Local Taxpayers Are Footing the Bill for Climate Disasters
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The costs for paying to fix or replace infrastructure and other assets more adversely impact low-income groups, according to a report.
Climate change has been acknowledged as a worldwide crisis, with record-breaking temperatures and severe storms among many other current and looming impacts. Often taxpayers are the ones with the financial responsibility to fix or replace assets that could be in the million-dollar range, and more adversely impact low-income groups and communities with higher social vulnerability, according to a report by IEEE Smart Cities.
According to NASA, climate change is a shift in the usual weather pattern found in a place. This could be a change in how much rain an area gets in a year or a movement in the usual temperature for a month or season. It also can be a change in where rain and snow usually fall.
At the beginning of the year, climate change trends broke news—from the cold front in Texas to the heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, according to the report. Infrastructure can be damaged or destroyed by such phenomena and a domino effect between the assets and services is directly compromised and the locality’s social environment is kicked off, the report states.
When a disaster in a community leaves many residents homeless, they may wind up moving rather than rebuilding and sticking around for the next calamity. These moves can take place across short distances and sometimes start as semi-permanent relocations, but over time, they add up, according to the report.
A number of localities across the country are implementing programs to address these issues. For example, many cities in California have had climate action plans for a while, and Boston and San Francisco have comprehensive, forward-thinking climate plans, the report states. Boston is ensuring and documenting preparedness for heat events, as well as cold fronts, showcasing that climate change impacts are not a simple unidirectional temperature curve.
The report proposes a threefold approach for climate change mitigation and adaptation measures at the local level. The pillars of the approach are:
- Embedding the relationship between the built environment and the area’s social environment into the metrics schema.
- Adding new metrics to move past generic measures of performance to more effective holistic measures that will inform targeted solutions.
- Prioritizing investments that are informed by a cost-benefit-based optimization that properly values the cascading benefits of resilience investments.
According to the report, the major components comprising a local-level climate action plan that aligns with principles above include:
- Forecasting local climate change impacts. (Minimum/maximum temperatures, sea level rise and more.)
- Comparing the metrics against set thresholds/targets to narrow down the areas that need improvement.
- Pairing of metrics exceeding target values with mitigation and adaptation measures. These will be rooted in either the built environment (electric grid, infrastructure) or the health and social environment.
- Establishing strong linkages between measures and metrics. This is a gap in current literature and industry practices.
- Formalizing investment prioritization to inform the optimal portfolio of measures based on net metric improvement, constrained by metrics’ desired targets, utility budgetary constraints and more.
For more information from the IEEE Smart Cities report click here.
Andre Claudio is an assistant editor at Route Fifty.
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