Focus on infrastructure must include climate resilience plan

Two of the most common answers to the question Camas Mayor Steve Hogan posed to potential Camas City Council applicants this week — “What are the top two or three issues facing Camas in the next five years?” — spoke to the city’s looming infrastructure needs and officials’ ability to proactively plan for future growth, especially in the city’s North Shore area. 

And while there is no doubt the city of Camas, like many jurisdictions in the Portland-Vancouver metro area, is facing several expensive-but-critical infrastructure needs, including the replacement of at least two Camas-Washougal fire stations within the next few years, there was one critical component of infrastructure-planning that seemed to be lacking in the Council applicants’ answers: climate resiliency. 

There is no doubt climate change is already devastating many U.S. cities. In early 2022, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that extreme weather events, fueled by human-caused climate change, claimed 688 lives and cost $145 billion throughout the U.S. in 2021 alone. 

“It was a tough year. Climate change has taken a shotgun approach to hazards across the country,” NOAA climatologist and economist Adam Smith, who compiled the report for the agency.

In fact, these types of extreme weather events have cost the U.S. nearly $2.3 trillion since 1980.

What’s more, recovering from these all-too-frequent events that happened once every 100 or 500 years prior to the rapid warming of the planet — mainly caused by humans burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas — is also becoming increasingly more difficult thanks to the strain these extreme weather events are having on insurance companies. 

As Vox pointed out in its Oct, 15, 2021, article, “The $5 trillion insurance industry faces a reckoning. Blame climate change,” insurance companies “are getting rocked by climate disasters.” 

“One estimate showed that by 2050, 645,000 homes in California will be built in ‘very high’ wildfire severity zones,” the Vox article reported. “The value of these properties is likely to rise as well, which in turn raises the bill when a catastrophe strikes.”

Local government officials often talk about the critical need for “workforce housing” in the Camas area, where the city’s many middle-class workers, including teachers, police, firefighters, city staff and others can live without spending upwards of 80% of their income on rent or a mortgage payment. Rarely is the topic of runaway insurance costs to protect those affordable homes from becoming worthless in the event  of a flood, wildfire or other “natural” disaster made worse by climate change. 

City leaders in this country, including those in the Camas-Washougal area, must prepare right now for this changing world. They cannot afford to duck their heads in the sand and hope their tried-and-true ways of planning for city growth and infrastructure needs will hold up in the face of runaway climate change and the extreme weather — the wildfires, heat domes, droughts and floods — it brings with it. 

In 2018, the fourth annual National Climate Assessment report noted that, although many U.S. community leaders had started to adapt their practices and policies to become more resilient in the face of climate change, the adaptations were not happening fast enough and were more focused on “capacity building and on making buildings and other assets less sensitive to climate impacts” instead of “reducing exposure through actions such as land-use change (preventing building in high-risk locations) and retreat.”
“Many communities’ adaption actions arise and are funded in the context of recovery after an event, rather than taken proactively,” the report noted, adding that many community leaders are still making assumptions based on outdated climate predictions.

“The assumption that current and future climate threats and impacts will resemble those of the past is no longer reliably true,” the report noted. “Human-caused carbon pollution in the atmosphere has already pushed many climate-influenced effects — such as the frequency, intensity or duration of some types of storms and extreme heat, drought and sea level rise — outside the range of recorded recent natural variability.”

As the city of Camas and its elected officials delve into future infrastructure needs, population growth and the crucial need for more affordable housing, leaders should also realize that, as Earth.org reported in June 2022, with one in 10 homes in the U.S. impacted by extreme weather events in 2021 alone: “The links between climate change and the affordable housing crisis are clear (and) local-level action is … necessary to remedy this housing shortage and to offset the effects of climate change.”

Now is a perfect time for elected officials in our cities and states to shift their thinking and realize climate resilience will likely be many people’s No. 1 “most critical issue” within the next decade. 

The $555 billion infrastructure bill President Joe Biden signed into law in November 2021 — a bill deemed “bipartisan,” even though only 13 of the 212 Republicans in the House supported it — included nearly $50 billion to help communities become more climate resilient. 

And there are more and more climate-resilient communities our elected leaders can use as models. One recent example of a community that has adequately planned for the realities of climate change, Babcock Ranch in Florida,  gained national attention this month, after it weathered the category 4 Hurricane Ian without ever losing power and with minimal damage — thanks to the fact that the community’s developers planned for extreme weather, siting Babcock Ranch 30 miles inland to avoid coastal storm surges, depending solely on solar power that has capacity to power 30,000 homes, running power lines underground to avoid wind damage during hurricanes, and encircling the community with retaining ponds to help protect it from flooding. 

As the past few years have proven — with devastating wildfires popping up in increasingly urban areas and extreme heat events killing dozens — the Pacific Northwest is in no way exempt from the ravages of climate change. And today is the best day for our elected officials and city planners to help ensure Camas-Washougal will be climate resilient far into the future.