Extreme heat, drought and wildfires; White House introduces new climate mapping tool
REDDING, Calif. — During a regional press briefing on Thursday, the White House unveiled the Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation (CMRA) web tool. This is designed to provide real-time information to various levels of administration regarding the ongoing and future impacts of climate change on their communities. This includes natural disasters impacted by climate patterns, including wildfires, heat waves, and droughts -- all of which are currently ongoing in the Northstate.
Development of the tool involved FEMA, the EPA, NOAA and USGS. During the briefing, David Hayes, Special Assistant to the President for Climate Policy, discussed the power of CMRA in shaping awareness and response as extreme conditions become more and more common.
NOAA Administrator Dr. Rick Spinrad said they are honored to host this portal and that he believes it will soon become the government's first line of defense. He noted that NOAA has been monitoring billion-dollar disasters since the 1980s and that the number of such events each year has increased from three in the 1980s to 19 in the 2010s. Further, the cost of these disasters has also risen dramatically, to an annual average of $92 billion. In describing the human impacts of these disasters, Spinrad specifically mentioned the extreme heat in California, as well as the health concerns that accompany power blackouts, isolation in the face of flooding, and the destructive impacts that fires have on lives and livelihoods.
He described CMRA as a first-of-its-kind climate portal, helping communities better understand and respond to threats in their area. In the spirit of access, the portal is publicly available and is built to benefit individuals, communities, businesses, city planners, and others.
Phoenix, Arizona Mayor Kate Gallego, whose city faces drought and extreme heat much like our own Northstate communities, described spending tens of millions on climate resilience in recent years and said that this tool will help them understand what methods will have the biggest impact, and especially as that relates to the most vulnerable populations. This is addressed in the Assessment Tool, which includes "flags" for building code criteria in selected areas as well as community statuses in terms of being disadvantaged.
The Assessment Tool serves to provide a glimpse at what is possible in the future under two different emissions scenarios. You can enter an address, and a large dashboard pops up, allowing you to explore the change of various important measures of climate impacts. You can explore this data for any individual census tract, county or tribal land. Benjamin Preston of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy noted that this is one of the first times that we are able to summarize climate information for these tribal lands.
Another tool in the portal is Hazard Information. These starting points for each type of impact include information on what they mean, what is currently happening, and what is projected on a large scale. Additionally, there is a selection of links to funding resources that state, local, and tribal governments can apply to for building greater resilience in their communities.
As for the future of this resource, Spinrad explained that the new bipartisan infrastructure bill includes funding for more mapping and collaboration between agencies on data collection and updates. You can explore the CMRA resources for yourself here.