A National Adaptation Strategy Could Guide the Way Towards a More Resilient Future | Article

The U.S. Global Change Research Program has the mammoth task of bringing together the science and information about climate impacts across U.S. regions, sectors, and topics to inform the National Climate Assessment, a Congressionally-mandated report that is expected every four years. The fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) process is underway now with 32 public engagement workshops taking place over the course of January and February 2022 and a public comment period open on each chapter’s outline until February 20. As NCA5 authors and stakeholders work to bring together information on climate impacts, in 2021 alone, 820 counties in the United States—where more than four in 10 Americans live—were impacted by a climate-related disaster. This highlights the importance of making and implementing adaptation plans nationwide in an efficient and equitable way.

States, municipalities, companies, and universities all over the country are at work designing and carrying out adaptation plans in the face of these climate impacts. At the federal level, the Biden-Harris Administration recently announced that 20 federal agencies had produced separate adaptation and resilience plans. This is a good start, but without a national adaptation strategy guiding the way, these plans are not as coherent, effective, and resource-efficient as they could be.

As Alice Hill, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and nominee for deputy administrator for resilience at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), explained during a 2021 EESI briefing, “One area where the United States is lagging is we do not have a national plan… Without a plan, it is very difficult to make sure that you are making those correct decisions in a whole-of-government and then a whole-of-community approach, so that the private sector, state and local governments, tribal governments, as well as the federal government are all rowing in the same direction as we make these important decisions.”

Other countries have already released national-level adaptation plans. France is at the end of a second National Adaptation Plan designed to inform its work focused on agriculture, industry, and tourism, building off an initial plan that started in 2011. China’s plan came out in 2013 and, according to the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, “outlines a wide range of measures to … protect water resources, minimize soil erosion and strengthen disaster prevention … and coastal restoration.” The plan also has sections on agriculture and the financial sector. Canada’s strategy is in the works, with a goal to finish its plan by the end of 2022. Since 2014, the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) Global Network has been supporting developing countries—often the most vulnerable to climate impacts—in generating plans.

Back in the United States, there is a clear need for a national adaptation strategy. As Dr. Rob Young, the director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, emphasized during a recent EESI podcast episode, there is now a significant amount of federal money moving through FEMA, Housing and Urban Development, the Army Corps of Engineers, and other federal agencies to support resilience projects, but there is no cohesive vision guiding the distribution or spending of those dollars.

“We spend a lot of money, but we have got no plan nationally on where the best places to spend that money are. Where do we get our bang for our buck? How do we ensure social and environmental justice when we spend that money? We really have no plan,” said Dr. Young.

A national plan, Young explained, would look at “where the real federal interest is in spending that money and where the state level interest is, where the public sector leaves off and where the private sector should be really picking up the tab to protect things like investment property and businesses … We spend a tremendous amount of money, but it is not in an organized way and it tends to go to communities that are very well organized and have a lot of capacity.”

In the first major effort of its kind to address some of these issues, a bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives, led by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), introduced the National Climate Adaptation and Resilience Strategy Act (NCARS) (H.R.6461/S.3531) in January 2022.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a co-sponsor on the bill, outlined some of the significant provisions in the legislation in a press release: “Our bipartisan legislation would direct the President to appoint a Chief Resilience Officer, who would oversee the development of a unified strategy for climate adaptation and resilience. The strategy would include recommendations to address outstanding gaps in federal resilience operations, streamline redundant efforts across agencies, and improve communication with vulnerable communities.”

The legislation would establish cross-agency working groups as well as a Partners Council on Climate Adaptation and Resilience, comprised of stakeholders outside the federal government. The bill emphasizes extending Council membership to those who “possess firsthand, lived experience of climate vulnerability in the United States, including direct experience working with, or as members of, frontline communities.”

As outlined in the bill, the national strategy would need to cover how the federal government will deal with climate impacts on its own programs and assets and how the federal government will support non-federal partners in adapting to climate change. The strategy would also need to address climate data and tools, resilience metrics, climate adaptation funding, and social equity.

The longer the United States does not have a plan, the more expensive and daunting it will become for communities, companies, and government at all levels to adapt to climate change.

As Alice Hill reflected during EESI’s briefing: “The best way to start adjusting to a different future is to plan. And one of the reasons why planning is so essential is because the risk that climate change brings is so unfamiliar. We have built all of our systems—transportation, communications, health, and housing—based on an assumption that the past will resemble the future and that the past can safely guide our choices as to how and where we build. But that is no longer true.”

Author: Anna McGinn