Two new reports show how rural communities can get federal funding for building resiliency to climate change

Two new reports from the liberal Center for American Progress "show rural how decision-makers can design and implement resilience funding programs under the new bipartisan infrastructure law to better help rural communities adapt to, and recover from, the effects of climate change," Kristi Eaton reports for The Daily Yonder.

Center fellow Mark Haggery told Eaton, “There’s a tremendous amount of money and resources that are available through the infrastructure law," as well as the legislation dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act]. "We want to make sure that it’s reaching the places that need it most, and where it can do the most good."

Haggery noted that most of the country is rural land: “That’s where the infrastructure for renewable energy is going to be built and cited and where transmission lines are going to cross. It’s where forests are going to be thinned. And restoration work is going to happen. It’s where watersheds are going to need to be improved to slow runoff to capture more water in the headwaters. So there’s a tremendous amount of work that needs to happen in rural communities.”

The infrastructure law created the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program. The center's report, How To Improve Community Wildfire Defense Grants To Build Rural Resilience, is a case study that reinspects the wildfire season in New Mexico, "in which 900,000 acres of public and private land burned throughout the state from April to June 2022. That’s almost four times the annual average from 1995 to 2015," Eaton writes.

U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore says in the report that climate change is leading to conditions on the ground never seen before: "Drought, extreme weather, wind conditions and unpredictable weather changes are challenging our ability to use prescribed fire as a tool to combat destructive fires,” he said. “Fires are outpacing our models and … we need to better understand how megadrought and climate change are affecting our actions on the ground."

The other report, How FEMA Can Build Rural Resilience Through Disaster Preparedness, examines the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program. The Federal Emergency Management Agency spent $1.5 billion through the program in the last two years to increase the resilience of communities to natural disasters before those disasters occur.

The report notes the disparities and ineffectiveness of the program: "BRIC's ability to reach BRIC’s focus on pre-disaster resilience is a paradigm shift. Yet the results of the program’s first two years raise concerns about its ability to deliver assistance to communities most susceptible to natural disasters and least able to prepare for and respond to them. In the past two years, fewer than 10 percent of nationally competitive BRIC grant proposals received funding, and communities in relatively populous and wealthy states won more than 80 percent of those dollars."