The Climate Resilience Game Changers Assessment
Climate change is causing devastating and deadly impacts across the country and around the world.
In 2023 alone, communities across the United States experienced extreme heat waves that pushed temperatures to triple digits for days or weeks on end, choking wildfire smoke in areas that had never experienced fires before, and record-breaking floods that washed away property and livelihoods. Extreme weather events drove more than 2.4 million Americans out of their homes, from Lahaina, Hawai’i to Montpelier, Vermont. These extreme events led to a record-breaking 28 disasters in 2023, each inflicting at least $1 billion in damage—more than twice the inflation-adjusted average annual number of billion-dollar disasters from 2010 to 2019, and roughly ten times the annual average in the 1980s. At the same time, chronic climate impacts like sea-level rise, habitat loss, repetitive flooding, and changes in rain and snow patterns are creating significant long-term stress on American lives, communities, homes, and the economy. By one analysis, the costs of flooding alone are between $180 billion and $496 billion annually.
While all communities are feeling the impacts of climate change, not all communities are experiencing these impacts equally.
Fossil-fuel-based energy systems have resulted in disproportionate public health burdens on communities with environmental justice concerns, including communities of color, low-income communities, Tribal Nations, and both rural and urban areas—from the coasts to former coal communities inland. Many of these same communities are also disproportionately harmed by climate change impacts. The National Climate Resilience Framework recognized the need to advance environmental justice for all, including by addressing the cumulative impacts of climate and other burdens on communities with environmental justice concerns who are most in harm’s way.
President Biden’s historic Inflation Reduction Act—the largest-ever single investment in tackling the climate crisis—and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law dedicate over $50 billion for climate resilience, in addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars helping reach national goals of cutting carbon pollution in half by 2030 and achieving a fully net-zero economy by 2050.
These historic pieces of legislation are the foundation of the American playbook to tackle climate change and advance environmental justice and have attracted major follow-on investment in clean technologies, materials, and other climate solutions. Many of these federal dollars also benefit, through the President’s Justice40 Initiative, the disadvantaged communities most impacted by climate change, pollution, and historic underinvestment.
But even with a rapid reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions, some climate impacts are expected to persist for decades to come.
Preparing for these impacts by investing in climate resilience, as well as climate mitigation, is therefore both a social and economic imperative.
Source:
Temukan peta dengan kualitas terbaik untuk gambar peta indonesia lengkap dengan provinsi.
