FEMA AS AN AGENT OF CHANGE

How FEMA Can Be a Leader in Tackling the Climate Emergency and Driving Energy Justice

The fossil-fueled climate emergency is contributing to more intense and frequent disasters, from record-breaking hurricanes to deadly heat waves, intense wildfires, and disastrous flooding. The Federal Emergency Management Agency — you probably know it as FEMA — is charged with helping U.S. communities prepare for these events and rebuild after disaster strikes.

FEMA Isn’t Fit for Its Purpose

Bad news: FEMA is ill equipped to carry out the task it was created for.

In fact the agency is exacerbating the very problems it’s charged with addressing. By investing billions of dollars in rebuilding the fragile fossil fuel status quo, it further advances the dual climate and energy justice crises.

Meanwhile, of course, FEMA is missing key opportunities to mitigate climate disasters by doing the right thing: building resilient and renewable infrastructure in the most impacted communities. One group the agency is particularly failing to protect is workers, who are on the front lines of increasingly dangerous extreme heat and wildfire smoke emergencies.

Our Campaign

FEMA has a responsibility to help protect the most disaster-prone and disaster-harmed communities. At the same time, it has the potential to spearhead the transition to an equitable, resilient, and renewable energy future.

The Center for Biological Diversity is leading a campaign to ensure that FEMA does its job reducing the United States’ vulnerability to climate disasters while addressing — rather than exacerbating — the climate emergency.

We work with frontline communities, labor unions, and local and national partners to bring FEMA in line with tackling the climate emergency.

Check out our press releases to learn about all the Center’s actions pushing FEMA to be fossil free.

And read on to learn more about some of our big campaigns.

Heat and Wildfire Smoke

Extreme heat and wildfire smoke are a major threat to public health — yet FEMA doesn’t recognize either one as a disaster under the Stafford Act, the primary law designed to bring federal aid to state and local governments harmed by natural disasters. That leaves resource-strapped states and at-risk communities to fend for themselves. As summers grow hotter, these emergencies will lead to thousands of deaths and put millions of lives at risk.

In a formal legal petition, we’ve urged FEMA to classify extreme heat and wildfire smoke as “major disasters” under the Stafford Act and direct funding toward important relief measures, like cooling centers and air filtration systems, as well as resilient and renewable energy, like rooftop solar with battery storage.

Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico’s centralized, fossil-fuel-reliant electric system is vulnerable to damage from storms that the climate crisis brings to the archipelago with increasing intensity. Distributed renewable energy resources, like rooftop solar with battery storage and solar microgrids, have repeatedly demonstrated they can keep the lights on when the grid goes down.

In response to two major hurricanes, FEMA has allocated billions of dollars in federal disaster aid to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electricity system. But instead of using that funding for rooftop solar and other resilient renewable energy projects, the agency is reinvesting in a failing and polluting fossil-fuel-based system that harms public health, exacerbates the climate emergency and energy poverty, and threatens endangered species.

We’ve filed a lawsuit against FEMA for failing to consider distributed renewable energy to provide electricity to communities at risk from Puerto Rico’s hurricane-battered grid.

Building Back Fossil Free

FEMA spends billions of taxpayer dollars every year to prop up fossil fuels — the primary driver of the climate emergency — which pollutes communities, leaves families vulnerable to blackouts, and locks in high utility costs for everyone. Instead of fueling the cycle of climate destruction and energy poverty, FEMA must prioritize resilience in its disaster response.

To save lives when disaster strikes, we’ve filed a legal petition proposing new regulations that would require FEMA to abandon fossil fuels and direct agency resources towards distributed energy technologies, including rooftop and community solar with battery storage. These regulations will help cut down fossil fuel pollution and carbon emissions while facilitating the urgent transition to a just and renewable energy future. We’ve also sued FEMA over its refusal to comply with a 2018 congressional mandate to robustly define how to bring resilience into all of its work.