Responding to disasters before they happen
It was a sleeper of a hurricane season, until it wasn’t. After only five named storms and no hurricanes through early September, Hurricane Fiona’s fury served as a wakeup call from Puerto Rico to Nova Scotia. Then, in Southwest Florida, Hurricane Ian provided a devastating reminder that deadly hurricanes can strike with a vengeance in otherwise slow storm seasons.
Federal, state and local governments have response plans in place for unfortunate but predictable disasters – and some plans are better than others. But as our world’s climate becomes more and more unstable, governments must do more than just react -- they must pursue “presponses” to predictable and costly disasters that inevitably occur, like hurricanes.
On a cost-adjusted basis, billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. have increased from 2.9 per year, costing an average of $17.8 billion in the 1980s, to 16.2 disasters per year at an average annual cost of $121.4 billion from 2016-2020.
These natural disasters include hurricanes, as well as floods, wildfires, drought, heat waves and cold snaps. They are costly in terms of lives — and taxpayer dollars. The Congressional Budget Office puts it rather succinctly, “Climate change increases federal budget deficits” and that “Investment by the government or others in various types of mitigation or adaptation efforts could reduce the costs of climate change.”
“Presponding” to natural disasters might sound like a bureaucratic buzzword, but it’s common sense. It means thinking ahead to save lives and protect property alike by creating more resilient communities that can withstand the onslaught of intense hurricanes and other natural disasters.
The goal must be to develop risk management strategies that enable communities, infrastructure, and industries to become more resilient, face less risk, and better adapt to and mitigate the future costs and damages of climate change. In other words, the disaster dollars doled out by taxpayers today must prespond to future disaster risks, because they are not going away.
Federal agencies and Congress have a role to play. Federal disaster-relief programs are almost purely reactive: they channel funding to communities only after a disaster has occurred. Too often, this results in a wash-rinse-repeat cycle, where communities are rebuilt with the same vulnerabilities as before. In a world with a changing climate, simply rebuilding and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity. After an event as deadly as Ian, it is cruel.
The relentless growth in the cost of federal disaster relief, now averaging more than $121 billion annually, should provide an incentive for policymakers to leverage post-disaster taxpayer dollars for pre-disaster mitigation. Every dollar spent on mitigation can save as much as six dollars or more in post-disaster response.
Even with recent changes to funding formulas, disaster response funding greatly exceeds funding for pre-disaster planning and mitigation. Federal laws often even fail to incentivize presponding to disasters.
Moreover, federal agencies have a spotty record in tracking disaster-relief funding to see what worked or didn’t; what should change in the future; and what are the lessons learned after each major natural disaster. After a plane crash or train derailment, there is a National Transportation Safety Board study and analysis to determine what went wrong and identify what to do differently going forward. A natural disaster strikes, killing dozens or hundreds of people and causing billions of dollars in damage, and too often the only response is to cut a check.
Federal policy and spending that targets presponding to climate-induced disasters will enable communities to develop an accountable and more resilient infrastructure that should require fewer costly, piecemeal, disaster responses when extreme weather events inevitably occur.
Not only will presponding protect human lives, but over time, it offers the potential to stretch our disaster relief dollars. This should help enable states and communities to prespond to other infrastructure threats that are happening due to climate change, such as “King Tide” or “sunny-day flooding,” and beach erosion.
This is the essence of “presponding” to the increasing number of climate-related extreme weather events taking place throughout our country. Whether it’s a hurricane, a wildfire, drought, or sunny-day flooding, better preparation simply makes sense. More importantly, it’s how we save lives.
Steve Ellis is president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog that works to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly and that government operates within its means.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Responding to disasters before they happen
