Despite Unprecedented Year of Extreme Weather, FEMA Ditches Every Single Mention of 'Climate' From Four-Year Strategic Plan

While 2017 was the costliest year ever for destruction from extreme weather events—and even as much of Puerto Rico is still struggling with a slow and “dehumanizing” recovery nearly six months after Hurricane Maria—a look at the new Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) four-year strategic plan reveals there is not a single mention of “climate change” or “global warming.”

The document (pdf), as Bloomberg points out, “doesn’t mention climate, global warming, sea-level rise, extreme weather, or any other terminology associated with scientific predictions of rising surface temperatures and their effects.” With this “dangerous” decision, FEMA’s 2018-2022 strategy departs from the version developed under the Obama adminitration, which “repeatedly cited the challenges caused by a changing climate, and the need for FEMA to incorporate those risks into its long-term plans.”

The new plan claims that “[l]arge scale, complex incidents, including FEMA’s responses to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, as well as the 2017-2018 California wildfires, underscore the criticality of our shared mission and remind us of the importance of learning from past disasters” and acknowledges that “[d]isaster costs are expected to continue to increase due to rising natural hazard risk, decaying critical infrastructure, and economic pressures that limit investments in risk resilience.”

However, despite the record-breaking costs of natural disasters last year, FEMA’s new plan fails to mention the how global warming—largely driven by greenhouse gas emissions generated by fossil fuel use—is fueling the “rising natural hazard risk” and has exacerbated these recent disasters.