The Disaster Management Complex: Law’s Adaptations in Times of Climate Disaster

The Anthropocene is marked by constant climate-related disasters and defined by the urgent need to foster and implement adaptations to future climate impacts that reduce disaster risk. The intensity, frequency, and severity of extreme weather events continue to rise even as nations and corporations alike miss their emissions targets, all promising a hotter, wetter, and more extreme future. A number of federal agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), have, at times, sought to adapt their own famously fragmented responses to these changing circumstances. However, federal disaster response is conducted against a backdrop of authorizing legislation that is designed primarily to support disaster consequence management, with often murky definitions of disaster types eligible for assistance.

Consequently, the relationship between agencies and disaster response and management is subject to pendulum policy swings between presidential administrations. As the politicization and polarization of issues at the intersection of climate and disaster grow, and in the light of recent actions of the Trump Administration, there is a growing call for reform. This Article analyzes how FEMA might integrate climate change into its disaster resilience efforts under existing authority, while exploring a more effective formal legislative mandate to enable FEMA to be a viable source of climate resilience leadership. We propose that FEMA’s mission would be best served by legislation explicitly requiring the agency to integrate climate change responsibilities in all phases of disaster management.

In particular, we recommend legislation that (a) clarifies the role of FEMA in relation to slow-onset disasters, such as sea level rise; (b) clarifies the role of FEMA in relation to compounding disasters, disasters that occur while recovery from a previous disaster is still underway; and (c) requires relevant federal, state, and local agencies to integrate climate projections and modelling into hazard and risk assessments