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COVID-19, Climate, and Resilience

Coronavirus and climate change. Very quickly it became obvious that the COVID-19 situation has a lot to teach us about responding to climate change. One lesson is that if you wait until the pain is severe, you have missed the time when you should have already been acting. The most effective way to address the problem is to take dramatic actions, which might themselves involve high costs, before you are severely suffering. Dr. Howard Kunreuther, Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Risk Management and Decision Center Processes Center and Dr. Paul Slovic, president of Decision Research and professor of psychology at the University of Oregon laid this out very clearly in their article “What the Coronavirus Curve Teaches Us About Climate Change.” Unfortunately for our future, they note that humans do very poorly at understanding the whole concept of “exponential growth” and how it impacts our future. One of the most effective ways to overcome this limited decision-making framework that evolution seems to have created in us is through science and statistics—the key tools we have used to understand the future impacts of climate change and sea-level rise (CC/SLR). This reaffirms how much we need to be working to re-establish greater public awareness of, understanding of, and “belief” in the importance of science and scientists.

A second lesson, flowing from the first, is that even in CC/SLR and the current pandemic, people naturally care most and pay the most attention to the places and people closest to them. Climate communication research has demonstrated that the most important source of information about CC/SLR for many are family and close friends. And we have seen that CC/SLR awareness developed first in SE Florida in part due to the severity of the early impacts happening right there. And with COVID-19, many are paying the closest attention to the impacts in their city, county, or state, not across the world in other countries. We tend to be local by nature. So, CC/SLR should learn the lesson of making the context local.

Third, we can learn that there is a difference between having a plan and implementing it. By all accounts, the United States had spent considerable time and resources planning on how to react to a global pandemic. However, this plan and those who developed it do not appear to have been fully mobilized. Rather, changed priorities led to systemic changes within our government that eliminated the office charged with preparing the United States for addressing a pandemic. In Florida, we have seen greater willingness to acknowledge CC/SLR at the state level with a change of state administration even as at the national level we have seen the opposite. And many local governments now have or are developing CC/SLR plans. However, as the pandemic has demonstrated, plans will have little value without effective implementation.

This leads directly to a fourth lesson we can learn from comparing the current pandemic with CC/SLR: political affiliations, cultural affiliations, and news sources seem to determine peoples’ beliefs and attitudes about issues more than scientific information. How to address this remains a challenge. Provision of more scientific information does not change this dynamic; cognitive research has even indicated that relying on more and more scientific information to reach those that disagree actually exacerbates this dynamic. Maybe the best prescription in such a case is what CC/SLR advocates—and Extension generally—seek to do to reach difficult audiences: find messengers that the audience already trusts, preferably messengers that look and sound like the audience and share cultural, religious, economic, or geographic reference points. These messengers are far more likely to “reach” an audience with scientific information than are “experts” that the audience does not feel resemble the audience itself.

Another news article noted that some temporary hospital facilities set up to address COVID-19 were placed in flood zones, including a temporary medical center in the Miami Beach Convention Center. Locating such facilities in flood zones emphasizes that many of the challenges of COVID-19 simply highlight and make more severe long-term issues. The article notes that if critical medical facilities must be located in hazard areas, they should have plans and resources in place to address flooding, such as elevated generators, elevated patients and equipment, and to evacuate if need be, especially since patients are often severely limited in their mobility.

Further demonstrating how COVID-19 highlights long-term issues, some argue that to address the environmental justice impacts of CC/SLR and COVID-19, we need to address the structural issues that create the high-risk factors (comorbidities) that lead to worse COVID-19 outcomes for vulnerable communities. See the webinar “Climate Justice and Compounding Crises” from April 28^th by EcoAdapt. In the webinar, the participants noted the profoundly disparate impacts of polluting industries on vulnerable communities of African-Americans, Latinx communities, and other minority communities, resulting in much higher incidences of COVID-19 comorbidity indicators such as asthma, other respiratory ailments, hypertension, and heart disease. Two key ways presenters noted to address these issues are through better and more equitable access to health care as well as improved environmental laws that are effectively enforced to minimize the disparate impacts of polluting industries and activities. The presenters emphasized that these and other possible solutions require voting for politicians that support such policies as well as on-going political involvement to ensure that policies are implemented.

In addition to questions about structural issues that have contributed to the United States experiencing one of the worst outcomes from COVID-19 among industrialized nations, some commentators have taken this further and begun to ask questions about the unique culture and history of the United States that might contribute to our societal response to COVID-19. For example, one commentator discusses how the libertarian streak we have in our history and culture has value in many ways but may also hamper our ability to respond the current pandemic. See, “Is America Too Libertarian to Deal with the Coronavirus?”

