Climate Change Requires New Approaches to Disaster Planning and Response
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Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
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June 2023
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POLICY PAPER
belfercenter.org/homelandsecurity
HOMELAND SECURITY PROJECT | JUNE 2023
Climate Change
Requires New Approaches
to Disaster Planning
and Response
David J. Hayes
Executive Summary
To date, most of the climate policy attention has been focused on the need to reduce the greenhouse
gases that are causing climate change and, as a corollary, to accelerate the U.S. economy’s transition
from fossil fuels to clean energy. Yet climate change also is straining our nation’s emergency
response capabilities as traditional climate-infused disasters such as hurricanes and floods become
more frequent and destructive. At the same time, the emergency response community faces new
challenges as slower-to-develop climate impacts like drought, heat, and wildfire increasingly are
hitting an acute tipping points and becoming life- and livelihood-threatening disasters.
Worsening climate impacts also require that the federal government help communities adapt
and become more resilient in the face of known and growing climate change threats. To do this
eectively, the time is ripe for the federal government to build new institutional mechanisms
that identify best practices across the full spectrum of resilience needs and work more closely as
partners with tribal, state, and local governments as they address the many and varying climate
risks that they face.
This short essay addresses these key climate emergency response and resilience issues and oers
specific recommendations for how the government can address them.
