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Current Legislative Plans for Reforming Disaster Relief Are Bad… So, We Wrote Our Own!

Many Republican elected officials deny there is a climate crisis, but that hasn’t stopped them from proposing changes to disaster relief programs. Few of these however, come close to confronting the scale of the problem.
A firefighter at the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S. November 8, 2018. Photo by REUTERS/Stephen Lam.
Democrats, who mostly acknowledge the depth of the climate crisis, have also been timorous in their proposals. Climate change and disaster relief has occupied almost no presidential debate time, and the candidates’ proposals (with the exception of Bernie Sanders fifteen-year, $16 trillion climate plan) have been small-scale and lacking in specifics.

So, in the spirit of the coming election year, and in recognition that environmental organizations need to support something rather than just criticize everything, Anthropocene Alliance decided to offer:
A Disaster Plan for the Anthropocene.

We have identified six broad areas of legislative remedy:

1. Empower front-line communities, especially those that are black and brown, economically disadvantaged or historically underserved, to monitor, report and direct efforts to prevent droughts, wildfires and flooding and adapt to excessive heat. This means providing them scientific, legal, engineering, medical, and social services to enable them to become better organized to recognize and quickly respond to environmental threats and deploy all available legal and practical remedies. The fight against excessive heat, drought, wildfires and floods cannot happen only at the federal or even the state level. While many of the causes of unnatural disasters ([link removed]) are national and even global, its impacts are always most severe at the local level. Federal support in the form of a mass mobilization of frontline communities, as well as revival of a locally based, Civilian Conservation Corps (or equivalent), could empower thousands of
people, especially the young, to inventory existing environmental assets, document threats, and organize community efforts to protect them.

2. Strengthen laws to conserve and restore fragile forests, aquifers, wetlands, prairies, barrier islands and other natural protections against droughts, fires, and floods. (Woods, marshes and prairies are highly effective carbon sinks and need to be greatly expanded to mitigate climate change.) Any new building in fire-prone woodlands should be strictly prohibited, and existing homes retrofitted to make them essentially fireproof. Development in wetlands and floodplains must also be strictly prohibited unless developers 1) can demonstrate that no additional flooding will result and 2) commit to acquiring and restoring to its natural state at least twice as much nearby land as that to be developed. Together, these laws would be potent weapons in the hands of local communities fighting to protects their lives, homes and neighborhoods against dangerous heat, droughts, fires and floods.

3. Bulk up on scientific, sociological, political and cultural research. Support academic and independent investigation of the accelerating risks of heat, fire, drought and floods. Redraw floodplain maps so that they make sense. (100-year floods should not happen every year; 500-year floods every five years!) Study, understand and communicate to the public – through art and other forms of expressive culture – the necessity to end the use of fossil fuels and change our diets and buying habits. We can’t consume our way to a livable planet. Our politics and economy exist to support our lives. Not the other way around.

4. Create national, fire and flood insurance programs that reward investment in essential, green infrastructure, such as aquifers, springs, streams, rain gardens, bioswales, and natural reservoirs, and prevent development in fire zones and floodplains, and other areas that serve as natural buffers against heat, drought, fire and flood. Ensure that any insurance program is equitable and means tested, in other words, that it is designed most of all to protect the economically vulnerable. Compensation for fire and flood survivors however, may entail the movement of individuals and even whole communities (so-called “managed retreat” or “climigration”) to ensure that disasters (and insurance payouts) are not repeated. The human/animal/nature interface must become a place not of conflict but sustainability and ecological revival.

5. Improve immediate disaster relief by establishing local, relief coordinators in front-line communities. These local leaders will work with VOADs (National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster), state and national FEMA directors, as well as private relief agencies, to quickly identify homes and neighborhoods in greatest need so that short, medium and long-term support can be provided with a minimum of red tape. Local knowledge, in many cases, is greater than administrative or tax records, especially when it comes to aiding the most economically vulnerable. People should not need to have degrees in law, accounting or engineering to receive essential governmental relief.

6. Emphasize disaster mitigation over adaptation. It will not be possible to adapt to what Will Steffen and others have termed a “Hothouse Earth” ([link removed]) scenario in which the planetary temperature rises well above the 1.5C – 2C target set by the Paris accords. That dangerous path is the one we are currently following. That means that release of the chief greenhouse gases must be halted within the next decade. The vast store of fossil fuels still in the ground must be left there, production and consumption of consumer goods reduced, waste eliminated, and an economy and society founded on real human and animal needs and potentials established in place of the current one built upon a foundation of profit and greed. There
is no technical fix for unnatural disasters, only a human one based upon cooperation and concerted action.
These six legislative proposals are of course, only approximations of what is needed. They are meant to prompt discussion and stimulate new ideas from our friends and partners in the environmental community and elsewhere. Any final, legislative remedies may look quite different from these. One thing is certain however: Whatever new laws and policies are proposed must be far more ambitious than anything that has been put forward before. The time remaining for action to mitigate the worst effects of global warming is short. Today, the most common-sense courses of action are the most far reaching.
Vilano Beach, Florida, post Hurricane Irma. Photo credit: Vilano Action Network.

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