Biden-Harris Administrations Announces Nearly $3 Billion in Project Selections to Help Communities Build Resilience to Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events
Additional Funding from the President’s Investing in America Agenda Enables Major Program Expansion, with 23 States Selected for the First Time
WASHINGTON—Today, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, and Senior Advisor to the President and White House Infrastructure Coordinator Mitch Landrieu announced the project selections for nearly $3 billion in climate resilience funding as part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, a key pillar of Bidenomics. The selections, through two competitive grant programs, will help communities across the nation enhance resilience to climate change and extreme weather events. Overall, the President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides FEMA nearly $7 billion to help communities proactively reduce their vulnerability to flood, hurricanes, drought, wildfires, extreme heat, and other climate-fueled hazards.
The planet has broiled this summer, with July winning the unwelcome title of the hottest month since records began, in the nineteenth century. Indeed, climate scientists think that it was possibly the hottest month in the past 120,000 years. Given the rapid pace of climate change, however, July offered merely a taste of the heat to come. In 2015, world leaders established a goal to keep average global surface temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. In July, global temperatures breached that critical ceiling, if only briefly. Nearly 5,000 local heat and rainfall records were broken in the United States alone; globally, the number exceeded 10,000. And scientists anticipate that 2023 will clock in as the hottest year on record.
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