Mapping Tool Shows Climate Change Effects Are Nationwide

You might think federal disaster declarations are mostly a coastal phenomenon or limited to Florida or Texas, but you’d be wrong. Climate change is an equal opportunity hazard. That’s the message of a new mapping tool, the Atlas of Accountability, by Rebuild by Design at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.

The Atlas of Accountability tracked the 713 federal disaster declarations issued from 2011 to 2023, and while most of the news might be focused on California, Louisiana, Texas and Florida, storms are happening everywhere, with states like Vermont, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Iowa and Alaska becoming “hot spots.”

Of the nine counties with the most federally declared disasters in that time period, with more than a dozen each, eight are in Kentucky and one is in Vermont.

In 2022, at least 40 people died and 300 homes were destroyed after a flood in eastern Kentucky. It marked the 13th time in 12 years that that county had been declared a federal disaster.

“After that flood I had 500 homeless people looking at me, ‘Judge, what are we doing to do?’” Judge Robbie Williams, administrator for Floyd County, told the Associated Press at the time. “It’s overwhelming and it’s just a matter of time before it happens again,” he said.

Amy Chester, managing director of Rebuild by Design and creator of the project, said, “One of the things we saw [is] that this is happening in places that aren’t making the national news. We hear about California and it makes sense, but when you have Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Iowa as states with the most disasters, I don’t think that America would know that.”

Chester called the entire report an “aha moment” and said one of the reasons to create it is to show that climate change is here, and “it’s not a red or blue issue,” but everyone’s issue: “As Americans, we are all paying for this, we’re paying for it through taxpayer dollars, through health impacts, but we have an opportunity to change that and start thinking about imagining living in places that can withstand future climate events.”

Creating parks that can accommodate storm runoff or storm surge, maintaining open spaces, securing affordable housing before disasters strike and not waiting to just rebuild after the fact are actions that will help offset future climate events, she said.

Chester said 3 million people lost their homes to climate events last year alone. “That’s 3 million people for which it’s too late,” she said.

In the Atlas of Accountability, the data showed that in New York City, for example, people displaced by a climate event — and 40 percent of people living in New York City are at risk for such an event — might have to leave the state to find suitable housing.

“We really believe that if we take care of it now, make space for our neighbors, move a couple of houses a couple of blocks away from the shore, then we have opportunities in the same communities on higher ground so people don’t have to leave New York,” Chester said.

The idea is to spend the money now, on mitigation, instead of spending it later on recovery. Every dollar spent now on prevention can save up to $10 or more on rebuilding after a disaster strikes.

A good example of mitigation is the work done in Hoboken, N.J., after Hurricane Sandy. There, the government bought old buildings and old factories and converted them into parks — engineered to pump in floodwaters from nearby neighborhoods, with storage beneath. These parks proved effective in negating the effects of flood events and storm surge.

“So you have something that operates 365 days a week as a park and operates as it needs to as water retention, and that saves an enormous amount of hardship and cost and physical and emotional damage,” Chester said. “We need to shift a lot more money to pre-disaster.”