News You Can Use: Preparing for El Niño and Other Climate Challenges

“When this happens, it really reverses the usual system we have. You end up having a lot of rain in areas where it tends to be rather dry, and you have a lot of dryness in places where you tend to have a lot of rain. That really wreaks a lot of problems on communities on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. We end up with a lot of flooding in California and Peru and Chile. And on the other side, we end up with a lot of fires in Australia and Indonesia, where a lot of fuel is built up during the intermediate times between El Niño events.”

Community Climate Risks

Victoria Salinas, Climate Leader in Residence

“Communities, by and large, know their risk much better now. The challenge really comes on how to make that risk actionable.”

“For small and rural communities, it can be turning their understanding of risk into projects because they don’t have engineers, they don’t have staff, they don’t have the capacity to do that. For others, it may be that they don’t have the revenue streams to actually be able to finance the projects they need to do. So, we are currently in a situation where, once a community understands risk, to actually deliver the projects that reduce risk and build resilience is exceedingly hard in this country.”

Dealing with Uncertainty

Mark Borsuk, civil and environmental engineering professor

“The important thing to recognize is that we don’t need to predict the future perfectly in order to make good decisions. Rather than asking what exactly will conditions look like in 2075, we should really be asking which decisions are likely to work reasonably well across the range of possible futures that we might face. This means looking for strategies that are robust, that can be adapted over time as we learn more, and that effectively avoid locking us into particular choices that we may regret later.” 

“We can’t use uncertainty as reason not to act. In many cases, uncertainty is actually a reason to act early to preserve flexibility and to build in a kind of margin of safety.”

Victoria Salinas, Climate Leader in Residence

“Across this country all the time, people kind of understand what they need to do. There’s uncertainty, but they’re managing through it. But then the question becomes for many communities: Do they have the authority to act?”

“In places like Harris County, Texas, the Harris County Flood Control District that manages a major watershed did have the governance capability and authority to act, and has done major bond measures to reduce flood risk. On the other end of the country in Philadelphia, they also have flood risk, and it goes across a watershed that cuts across counties. They have to use coordination, collaboration, convenings, and spend a lot of effort to try and figure out how to tackle flood risk together because no one entity has the authority to act.”

State Laws and Policies

Victoria Salinas, Climate Leader in Residence

“States, in many ways, write much of the operating system for local resilience. Some of the biggest barriers to climate resilience are laws or policies that never mention the word ‘climate.’”

“For instance, local taxing and fee authority is one of the biggest things that drives the ability to go from understanding of risk to project execution. We see a number of states where even a very traditional revenue generation authority—stormwater revenues—is being litigated, including in Michigan and Pennsylvania. That really gets to the ability of communities to figure out whether the responsible entity to avoid basic flooding has the clear authority to do the work and the predictable revenue sources to do the job.”

Building Codes

Victoria Salinas, Climate Leader in Residence

“We got to a point in the ‘80s where seat belts were required for cars. Similarly, building codes provide a very basic level of safety, but it is the floor.”

“We see some states where local governments may know that they’re exposed to unique hazards different from other parts of their state. But they face different challenges in actually updating their codes to the level of safety that they might want because of the floor becoming the ceiling. They’re having to use other tools like zoning or incentives when having a safety floor that actually is built for the future would make it so both the public and the private sector were more organically contributing to that safer future that helps everyone.”

Rebuilding NC Highway 12

Brian McAdoo, earth and climate science professor

“This weekend's event was particularly unfortunate because you had this nor’ easter that coincided with the full moon when the tides were high, so it had no choice but to wipe out the road. And the road is only a couple of feet above sea level anyway, so it’s going to get wiped out again.”

“The reason why these roads get rebuilt so frequently is because they are an economic engine. They develop, allow people to get out to their homes, to vacationers to come, promise to happen in certain places. So, they really are necessary to have. But unfortunately, in this changing climate, they happen in areas where they’ll be exposed to different kind of hazards, like in this case, coastal flooding.”

Insurance Markets

Mark Borsuk, civil and environmental engineering professor

“There’s a good reason why insurers reassess risk and reprice policies regularly as conditions change, but this does create a real challenge when we’re trying to encourage investments whose benefits may last for decades.”

“North Carolina has a good example of solving this problem. The North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association has a Strengthen Your Roof program that helps eligible coastal homeowners pay for so-called FORTIFIED Roofs. These are roofs that are designed and certified to better withstand severe winds. Qualifying homeowners can do this, pay a bit extra and receive insurance credits for making those improvements. 

“It's this kind of connection, which may involve a kind of intermediate organization or party, that we need to be making more often. Find ways to clearly establish that a particular action actually reduces losses, find a way to verify that action has been done properly, and then find ways to recognize that value in some way financially. This is how you can begin to align the short-term financial decisions that are in front of us each day with the kind of long-term resilience investments for which the benefits accrue over years.”

Planning Differently

Mark Borsuk, civil and environmental engineering professor

“We should be planning at a time when we’re not simultaneously recovering. That's just too difficult a time to be making those decisions.”

“This isn’t really a conversation just about resilience and disaster recovery—it's really one about the future of the community. A resilience plan isn't its own plan separate from the community plan. It belongs in that community planning process well before any disaster occurs.”

Victoria Salinas, Climate Leader in Residence

“FEMA and other agencies in different states have had efforts and capability and programs that focus on pre-disaster recovery planning, pre-recovery, trying to get communities to build those capabilities ahead of time. But what we see time and time again, it’s in that moment where you are personally affected, where the state and local governments and communities are most struggling, where the political will exists. That mismatch absolutely means that resilience and risk reduction and the ability to recover quickly from disruption are things that must be embedded in the very basic and central things to how we function as a country—the local taxing and fee authority, stormwater finance, building codes, land use powers, how you procure permitting at the state and local and federal level, infrastructure regulation, infrastructure programs, professional standards for architects and engineers.”

Brian McAdoo, earth and climate science professor

“There are numerous studies that show communities that are better off tend to recover, tend to jump forward after a major disaster, and communities that are less well-off tend to take a step back and may often never recover. To enable resilient construction, reconstruction, building, foresight, we really need to start thinking about how we proactively invest in these smaller, rural, underfinanced communities and figure out clever ways of financing and getting resources to them and improving building codes from the ground up.”

Learn more about how federal funding supports research that keeps communities safe at Duke Research Saves Lives.