Climate change forcing change to emergency response processes

 Deputy administrator
 of the Federal Emergency
 Management Agency,
Joseph Nimmich.

Climate change—and the extreme weather associated with it—is changing the way U.S. emergency response organizations operate, from how they spend their money to where they pre-position resources, a panel of military, emergency and climate science experts said Monday.

"We pay a lot of money to have our military prepared to do something we really don't want them to have to do: go to war," said Joseph Nimmich, deputy administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "Well, we also need a FEMA and national infrastructure to deal with those catastrophic events we hope never happen… but are inevitable."

By using climate forecasts created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), FEMA has begun pre-positioning resources before a disaster strikes. FEMA is also now requiring state governments to incorporate climate change into their disaster mitigation strategies or risk losing out on billions of dollars of federal funds.

Read Katherine Bagley’s Inside Climate News story - “Climate Data Now Key to Disaster Preparedness, First Responders Say.”