Other articles that discuss connections between COVID-19 and CC:

Flooding, SLR, Disasters, and Economics

Disasters have many consequences, including economic ones. Despite slightly lower numbers in 2019 than in 2018, largely due to the absence of severe hurricanes in the United States, disaster losses continue to have major economic impacts at the global level. The 2020 report "Natural catastrophes in times of economic accumulation and climate change," from the global reinsurer Swiss Re, an insurer of insurance companies, notes that increasing disaster losses primarily result from increasing exposure to natural hazards. Just as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted in its 2012 report, “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation," most of the increase in disaster impacts currently results from on-going increases in human development and growth in areas subject to disaster risk. Both the Swiss Re and 2012 IPCC report that even though we know conclusively that increased development and exposure in at-risk areas cause increased losses, climate change and sea-level rise are also likely increasing damages and loss.

New research from the World Resources Institute (WRI) reinforces the increasing costs of flooding and the importance of increasing development in at-risk areas that contributes to this trend. The WRI analysis indicates that not only has flooding caused more than $1 trillion in losses across the world since 1980, but that situation will worsen into the future. The analysis estimates that the number of people affected by riverine floods will rise from 65 million in 2010 to 132 million in 2030, and the number impacted by coastal flooding will increase from 7 million to 15 million. The analysis added that the economic impacts will also balloon: urban property damaged by riverine floods is estimated to increase from $157 billion to $535 billion annually, with urban property damaged by storms moving from $17 billion to $177 billion, again, annually. The numbers from 2050 and 2080 are even more astounding, rising to $1.27 trillion of urban assets exposed to flooding by 2080. Interestingly, the webpage discussing the analysis (from the link above) focuses primarily on the potential advantages of hard (gray) infrastructure in preventing flood losses while observing that green infrastructure is also worth considering. There is no mention of moving people out of hazardous flood areas.

Other recent discussion in the United States does focus more on the issue of increasing development in at-risk areas leading to increasing losses. The article, “Removing 1 Million Homes from Flood Zones Could Save $1 Trillion,” discusses the report, “Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves,” from the National Institute of Building Sciences. The report notes that buyouts of residential properties (purchasing land and infrastructure and removing the infrastructure), unlike retrofits, represents permanent flood mitigation. The report, like others, acknowledges that the frequency and magnitude of destruction “are exacerbated by the decisions Americans make in where and how they build.” The report estimates that the cost of buyouts for relocation would be $180 billion to buyout about 790,000 residences but result in $1.16 trillion of benefit. Still, the vast majority of the report focuses on “built” mitigation strategies such construction that exceeds code requirements, elevation of structures, and building retrofits. Even with such a positive potential payback for buyouts, other questions remain: Before spending so much money to remove homes from at-risk areas, will we first stop our on-going practice of constructing new buildings in at-risk areas? Can the public bear the cost to really make buyouts an expected long-term policy “solution” without changing the dynamics that continue to allow new construction in at-risk areas and that will eventually also need to be bought out? Which taxpayers pay the costs and which taxpayers reap the benefits of spending taxpayer funds on buyouts, especially in light of increasing demands to better integrate justice and equity into mitigation and adaptation? While we urgently need to keep pursuing more durable mitigation measures, relocation still presents us with many challenges.

Even as the picture drawn by the Swiss Re report and others about economic impact of disasters may be grim, the Swiss Re report still states that “weather-related risks remain insurable,” in large part simply because most insurance and reinsurance business is short-term in nature (e.g. 1-year contracts) that allow for continuous adjustments to pricing based on annual risk. Still, the report also notes that the time to act is now to avoid “tipping points” that might lead to areas where risk could lead to the inability to insure those risks to assets.

As if to put a point on the distinction between elevating homes versus the permanent mitigation of relocation, the Washington Post story, “Climate Change Turns the Tide on Waterfront Living,” discusses homes being elevated in one of Norfolk, Virginia’s neighborhoods and poses the question, “Will the city be better off if people live in that house for another 30 to 50 years but are unable to get in or out during high tides or lingering storms?” This focuses on the long-term viability of infrastructure services, long a focus of Florida Sea Grant’s Coastal Planning Program. The Washington Post article continues with Norfolk’s planning director asking, “How long . . . does the city maintain the street? Or keep the storm-water and sewer systems operating? What happens years from now, when emergency services can’t get to these homes because the street has flooded? ‘At some point, the investment in infrastructure can’t be sustained.' . . . ‘That’s the bottom line.’”

