How should we respond to the acute effects of climate change?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer One Concern
It boils down to this: we need to be able to plan more effectively, and measure more accurately our resilience to climate change.
Government Planning Tools
It is critical that the risks and effects of climate change are identified and understood so that we can take immediate action.
We need to build better climate impact models and analysis tools for States and Local Governments, to help them understand their blindspots and take effective action to mitigate them.
We need to draw from diverse scientific perspectives to accelerate innovation and adoption of solutions. We need to start thinking about allocating resources to improve the platforms and models that can forecast and/or characterize sea level rise, flooding probabilities, wildfire risk, drought impacts, and other vulnerabilities associated with extreme weather and changing precipitation patterns.
Uniformed tools to measure resilience
The first step to create a resiliency standard is to develop tools to measure a community’s resilience of its Tax Base to natural hazards.
When local officials try to measure resilience, they often talk about critical infrastructure (Power, Water, Communications, etc.). A better measure is the resiliency of their tax base to natural hazard risks.
From Hurricane Andrew (and the closing of Homestead USAF Base), Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Michael and the Florida Panhandle, The Camp Fire in California (Paradise), all have seen reductions in their tax base making recovery difficult or delayed.
40% of small businesses never reopen after a disaster and another 25%, that do, fail within a year. (Jim McKay, “Small Businesses Are a Vital Part of Community Resiliency but Often Overlook Vulnerabilities, July 26 2018, FEMA)
This loss of housing, jobs, and businesses compound the impacts of the disaster and can mean at worst-case, the inability to fully recover from disaster, and best-case significantly delayed recovery.
