One-Year Anniversary of the Atlas of Disaster: What You Need to Know About Climate Risk

THIS WEEK’S CONTRIBUTOR:
Paul Tschirky, PhD, P.Eng, BC.CE | Senior Director of Resilience
APTIM | Resilient Solutions
Paul.Tschirky@APTIM.com

Paul Tschirky, PhD, P.Eng, BC.CE, leads APTIM’s resilience practice, bringing full-service resilient solutions to clients and communities across the U.S. and helping them adapt to environmental and climate-driven risks. Paul has recently been appointed to Vice Chair for Community and Regional Resilience as part of the Society of American Military Engineers Resilience Community of Interest.

One-Year Anniversary of the Atlas of Disaster: What You Need to Know About Climate Risk

A year ago, APTIM, in collaboration with Rebuild by Design and iParametrics, released the Atlas of Disaster. The Atlas represented a nationwide, statewide, and county/parish-level look at the climate-related hazards facing our communities. The title “Atlas of Disaster” sounds rather ominous, and while the challenges of climate adaptation are serious, we have the capacity to work together with our communities and ecology to develop resilient solutions to these challenges.

Communicating Risk

The American Society of Civil Engineers stated in their 2017 Flood Risk Management Priorities that: “Two of the greatest challenges facing the nation are recognizing the magnitude of risk posed by flooding and motivating the public and decision-makers to make the investments and difficult policy decisions required to reduce flood risk.” This is still true today, and the thought can be extended to all weather- and climate-related hazards we now face.

Effectively communicating risks to decision makers and the public is critical in allocating limited resources to the maximum benefit of the health and safety of our communities and the protection of built infrastructure and the natural environment. The Atlas helps demonstrate these risks through maps of federal disasters, disaster assistance, electrical reliability, and social vulnerability at county/parish level and helps identify actionable plans for states to create resilient infrastructure funds and collaborative adaptation.

The Cost of Climate Risk

Ninety-three percent of the U.S. population—more than 300 million people—live in counties that have experienced federal climate disaster from 2011–2021. The Atlas provides the ability to examine data on a state and municipal level both graphically, through maps, and data tables. In that 10-year period, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development spent $91 billion dollars in post-disaster assistance. Remember, this does not include state, local, and private spending. The cost of these disasters is significant and growing.

Climate and weather-related hazards can be acute or chronic, such as the creeping and ever-increasing risks posed by sea level rise. The significant economic and social hardships caused by weather and climate related disasters are impacting all of us regardless of where we live. Even before a disaster strikes, many people are faced with significant increases in insurance costs and, in some cases, the inability to find companies willing to provide insurance in their regions.

Rising Risk: Extreme Heat

While coastal regions with their growing populations and dramatic hurricane disasters are a major area of concern, this summer reminds us that these climate-related disasters reach beyond storms and flooding along our coasts. Wildfires and extreme heat proved to be significant in many places. Extreme heat, still largely unrecognized and not counted among federal disasters, is a major cause of death but has a relatively low impact on physical properties, so it has generally not been actively funded in disaster response and mitigation. The summer of 2023 was the Earth’s hottest since global record keeping began in 1880, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York.

Combatting Risk

Improved emergency preparedness is a key element of building resilience. More than just having a plan, governments, communities, and business need to ensure those plans are up-to-date and properly resourced so that they can be put into action as the need arises. Check out this guide to building your disaster response plan from APTIM’s preparedness experts.

While we have seen a positive shift from purely responding after a disaster to more proactive pre-disaster hazard mitigation solutions, there is more work to be done. Just as development of the Atlas of Disaster engaged non-profits and industry including planners, engineers, scientists, researchers, finance experts, and data managers, so must our development of truly resilient solutions for adaptation to climate risk.

APTIM is an award-winning, nationally recognized leader in disaster recovery, coastal engineering, grants management, flood mitigation, and program management. We take a holistic approach to resilience, understanding that multiple systems impact the success or failure of a community. With thousands of employees in strategic locations nationwide, we provide the resources you need for the preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation from all hazards. Learn more here.