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Emergency managers in the United States face a challenging operating environment characterized by more-frequent and -intense storms, extended or year-round wildfire seasons, multiple simultaneous disasters, and an ongoing global pandemic. The sheer magnitude and growing frequency of weather and climate disasters are straining the capacities, capabilities, and systems that enable the United States to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. To support the U.S. emergency management system, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other entities have created constructs - programs, grants, assessments, doctrine, and coordination bodies - at different times and in response to various events and needs. The overall number of constructs has grown, and the poor integration among them can worsen emergency management services and disaster outcomes. Researchers reviewed 31 FEMA-selected constructs for opportunities to streamline, simplify, and strengthen the system, assessing how overlap, duplication, and fragmentation could affect implementation and outcomes. In this report, the researchers describe options for addressing the issues and impacts identified. Some options are designed to address specific impacts or individual constructs, while others propose broader solutions that would transform the emergency management system. Truly transformative changes generally require a broad consensus and engagement by multiple actors and would therefore likely be more difficult than smaller-scale changes to achieve. However, adoption of such options also offers the greatest opportunity for significant streamlining. The authors also discuss trade-offs in costs and unintended consequences.

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To fulfill Congress's requirement for an economic and disaster-recovery plan for Puerto Rico following Hurricanes Irma and Maria, a team from the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center conducted an analysis for the government of Puerto Rico and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The team assessed the hurricanes' effect on Puerto Rico's municipalities and the municipalities' ability to govern, deliver services, and recover from the damage they incurred. To address information gaps in Puerto Rico, the team surveyed officials from all 78 municipal governments, conducted 12 regional roundtables with municipal officials, collected and analyzed available municipal-level data, and consulted with subject-matter experts. The team's analysis shows that municipal governments faced the hurricanes while dealing with severe fiscal constraints caused by declining income — something that complicated response and recovery efforts. FEMA data revealed that the most–heavily affected municipalities were clustered in the southeast coast of the main island, where Maria made landfall, and the central mountainous region, where the rugged terrain exacerbated the hurricane's effects. The team created a framework to evaluate the rate at which different municipalities are recovering, which revealed that the most–heavily damaged municipalities are generally also the ones recovering most slowly. Finally, working with the government of Puerto Rico and FEMA, the team developed a set of courses of action (COAs) for recovery aimed at improving municipalities' capacity to govern and deliver key services. These COAs focus on improving municipal fiscal conditions, implementing regional approaches to service delivery and planning, rebuilding urban centers, increasing transparency, and enhancing municipal capacity.

Municipal government --- Hurricane damage --- Hurricane Irma, 2017. --- Hurricane Maria, 2017. --- Puerto Rico.

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National Critical Functions (NCFs) are government and private-sector functions so vital that their disruption would debilitate security, the economy, public health, or safety. Researchers developed a risk management framework to assess and manage the risk that climate change poses to the NCFs and use the framework to assess 27 priority NCFs. This report details the risk assessment portions of the framework. The team assessed risk based on a scale that the National Risk Management Center uses that ranges from a rating of 1 (no disruption or normal operations) to 5 (critical disruption on a national scale). A rating of 3 (moderate disruption) on the national level, although it still allows normal functioning on a national scale, should be regarded as highly significant and includes the potential for major disruptions or failure of NCFs at a local or regional level and for significant economic loss, health and safety impacts, and other consequences. Using this risk rating scale and projected changes in eight climate drivers identified in the analysis (flooding, sea-level rise, tropical cyclones and hurricanes, severe storm systems, extreme cold, extreme heat, wildfire, and drought), the researchers examined how NCFs could be affected by and at risk from climate change in three future time periods (by 2030, by 2050, and by 2100) and two future greenhouse gas emission scenarios (current and high).

Infrastructure (Economics) --- Climatic changes --- Public works --- Forecasting. --- Economic aspects --- Evaluation. --- Protection.

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Climate change will induce increasingly severe and frequent hazards, such as heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, and floods. In turn, these hazards lead to increased spending in such areas as disaster relief, health care, and insurance programs. Climate change will also likely lead to a net reduction in revenue by affecting productivity, labor hours, and total labor force. The combination of these factors results in a substantial net loss to the federal budget because of climate change. However, these losses are currently underrepresented by the methodology used to quantify the costs and benefits of climate policy. In this report, the authors examine the ways that climate change and climate change mitigation policy affect the federal budget. They recommend ways to improve the modeling of such effects and provide an overview of a budget model that can be used to score legislation. This report is intended for modelers seeking to capture important relationships between climate, federal policy, and the economy. The authors aim to inform the eventual development of such a model. In particular, the report's analysis might be useful for analysts involved in budget modeling at policy research organizations, such as the Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget, and other policymakers involved with scoring legislation.