Photo Credit: Christophe Paul 2023
By FREE Staff
In September, the Biden administration hosted the first White House Summit on Building Climate Resilient Communities.
The event brought together 25 states, territories, and Tribal Nations to discuss and collaborate on how to create and integrate community-driven, locally focused, climate solutions to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate threats.
The summit was part of the White House’s massive Investment in the country’s climate-sensitive infrastructure policy, meant to bolster clean energy manufacturing and infrastructure and grow the energy transition in the U.S.
The event was also held in conjunction with the release of the administration’s National Climate Resilience Framework, a policy outline to guide the key values and objectives of the country’s comprehensive climate resilience efforts.
Here are four key takeaways from the summit and the framework, which shed light on the Biden administration’s climate policy and how it will interact with and affect local communities.
- Equity and inclusion are key to climate resilience
Equity and inclusion were two of the first values highlighted in the Biden administration’s climate resilience framework. The framework encourages stakeholders to address, not exacerbate, disparities between communities, keeping climate justice at the center of policy strategy.
The framework recognized that the effects of climate change are disproportionately felt by low-income communities and communities of color, an inequity that must be addressed in the transition to a clean energy economy.
This value was part of why the summit sought to include a wide range of voices and perspectives, in an effort to ensure more communities affected by the climate crisis could have their opinions heard and included in a plan for a climate policy transition. It’s also why many of the investments discussed in the framework are part of the Justice40 Initiative, which set the goal that 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal climate investments go to disadvantaged communities.
- Climate solutions need to be proactive and long-lasting
As policymakers and community leaders strategize around climate resiliency, they must consider solutions that anticipate and fend off climate threats before they occur. In addition, the framework highlights the need for durable solutions that can serve both current and future needs.
Climate solutions should be embedded into planning and management processes at the federal, state, and local level. “Multiple studies show that the benefits of proactively accounting for and building resilience to climate impacts upfront will typically mitigate the resulting impacts, save lives, and mitigate the costs of damages following an event,” according to the framework.
As part of this strategy, policymakers must stop assuming that future climate changes will occur in the same manner as past ones. Instead, climate resilience planning must work under the notion that future climate occurrences will be more frequent and more severe, and proactive and durable planning must take that into consideration.
- Climate resilience is not possible without climate funding
It is clear that proper policy changes can only be adopted and made successful with adequate funding. Ahead of the summit, the Biden administration announced more than $500 million in federal funding for climate resilience efforts.
Investing in climate resilience is not only necessary to integrate policy changes, it is also lucrative. The climate resilience market is slated to be worth $2 trillion per year by 2026, according to the framework. Within that, both public and private capital is needed.
It’s not only investment that’s necessary however. Climate projects need more flexible funding that allows for longer turnaround times for return on investment, as well as greater consideration of the indirect benefits of investment, such as how funding will improve the quality of life for the greater community and environment.
- Climate solutions are not one size fits all
A key component of the climate resilience summit was how solutions could benefit specific municipalities, and what strategies would be needed to bring those solutions to fruition. Both the summit and the framework highlighted the critical notion that each community has its own specific climate policy needs, and that policy ideas must be crafted with this concept in mind, rather than using a cookie cutter approach to solutions.
This approach includes bringing together local and regional collaboration with Tribal, territorial, and Indigenous communities to integrate their best practices and knowledge of the land and environment.
In addition, policymakers and leaders should work with communities to ensure there is a local climate-educated workforce, and that community services and meeting places are climate-resilient in case of natural disasters.
Local communities are on the front lines of the climate crisis, and as such should be at the center of climate resilience policy.