Changing the National Flood Insurance Program for a Changing Climate

• Date: 01 April 2019
• Author: Dena Adler, Michael Burger, Rob Moore, and Joel Scata

49 ELR 10320 ENVIRONMENTAL LAW REPORTER 4-2019

COMMENTS

Changing the National Flood Insurance

Program for a Changing Climate

by Dena Adler, Michael Burger, Rob Moore, and Joel Scata

Dena Adler is a Fellow and Michael Burger is the Executive Director at the Sabin Center for

Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. Rob Moore is a Senior Policy Analyst and

Joel Scata is a Water & Climate Attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Congress established the National Flood Insura nce

Program (NFIP) in 1968 to reduce ood dam-

ages nationwide and ease the federa l government’s

nancial burden for providing disaster recovery.1 To

achieve this goal, the progra m was designed to perform

three primary f unctions. First, the program provides feder-

ally backed insura nce to property owners and renters. Sec-

ond, the program established minimum requirements for

building, land use, a nd oodplain management practices

that local communities must adopt in order for their resi-

dents to be eligible to purchase NFIP insurance coverage.

ird, the program is responsible for mapping high ood-

risk areas. ese maps inform local land use decisions as

well as the pricing of ood insurance premiums.

eoretica lly, the NFIP should have deterred develop-

ment in ood-prone areas, ensured that any new devel-

opment in the oodplain was designed to minimize the

risk of ood damage, and reduced federa l expenditures

on disaster recovery costs. In practice, the rising debts of

the program and growing severity a nd frequency of ood

disasters imply the opposite is true. One signicant fac-

tor contributing to this shortcoming is that the NFIP is

predicated on the assumption that ood risks a re static

and change little over time. Climate c hange is proving that

assumption to be extremely dangerous and costly.

is Comment will assess the current state of the NFIP

and the threats to it from climate change (Part I). In addi-

tion, it explores several strategies to change the NFIP for a

changing climate.

1. National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, as amended, and the Flood Disaster

Protection Act of 1973, 42 U.S.C.A. §§4001 et seq. It was further modied

by the National Flood Insurance Reform Act of 1994 and the Flood Insur-

ance Reform Act of 2004.

ese strategies include:

• Encourage long-term migration away from coastal

areas and oodplains t hrough a national “discounts

for buyouts” program that wou ld oer homeowners

discounts on their ood insurance premiums now,

in exchange for a commitment to accept a future

buyout once their home is substantially damaged by

ooding (Part II).

• Expedite bringing vulnerable properties into compli-

ance with oodplain development requirements that

decrease the potential for ood damage by commu-

nity adoption of a cumulative and/or lower threshold

“substantial damage” or “substantia l improvement”

standard (Part III).

• Increase the transparency and availability of infor-

mation on ood damages, number and cost of poli-

cies, information on repeatedly ooded properties,

costs of the program to the nation, and the level of

enforcement by participating communities through

a national “homeowner right-to-know” provi sion,

and at the state level improve disclosure policies

that inform homebuyers about ood-related risks

(Pa rt I V).

• Improve monitoring, tracking, and disclosure of

data related to community compliance and provide

resources to address barriers to enforcement that

impede implementation of the oodplain regulations

at the community level (Part V).

Collectively, these reforms can help restructure the NFIP

to prevent escalation of debts, reduce taxpayer burden, and

most importantly increase the safety of millions of vulner-

able homeowners.

I. The NFIP and Climate Change

Today, the NFIP has 5.1 million ood insurance policies

providing $1.3 trillion of insurance coverage to policy-

Authors’ Note: We are greatly appreciative of research support from

our student interns Sophia Cornell, Samantha Doss, Korinna

Gareld, Adelaide Jones, and Joe Liberman.

Copyright © 2019 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. Reprinted with permission from ELR®, http://www.eli.org, 1-800-433-5120.