Similar challenges present themselves in the Florida Keys. A recent article in Florida Keys News addressed the challenge of the Stillwright Point neighborhood, which gained some notoriety after 91 days of its roads being underwater last year during fall high tides. County analysis indicated that road-raising and drainage modifications would cost the equivalent of almost $7,000 per year per property for a 20-year project. Property owners and representatives attending a virtual Monroe County Commission meeting repeatedly urged Monroe County to find federal funding to pay for the project as soon as possible.

Even when property owners are able to prop up the value of the their property through taxpayer funds that help offset inherent risk to the properties, property values may still drop due to mortgage lenders beginning to take more notice of the risk of mortgages in coastal areas. A recent NY Times article notes that rising seas may threaten the 30-year mortgage as lenders tacitly acknowledge greater asset risk in coastal areas through demands for higher down payments. The article also points out that lenders are increasingly working to shift more of their vulnerable-area mortgages off their books and into the tax-payer-backed programs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, potentially leading to massive losses that would be borne by taxpayers. Unless we make changes, property owners' decisions about where to live may result in even larger costs for taxpayers that such decisions have already cost us in disaster response, mitigation, and through subsidies to the National Flood Insurance Program.

SLR and Infrastructure:
A Case Study in a Different Approach

Florida Sea Grant has been working with Satellite Beach, Florida to imagine the city's future with rising seas. The City of Satellite Beach, a city of about 10,000 on 3 square miles of barrier island, primarily consists of modest housing stock. The City's tax base primarily depends on property taxes and tourism. The City's modest budget precludes the city from entertaining potential structural solutions costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, Satellite Beach is working to best protect assets and citizens in the short- to medium-term while also working to develop a vision for how to best maintain the long-term viability of the City and maybe even a day when the City is no longer viable. As part of the Satellite Beach's thinking through short-term to long-term policies and actions, Florida Sea Grant worked with the City, Stetson University, and Erin L. Deady, P.A. to develop a vulnerability analysis and policy recommendations based on the vulnerability study. The vulnerability analysis already resulted in the City of Satellite Beach deciding to move its fire station from an area that already floods at high tide to a higher, drier location.

As the City does not have the tax base to engage in very large structural protection projects such as road raisings and large-scale pumped drainage systems, the policy recommendations focus more on seeking to help property owners understand the changing risks and the City's limited fiscal ability to protect all infrastructure and properties from tidal or rain-induced flooding in the medium- or long-term. As such flooding is currently somewhat limited in Satellite Beach, providing this notice to property owners allows them and the property market to adjust expectations accordingly. The policies are also structured to provide the City the strongest possible legal footing to argue that the City is not liable for damages that property owners suffer in the future when the City's financial limitations will no longer allow it to upgrade drainage infrastructure sufficiently to protect all properties from tidal or rain-induced flooding.

COVID-19, SLR, & Local Gov't Finances

As noted in the previous section discussing Satellite Beach, the confluence of more expensive infrastructure maintenance and upgrades under ever-more challenging SLR scenarios with decreasing income streams to local governments due to declining property values, poses a long-term threat to coastal local governments confronting SLR. The current pandemic’s impact on local government finances provides a hyper-speed example of this dynamic. The story “City Governments in Florida Forced to Declare Bankruptcy? Lawmakers Saying it Could Happen," describes this confluence of increasing costs and decreasing local government revenues due to COVID-19. It does not appear at this point that the federal government is likely to develop a comprehensive plan to assist struggling local governments. But currently, Florida has a policy of not allowing local governments to file for bankruptcy without approval from the State of Florida. The concern of Florida is that allowing bankruptcy filings by local governments would hurt local government bond ratings, ultimately raising the cost of borrowing and bonding money for infrastructure projects for all local governments in the state. This concern is valid as most local governments rely very heavily on bonding for major infrastructure projects. At the same time, without supervision and guidance, local governments may still sink into the economic abyss. The state that arguably has one of the best defenses against local government financial meltdowns is North Carolina. During the Great Depression, North Carolina set up its “Local Government Commission” (LGC) to oversee local governments’ financial health so that the LGC can provide assistance to local governments and, when needed, intervene. This model has been a boon to local governments, and representatives of major bond ratings agencies credit the LGC as the reason North Carolina local governments enjoy some of the best bond ratings in the country. For more information on the North Carolina model, see North Carolina Agency Is Local Government Lifeline. Florida laws and regulations do provide some oversight of local government finance, but not to the level implemented by North Carolina’s LGC.

