White House Office of Management and Budget releases report to support community resilience

Washington, D.C. — The White Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a new report — Standards and Finance to Support Community Resilience — the culmination of collaboration with leaders in re/insurance, catastrophe modeling, and building science to advance community resilience and insurability.

In June 2014, the White House hosted the Roundtable Meeting on Climate Resilience and Insurance, convening senior Federal officials and insurance industry leaders to discuss how to mitigate increasing economic consequences of extreme weather and other climate-related risks. Since then, the White House has coordinated collaborative efforts in partnership with insurance and finance leaders on strategic objectives to increase community resilience and insurability.

These partnered efforts helped produce the Property-Casualty Insurance Industry Joint Statement Public and Private Resilience Initiatives; executive actions that strengthen the security of Federal buildings and assets and improve their resilience to floods, wildfires, and earthquakes; a new framework developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Community Resilience Indicators and National-Level Measures, including a community resilience primer and web-based viewer; the National Institute of Standards and Technology Community Resilience Planning Guides; the Mitigation Framework Leadership Group’s Strategies to Encourage State and Local Adoption of Disaster-Resistant Codes and Standards to Improve Resiliency; the White House Conference on Resilient Building Codes; the Forum on Smart Finance for Disaster Resilience; numerous technical workshops with NOAA and catastrophe modeling firms and reinsurers; and forums on flood risk communication led by FEMA and the Federal Insurance Office at the Department of Treasury.

As these commitments further demonstrate, climate action is a matter of fiscal responsibility. That’s why, in addition to forging partnerships with the private sector to act on climate, Federal agencies continue to move forward on this work. For instance, the U.S. Geological Survey is launching a new Streamflow Information public-private partnership in support of the National Streamgage Network. FEMA is pursuing reinsurance opportunities to diversify its approaches to manage the financial consequences of catastrophic floods; developing a new cooperative research and development agreement with re/insurance and academia to increase the sharing of data, modeling software, and analytic products; and developing the concept of a Disaster Deductible to incentivize State and local action increase their resilience to disasters.

Today’s announcements show how public-private collaboration is yielding better climate risk identification, adaption, and resilience practices – and positioning these practices for success over the long term. Through this sustained commitment from government and private sector leaders, the places where we live, work, and gather will better withstand the more frequent and intense weather events and other impacts of climate change that are already underway and those that can no longer be avoided.

Download the report at https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/reports/omb_resilience_finance_report.pdf