dollar disasters, according to a
NOAA report released early this year. That research found that such catastrophes in the United States alone amounted to $95 billion from 22 separate billion-dollar events. The previous record for billion-dollar disasters was 16 in 2011 and in 2017.
How escalating temperatures fueled California’s infernos
Severe wildfires raged in the West, burning millions of acres and entire neighborhoods.
The year marked the most severe wildfire season across the West to date, with California logging five of its six biggest wildfires in state history. Hurricanes and tropical storms battered parts of the Gulf Coast.
In addition, 2020
essentially tied 2016 as the hottest year on record, according to scientists. It also capped the hottest decade in recorded history.
Long, now executive vice president at Hagerty Consulting, said that it was too early to judge Biden’s handling of natural disasters. But he warned that these events are only escalating: The damages that took place during his time as FEMA administrator equaled nearly $456.7 billion in damages and associated costs — more than those under the past nine administrators combined.
“Disasters can make or break a president’s legacy,” he said.