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While the private insurance sector is sounding the alarm about the economic fallout from extreme heat, the U.S. federal government is pulling back.
A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has declined to include extreme heat in its cost-benefit analyses for disaster mitigation, despite mounting evidence that the hazard is now the nation's deadliest weather peril.
Last week, FEMA agreed to most of GAO's recommendations regarding the rising risk of extreme heat in the U.S. except one: a proposal to "establish a plan to incorporate more extreme-heat activities into its benefit-cost analysis."
The Trump Administration agency rejected the idea, saying it "no longer plans to pursue this effort," even though GAO noted that "calculating extreme-heat-related project benefits was a challenge" and that a standardized approach could "alleviate the burden on communities to demonstrate their extreme-heat projects' cost-effectiveness."
"FEMA has provided limited assistance to tribal, state, and local governments for projects to mitigate extreme heat," the report says. "Less than 1 percent of the agency's 1,235 Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant projects with obligations from fiscal years 2020 through 2023 primarily addressed extreme heat."
That omission has material consequences.