Proposed SLR Plan Sparks Controversy

The California Coastal Commission and several other agencies in California recently agreed to principles in “Making California’s Coast Resilient to Sea Level Rise.” Part of this includes planning for a target of 3.5 feet of sea-level rise (SLR) by 2050, which is higher than even the 2017 NOAA extreme projection for SLR in "Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States NOAA Technical Report NOS CO-OPS 083." In defending the use of an estimate by 2050 that not even the current worst-case scenarios project, the California governor’s coast and ocean policy advisor noted that “no one's building anything just for the year 2050. You're building development, you're protecting property for beyond 2050. . . . So the margin of safety that was added was using the 2100 number for the year 2050.” While an attorney for the Del Mar Beach Preservation Coalition pushed back by noting that this was “asking for three times what is currently anticipated to occur under the likely range, and significantly higher than what is anticipated to occur under [the most catastrophic] scenario.” While technically this critique is true, it does little to constructively address the reality that development already in existence or being created today will not disappear come 2050.

Some fear that state-backed efforts to protect property owners from the impacts of SLR really are forms of redistribution of wealth from those that do not own property to those that do. This argument appears, for example, in the opinion piece "We Shouldn't Have to Pay for Jack Dorsey's $40m Estate When It Crumbles into the Sea." As many have noted, many property owners impacted by SLR are not wealthy people such as Jack Dorsey. Still the equity and justice impacts of focusing taxpayer dollars on supporting property values rather than directly supporting impacted people merits careful discussion.

Army Corps of Engineers Studies and the Challenge of Paying for Protection

As part of a series of regional studies, the United States Army Corps of engineers is proposing surge barriers and flood walls as protection for several areas, including Miami; Norfolk, VA; Galveston, TX; parts of New Jersey; and parts of New York. These recommendations are part of “regional studies” the Corps is working on. See, e.g. North Atlantic Study information; South Atlantic Coastal Study; PowerPoint presentation on South Atlantic Coastal Study.

These studies have begun resulting in draft proposals that incorporate non-structural, structural, and nature-based strategies to address flooding. Non-structural approaches include acquisition & relocation, building retrofits, enhanced flood warning & evacuation planning, and land use management/zoning & flood insurance. Structural approaches include deployable floodwalls, floodwalls, levees, seawalls, revetments, bulkheads, and storm surge barriers. Nature-based approaches include overwash fans, reefs, submerged aquatic vegetation, and wetlands. Beach restoration, breakwaters, drainage improvements, and living shorelines fall under the rubric of hybrids between structural and non-structural approaches.

Even the Corps’ draft recommendations face challenges. One of these is cost. The article “Fortress Charleston: Will Walling Off the City Hold Back the Waters?" notes that the proposal for Charleston carries a price tag of about $2 billion dollars; and other proposals carry even higher price tags: in Texas, two proposals would cost an estimated $39 billion. In New Jersey, a proposed plan would cost up to $15 billion. A Corps proposal for New York City is estimated to cost $62 to $119 billion. The $19 million, 6-year analysis for NYC was frozen earlier this year after the executive branch criticized the plan.

An earlier draft plan for Miami carried an estimated price tag of $8 billion to build a 10-13-foot storm surge barrier, acquire land, elevate 10,000 buildings, and floodproof another 7,000 buildings. A more recent, scaled back version is estimated to cost about $4.6 billion and include evalating up to 2,300 structures and floodproof another 3,800. While simplistic economic analysis may show that more property value is protected and more loss is avoided than would be spent on such projects, such analysis does not show the whole story. This type of economic analysis only addresses overall “efficiency”; in other words, is more money, in the aggregate, spent or saved? What such analysis misses is the ”distributive” impact of such spending and saving, or who pays the bill and who receives the benefits of such spending (for more, see the opinion piece at end of previous article in this newsletter). As noted in the section “Economics & Sea-Level Rise” in the July 2019 newsletter, more voices are beginning to assert that the Corps’ benefit-cost analysis skews the benefits towards wealthy property owners. This conundrum admits of no easy solution. “[E]ven if the [Corps'] approach is designed to avoid picking winners and losers, it ends up doing so anyway, favoring wealthier neighborhoods” by focusing on more valuable businesses and neighborhoods. At the same time, it may not make much more sense to argue that billions of dollars in protective infrastructure should be spent to protect less valuable properties and businesses. This again highlights the need for open and transparent discussions at all levels of government of who pays for adaptation, how, why, and what are the larger implications of these decisions for our shared future.

