At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan Friday morning staff from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration talked at the “America is All In” pavilion about one of my favorite topics, hazards and resilience.
Victoria Salinas, Acting Deputy Administrator for Resilience at FEMA, described FEMA’s ongoing work to build climate resilience in communities across the United States. FEMA’s most familiar work is helping communities respond and rebuild in the aftermath of a natural hazard, like a hurricane or a flood. This will remain an important part of FEMA’s role. But given changing risk profiles for weather- and climate-related disasters in many parts of the country, FEMA is now helping communities prepare for natural disasters in various evidence-based ways.
Teaching communities how to protect homes from wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes using strategies like vegetation management, wind-resistent building techniques, or rebuilding after a loss in a safer location are some of the ways scientists and engineers advise homeowners and planners to improve resilience. Through this community resilience approach, FEMA learned that resources can go much further than the historic practice of only helping individual homeowners rebuild after a loss. Improvements in community resilience benefit a broader cross section of the community, including those who rent their home and those who live in institutional settings.
Salinas mentioned a new approach for the federal Flood Mitigation Assistance Program, saying “If we have a large pot of money we can do transformational projects like stormwater management, which have large-scale, broader impacts than just elevating single-family homes which only benefit homeowners and those with insurance.” By making these adjustments, the agency exceeded their Justice40, a White House environmental justice initiative, in just three years.
Amanda McCarty, Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Ready Nation initiative told us about the ways she uses scientific data to communicate climate-related risk. NOAA has invested in social science research so they can better communicate risk from a variety of hazards. NOAA has made changes to National Weather Service forecasts and National Hurricane Center graphics so that they are more easily understood by the public. They hope this will lead to more people making good decisions to protect themselves from hazards.
The agency also partners with the American Society of Civil Engineers to support the design of hazard-resistant, climate-informed building codes. This is especially important for infrastructure like bridges, ports, and highways, which must be designed for long-term use. It is also important for city planning, development, and construction of critical facilities like hospitals. NOAA works closely with state climatologists, knowing that these scientists are the one state governments turn to with questions about changing climate risk.
After the presentation, Christine Moffett from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and I had a discussion with the panelists about the role faith communities and faith-based disaster relief organizations play in improving community resilience to natural hazards.
Faith-based relief organizations like the United Methodist Committee on Relief are often first responders after a hurricane or a tornado. But now, given the increased incidence of these events, resources are feeling stretched. Turning to resilience and preparation can be a better use of resources because not only does it reduce the cost of responding to a disaster, it also makes disasters less traumatic for community members.
The panelists told us that faith organizations can take leadership on preparedness to break the cycle of disaster and relief and that faith partnerships are very important to FEMA.
Faith communities can also serve as role models for their communities by installing solar generation or making other physical changes to their facilities to lead the way to resilience. Federal programs exist that can help faith communities become resilience hubs, places where the community turns after an event for power, food, and other resources.