Infrastructure Policy and Programs: Disaster Resilience and Equity | Article

Trillions of additional dollars will likely be allocated towards infrastructure this year in an effort to address community needs and boost economic recovery. With such a huge investment, it is imperative that projects take climate change into account to increase their longevity and effectiveness.

Integrating climate change considerations into infrastructure plans requires collecting appropriate data and delivering the data in an accessible, user-friendly way to local decision-makers. Relevant stakeholders should also be engaged in providing input into decisions affecting their community.

Federal policy should not encourage infrastructure development in areas prone to sea level rise and excessive flooding. Likewise, for many coastal communities facing sea level rise and increasingly destructive storms, a managed retreat inland is the most sensible option to protect property and lives.

While planning for climate-smart infrastructure can be a costly undertaking, the costs of ignoring climate threats or neglecting infrastructure needs are greater, both in terms of actual money spent and in terms of lives and livelihoods upended or lost.

The following are recent resources from EESI covering infrastructure and disaster planning and mitigation:

Report:

A Resilient Future for Coastal Communities

This report represents a distillation of the ideas, findings, and policy recommendations identified during EESI’s Regional Coastal Resilience Congressional briefing series. Chapter Five features four recommendations for disaster preparedness but the theme is touched on throughout the report.

Briefings:

Protecting Vulnerable Communities from Climate Impacts

Speakers discussed a new data resource that identifies federally-subsidized affordable housing at risk of chronic flooding, property-level climate risk assessment tools, a recently published scorecard of state flood-risk disclosure policies, and resilience measures in Los Angeles.

Federal Action for Resilient Coasts

The discussion included specific case studies of proven solutions building community resilience to coastal hazards, along with policies and programs Congress or federal agencies can support or expand to replicate these success stories.

Rural Communities Rise to the Challenge of Dual Disasters

Speakers discussed governance challenges in repairing critical infrastructure using the examples of the Midland dam floods in Michigan and federal mapping and flood protection programs in Kansas.

Resilient Housing and Communities

Speakers discussed disaster preparedness challenges in the U.S. Caribbean islands and how solar energy and resilient community centers are helping communities face these challenges.

Federal Support and Local Action

This panel provided an overview of resilience initiatives in the U.S. Caribbean and discussed the status of federal support for disaster recovery and hazard mitigation.

Climate Adaptation Data Week

This five-part briefing series featured decision-makers at all levels working to integrate new climate data into existing systems, obtain localized data to inform community-level decisions, integrate social science data into resiliency planning, and more.

Coastal Resilience in Alaska

The panelists described the collaborative process between federal, state, local, and tribal stakeholders in collecting, sharing, and acting on scientific data to inform policy decisions around climate adaptation and help communities define and achieve their resilience goals.

Coastal Resilience in the Southeast

A briefing on initiatives, including federal climate data collection and dissemination programs, that are helping protect Southeast ecosystems and communities from erosion, storms, and other coastal hazards.

Coastal Resilience in the Great Lakes Region

This briefing showcased nature-based solutions for climate adaptation in rural and urban Great Lakes settings and showed how cutting-edge technology and traditional practices can be used to create resilient communities and inform a participatory planning process.

Community-Centered Resilience: Lessons from Louisiana

This briefing focused on Louisiana's Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE), a holistic approach to flood risks. Using a ground-breaking approach to community adaptation planning, LA SAFE held 71 community meetings and engaged with over 3,000 people in coastal Louisiana. Together, the communities developed adaptation plans and voted on pilot projects, jumpstarting implementation thanks to funding from federal Community Development Block Grants.

Articles:

Improving National Infrastructure Through Resilience and Pre-Disaster Mitigation

Members of Congress and experts engaged with the topics of resilience, pre-disaster mitigation, and emergency preparedness, outlining key steps the federal government can take to adapt to climate change while upgrading the nation’s infrastructure during a March 2021 hearing covered by this EESI article.

Bolstering Resilience: Maryland County Showcases the Power of Microgrids

When disasters impact one area of the grid, the effects are amplified, causing outages far beyond the original damaged area and leaving many people without power. With climate change exacerbating extreme weather events, building robust, reliable grids is essential to keeping communities safe.

Interagency Committee Says Communication and Coordination Are Key Components of Hurricane Resilience

A Q&A with Katherine Chambers, a research scientist at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who discussed what federal agencies are currently doing to make the marine transportation system more resilient, and the challenges of taking agency resilience work to the next level.

Major Oceans Bill Puts Coastal Resilience at the Forefront

The Ocean-Based Climate Solutions Act (H.R.8632), an ambitious piece of climate legislation introduced in Congress in October 2020, aims to make major strides in improving the resilience of America’s coastlines to major storms and flooding exacerbated by climate change.

Federal Grant Process Is another Hurdle for Communities Facing Coastal Threats

Throughout an October 2020 House Natural Resources Committee hearing covered by EESI, witnesses emphasized the importance of building local capacity to navigate the grant application process and characterized the challenges of meeting federal matching requirements.

Arctic Voices Bring Attention to the Climate Crisis, Need for Inclusive Federal Adaptation Policies in Alaska

In October 2020, the House Natural Resources Committee's Democrats held a forum featuring four representatives from Arctic tribes. Panelists discussed shocking environmental changes in the Arctic and policy solutions that could help tribes build resilience in a changing world.

Building Wildfire Resilience Through Forest Management and Community Adaptation

Forest management largely relies on reducing fuels, through thinning and prescribed burns. Yet, even when these fuel reduction initiatives are successfully implemented, fires remain a possibility. Preparing at-risk communities is essential to avoiding catastrophe.

Weather Disasters Bring Renewed Attention to Adaptation and Resilience Measures in Climate Crisis Report

The report released in June 2020 by the majority staff of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis offers numerous policy recommendations to help society adapt to the impacts of climate change and become more resilient to its stressors and shocks.

Cultural Heritage Is a Necessary Component of Climate Solutions

As communities face the impacts of climate change, meaningful and valuable cultural heritage sites and traditions are also at risk.

Macro Benefits of Microgrids

Microgrids, robust electricity networks that can be operated in parallel with, or independently of, the utility grid, deliver considerable reliability and resilience benefits—not just for the consumers of their energy output, but also for the rest of the grid.

New Infrastructure Playbook Calls for Adaptable Federal Policy

The New Playbook on Infrastructure, released in the summer of 2020 by a bipartisan coalition of government officials and policy experts, outlines steps that the federal government can take to create infrastructure policy that works for different localities.

Barriers to Floodplain Management in Rural Communities

Challenges faced by rural communities in managing floodplains include: inadequate or non-existent flood maps, lack of staff and resources to meet community needs, barriers to access federal programs, and misalignment between federal funding and community action.

Data Needs in a Changing Climate

On-going collection of a variety of data is critical to help federal agencies and communities understand how systems change and adapt to climate impacts.

Key Takeaways from EESI’s Climate Adaptation Data Week

While data and well-designed databases are necessary for resilience planning, they are insufficient alone. For data to really be understood and integrated into daily decision-making, it must be meshed with existing management processes, technical support must be easily accessible when decision-makers hit roadblocks, and the data must match the needs communities identify for themselves.

Study Assesses Impacts of Flooding and COVID-19 on Rural Communities

Researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists sat down with EESI’s policy team to discuss their analysis of the multiple stressors facing communities as the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated in the United States.

Author: Amber Todoroff