Narratives to inspire and align local governments around resilience
Abby Ross, CEO, The Resiliency Company
Last month, we hosted our first Resilient America Summit. It brought together more than 100 leaders from state and local government, public finance, insurance, investing, philanthropy, nonprofits, and climate resilience. State and local governments are critical to resilience because they finance, build and maintain around 70% of the country’s shared physical infrastructure. However, as the frequency of extreme weather increases, they’re struggling to keep up.
State and local governments are already stretched, both in terms of their budgets and capacities. Becoming resilient to the changed and changing weather, including disasters, can’t be “one more thing” for them to do. Approaching it that way will likely mean it won’t get done. Instead, becoming resilient needs to be baked into every decision being made across government.
Achieving that requires a deeper narrative than the one we currently have. At present, the narrative is:
weather-related disasters are increasing and becoming more expensive,
traditional sources of funding are drying up, and
governments need to get creative on how they upgrade public infrastructure.
While all true, this narrative tethers our actions to disasters and crises, rather than enabling us to stand back and see the fuller picture.
What is that fuller picture? We used the program of the Summit to flesh out its three parts:
Understand why and how communities have changed
The first part is understanding why we’re seeing more disasters and higher costs. As our friends at Probable Futures explain, we’ve built our communities on an understanding of what the climate in a place is. The fact that this has remained unchanged for centuries, if not millennia, has meant that we’ve made a bunch of assumptions that are now being tested – the stormwater system here needs to be this size, the power grid here needs this capacity, the building codes here need to handle this much, the agriculture here should be this.
In many cases, these assumptions have not been written down. They were tacit, simply understood to be the way things are – i.e., what the weather is. But as the climate changes and the weather gets “weird” – rains that flood roads that always used to be clear, air that’s unhealthy due to smoke from wildfires hundreds of miles away – it becomes important to write down and question these assumptions. How much rain do we really get these days? And how do we get it, gradually or in sudden downpours? What’s upwind from us and does it have implications for our communities?
Provide a common view of how physical risk translates into financial risk
This brings us to the second part – translating these physical risks into fiscal risk. While disasters grab the headlines, most fiscal risk comes from daily nuances like heat, repeated fires, ponding, and more intense freeze-thaw cycles. These relentless challenges to physical infrastructure increase maintenance costs, erode tax revenues, and increase borrowing costs, all of which strain operating budgets. But by how much?
At the Summit, and in partnership with the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA), we showed how to translate physical risk into fiscal risk, whether to budgets, reserves, capital plans, or debt. This atomising of fiscal risk makes it possible to think about how to respond to physical, climate risk on more strategic terms than needing to “get creative”. Responding becomes about more identifiable tasks, such as budget planning, reserves management, and investment strategies.
Give reasons to believe with concrete examples
The third part of the fuller picture is that some state and local governments have started to figure out how to become resilient to the new weather where they are. Our Summit included a number of lightning talks of places that have become resilient, and the financing models they used. For instance,
In North Carolina, an innovative financing tool transfers disaster risk to capital markets, providing the state with rapid, post-disaster funding and greater fiscal stability
In Anne Arundel County, MD, an independent public authority has been established that finances and delivers resilience infrastructure projects using flexible public-private financing mechanisms
In Escondido, CA, the local government used zoning laws to pave the way for an entire neighborhood to be built wildfire-resilient.
In Alabama, a statewide grant program funded by an insurance premium tax has helped homeowners build or retrofit FORTIFIED homes to better withstand severe storms
Embracing this fuller picture of explicitly stated assumptions, atomised fiscal risk, and things that have worked makes us more likely to respond effectively to the extreme weather and impact on communities. At the heart of the response is being able to find dedicated, predictable funding mechanisms, such as through taxes, new authorities, capital markets or infrastructure investments, rather than the vague notion of getting creative after disaster strikes.
Throughout the Summit, we had workshops to help leaders move beyond identifying resilience challenges to uncovering the financing, policy, governance, and partnership opportunities needed to implement solutions. After the event, I could tell that there was an itch that still needed to be scratched. We laid out several dots, but didn’t totally connect them. That is what comes next – the rigor, depth, and specificity of helping specific places.
