Financially, FEMA may not be equipped to handle climate change
Financially, FEMA may not be equipped to handle climate change
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund is running low, and is likely to be in the red sometime next month. That’s before the end of the current fiscal year, and right in the middle of hurricane and wildfire season.
This isn’t that unusual, and the bright side is the fact that Congress can approve supplemental funding.
But, as FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell testified recently, climate change is increasingly putting a strain on FEMA’s budget.
If FEMA’s disaster fund “runs out of money,” it doesn’t mean the agency won’t be able to help if there’s a big hurricane.
Craig Fugate was FEMA Administrator during the Obama administration, and he said the agency will make sure it has cash for a disaster like that.
“But it means a lot of other programs, like the rebuilding, the mitigation programs, will either cease or slow down until they get more funding,” he said.
It’s rare for that to happen, but Ari Renoni, a deputy director of disaster recovery at Hagerty Consulting, said when it does, there are consequences.
“This can really have this downstream effect where, you know, the states, the local communities affected by these events, it just further delays their ability to recover,” he said.
With climate change making disasters more frequent and extreme, Craig Fugate said he thinks the amount of funding FEMA gets is too low.
“We built our disaster response system based upon the last 100 years worth of disasters and weather data,” he said. “Going forward, I’m not sure our infrastructure that was built for the past is holding up.”
Or, he said, that our approach to disaster response is either.
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