Climate Adaptation Moves Toward Center Stage

There’s an increasing bipartisan move to fund climate resilience.

The big news today is the deal with Manchin to  provide billions of dollars of funding for clean energy. Manchin’s vote will be needed because no Republican Senator will vote for the bill.  In contrast, funding for climate resilience has drawing power even for Republicans.

It seems to be true that, in Bob Dylan’s words “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”  You don’t even need a climate modeler. The need for adaptation has becoming unmistakable as cascading floods, heatwaves, storms, wildfires, and drought assault the nation — the plenty of examples in just the past few weeks.

Climate adaptation is moving into the limelight, with major funding on adaptation from Congress and state governments.  Notably, this funding is coming with bipartisan support.

The 2021 infrastructure bill, which required bipartisan support in both Houses to pass,  contained $47 billion for climate resilience. For instance, the Army Corps of Engineers received four times the amount it got last year for flood control related construction. The Bureau of Reclamation got $250 million for desalinization and a billion for water recycling and reuse. NOAA will get half a billion to map and model flooding, and the Agriculture Department got a similar amount for wildfire defense grants to at risk communities. Other funding went to funding for Indian tribes for resilience, including funds to relocate some communities from high-risk areas; funding to move highways out of high risk area; and relocating water infrastructure.

Notably, Republicans like Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy helped write the resilience provisions of the bill. His remarks make clear the broad appeal of resilience spending. “There’s people living in Livingston Parish, for example, flooded in 2016, whose lives — everything in their life was destroyed,” he said. “The pictures of their children, the wedding dress in which they married, the home in which they lived, which had never flooded before — the fact that we are helping our fellow Americans avoid that gives me an incredible sense of satisfaction.”

Only a couple of months earlier than that, California Governor Newsom signed a package of bills providing billions of dollars for climate adaptation. The bill includes $1.5 billion for forest and wildfire resilience; $5.2 billion for drought response and water resilience; and $3.7 billion to help communities deal with risks from heat waves, sea-level rise, and flooding.

At other end of the country and the political spectrum, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill providing $640 billion to fund coastal resilience efforts.  He did not, of course, mention the word climate change. But his speech endorsing the measure left no doubt about his awareness of a changing world:

“Since day one, the resiliency of our state has been a top priority for my administration. This legislation will allow us to build on historic investments and progress by ensuring communities have the resources they need for resilience planning and project implementation as well as creating a framework for a cohesive, coordinated approach to address the impacts of sea level rise, intensified storms, and localized flooding.”

There’s always been concern that talking about climate adaptation might mislead people into thinking that cutting carbon emissions isn’t urgent. For that reason, there was a long-time reluctance on the part of climate advocates to focus on adaptation.  It’s possible, of course, that understanding the scope of climate impacts and the cost of adaptation might have the opposite effect of dramatizing the seriousness of climate change.

That debate over voter psychology is no longer relevant. We’re past the time when climate adaptation was a optional topic for discussion. Serious climate effects are crashing into us, and we have no choice but to invest in adaptation. Even if we manage to curb carbon emissions by midcentury, the need for adaptation will only escalate. What’s been done so far is only a down-payment on a much larger adaptation bill.

Climate Adaptation, climate resilience, Drought preparation, flood risks, infrastructure investment, sea level rise, state climate action