Another challenge in the Corps’ proposals resulting from regional studies is that, increasingly, the Corps is taking a different approach than the Federal Emergency Management agency has taken for acquiring properties. FEMA’s acquisition program regulations specify that all acquisitions must be voluntary and that state and local participants actually promise not to use eminent domain to acquire the properties. The Corps, on the other hand, has proposed requirements that would insist that local governments commit to using eminent domain to acquire properties in order to receive Corps funding for projects. See, e.g. “Trump Administration Presses Cities to Evict Homeowners from Flood Zones” and “Surviving hurricanes, sea rise in Keys may mean $3 billion in home buyouts, elevations”. Eminent domain to force relocation remains very unpopular politically at the local level. The Corps seems committed to this approach to address the “checkerboard” problem of voluntary buyouts acquiring some properties in vulnerable areas, but not others. This “checkerboard” effect can actually increase per-capita infrastructure and services costs for local governments, prevent optimal utilization of newly unoccupied properties for parks, water retention, and natural areas, and degrade the remaining community fabric. Thus, voluntary buyouts and eminent domain both face significant obstacles, though it is clear that in some areas, one or both options will eventually need to be exercised.

While we may not have good solutions for these challenges yet, they reaffirm that, at minimum, we should be working first to stop creating more future problems through current development practices. After all, how can we spend billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to protect private property from flooding and other coastal hazards at the same time that we continue to allow more and more building in areas that either already are, or soon will be, impacted by more flooding due to SLR and increasingly intense rainfall events? In presentations I have frequently likened this to a patient going to the doctor seeking relief from headaches, yet the patient refuses to stop beating his head against the wall as part of treatment. I have also written in a forthcoming book chapter (Thomas Ruppert, Take Out the Trash When You Leave: Cleaning Up Properties Abandoned to Rising Seas, in A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation (Carolyn Kousky, Billy Fleming, & Alan Berger, eds., forthcoming 2020, Island Press)) that continuing to allow creation of more of the at-risk development that we are already struggling to mitigate creates a situation where we largely privatize the economic benefit of new development and then socialize the long-term costs of risks to that development; we allow property owners and developers to develop in at-risk places, and then taxpayers are on the hook for the disasters, increased infrastructure costs, buyouts, and protection that will sought in the future. In all fairness, even this oversimplifies the dynamics: local governments sometimes allow unwise, hazard-prone development to simultaneously avoid potential property-owner lawsuits even as the local government increases its property tax revenue. And maybe the property owners were not aware of just how at-risk their new property is or will be. The next article discusses at least one modest advance in the realm of providing notice to potential property purchasers of one type of potential risk with specific properties.

Seawall, Flooding, and Notice to Property Purchasers

In January of this year Broward County passed an ordinance that contains a regional standard for seawalls, with affected municipalities in the county required to adopt consistent seawall standards by February 13, 2022. The new standard applies to all tidally influenced properties within Broward County except for oceanfront beaches or shorelines seaward of the State of Florida’s Coastal Construction Control Line.

As a long-time advocate of providing better notice to potential property purchasers of past and potential future hazards to property, it was great to see that the Broward County ordinance includes a provision (Article XXV, Sec. 39-408. Required disclosure in contracts for sale of real estate.) that requires all contracts for sale of real estate in tidally influenced areas in Broward County after December 31, 2020, to include in capitalized, bold-faced type, this language: THIS REAL ESTATE IS LOCATED IN A TIDALLY INFLUENCED AREA. THE OWNER MAY BE REQUIRED BY COUNTY OR MUNICIPAL ORDINANCE TO MEET MINIMUM TIDAL FLOOD BARRIER ELEVATION STANDARDS DURING CONSTRUCTION OR SUBSTANTIAL REPAIR OR SUBSTANTIAL REHABILITATION OF SEAWALLS, BANKS, BERMS, AND SIMILAR INFRASTRUCTURE OR WHEN REQUIRED TO ABATE NUISANCE FLOODING.

While it is good to see a local government taking this important step to provide better notice to potential property purchasers, it would be even better to see a local government go further with providing notice to potential property purchasers for not only seawalls, but also for other coastal hazards. For example, a local government could assist property purchasers by ensuring that they are aware if a property has previously flooded by joining states that require such notice (See, e.g. Natural Resources Defense Council, How States Stack Up on Flood Disclosure). In addition, research has demonstrated that merely putting language in a sales contract fails to provide sufficient notice since buyers typically do not read all of the dozens or hundreds of pages in a purchase contract. Thus, careful structuring of notice requirements is required to ensure that property owners are actually aware of the hazards and challenges they are being warned about. For more information on how to most effectively structure notice requirements, see Thomas Ruppert, Reasonable Investment-Backed Expectations: Should Notice of Rising Seas Lead to Falling Expectations for Coastal Property Purchasers?, §VII, 26 J. Land Use & Envtl. Law 239 (2011).

The Florida House of Representatives, The Florida Senate

In this year’s legislative session, the Florida Legislature passed and Governor DeSantis signed into law SB 712, the Clean Waterways Act. Among the Act’s 111 pages appears some language about septic systems. Septic systems have received increased attention over the past few years as rising seas and harmful algal blooms impact Florida communities. The Clean Waterways Act transfers responsibility for septic tank regulation from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to the Department of Health (DOH). The Act requires new rules for locating septic tanks to prevent contamination and to create fast-track approval process for upgraded tanks. While no one knows exactly how many septic tanks are in service in Florida, DOH has now located almost 3 million of them as part of 2014-16 inventory project. As noted in a previous newsletter, it is almost certain that many septic systems are not functioning properly due to sea-level rise causing increased groundwater levels or for other reasons. However, we do not have good information on septic systems or how well they are functioning as there is no state inspection program to help assess their functioning or impact on the environment or human health. In 2010 the Florida Legislature passed a law that required septic tank inspections every five years. After pushback, the law was repealed just two years later in 2012. While The Clean Waterways Act did not bring back mandatory septic system inspections, harmful algal blooms may just be enough to get us thinking more carefully again about the impact of septic systems, particularly in low-lying areas along the coast.

Climate and Sea-level Rise Legislation in 2020

While The Clean Waterways Act passed, three other pieces of legislation focused on climate change failed. These included SB 7016 (Office of Statewide Resiliency), SB 278 (Climate Health Planning), SB 280 (Climate Fiscal Responsibility), and SB 1232 (Florida Climate and Resiliency Research Program). One piece of legislation that did pass the Legislature was SB 178. This bill requires that construction projects in the coastal zone in Florida that receive public financing must first have a “sea level impact projection study” to evaluate the flooding, inundation, and wave action damage risks over the expected life of the construction or 50 years, whichever is less. While this is a step in the right direction, the law requires rule making, which will take a while. The biggest weakness of this bill is that, much like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), this is really a “procedural” law in that it requires information be developed, but the law does not establish a specific substantive standard for when the sea-level rise impacts on a proposed project might make public financing unavailable.

A New Federal Program for Pre-Disaster Mitigation Funding

The Building Resilience Infrastructure & Communities (BRIC) is a new program that will serve as FEMA’s replacement for the existing Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program (PDM).

The BRIC program will still fund all the same types of activities that were eligible for funding under the PDM program, but BRIC also expands eligible activities for mitigation funding to explicitly include:

Technical assistance (such as assistance for smaller local governments to prepare to submit an effective application for a project);
Capability and capacity building;
Mitigation projects (the types of physical green, gray, blue infrastructure often associated with the PDM program);
Management costs.

The capability and capacity building is a key expansion. This could include activities such as money to assist in partnership building that promotes resilience, work on building codes, training, scoping to develop cost-benefit analyses for projects, gap analysis, or other activities needed for a future application for a mitigation project. Another BRIC expansion of project evaluation criteria includes a focus on “community lifelines,” including:

Safety and security;
Food, water, and shelter;
Health and medical;
Energy (power & fuel);
Communications;
Transportation; and
Hazardous materials.

In other words, the new BRIC program will encourage holistic thinking to create innovative mitigation projects. These can include far more than only the traditional concepts we may have of “mitigation,” though such “traditional” infrastructure mitigation projects will still be eligible for funding.

For more information on the BRIC program, which will issue its first “Notice of Funding Opportunity” in the late summer or fall of this year, visit www.fema.gov/bric. FEMA is providing an engagement series of webinars each Wednesday in July from 2-3 pm Eastern Daylight Time. While registration for the remaining July sessions has been reached, links to recordings will be available after the session. More information and links to recordings of the sessions are available here.

Please share this information with those in your community working on hazard mitigation.

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