Heat is on States to Mitigate for Rising Temperatures

New report provides states with roadmap for better evaluating threat of extreme heat in disaster plans

As climate change causes global temperatures to rise, heat waves increasingly pose health risks to vulnerable populations. Yet state-level disaster plans mandated by the US federal government often understate the importance of extreme heat, according to a report published Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability.

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The Nicholas Institute report supplements policy guidance issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that for the first time requires state emergency managers to consider climate change and equity in disaster planning. The updated guidelines, which took effect Wednesday, are intended to prioritize extreme heat as a weather-related hazard that states should mitigate.

The new report scores how well states account for extreme heat in their most recent hazard mitigation plans. The authors also offer recommendations to help emergency managers adequately evaluate the threat of extreme heat as they update their plans.

“It is great to see federal agencies like FEMA prioritizing extreme heat and incorporating it into their guidance,” said Ashley Ward, senior policy associate at the Nicholas Institute. “What states need now is further support to effectively implement heat mitigation into their planning process.”

Over the last 30 years, more people in the United States have died from heat exposure than any other weather-related event, according to data from the National Weather Service. While destruction caused by hurricanes, floods or tornadoes is readily apparent, the economic impacts of extreme heat—from labor loss to hospital visits to crop damage—can quickly add up, wrote Ward and Jordan Clark, a postdoctoral associate at the Nicholas Institute.

For their analysis, Ward and Clark used a scoring system developed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which recently released an assessment of hazard mitigation plans for each state in the Southeast. Ward and Clark scored all 50 state plans on 18 different metrics that considered the overall assessment of risk from extreme heat and detailed heat-specific mitigation strategies.

Oregon (17) received the highest score, getting full credit for all but one metric. California (14.5), Vermont (14) and Massachusetts (12.5) followed at the top of the list. At the other end of the spectrum, four states—Arkansas, Hawaii, Maine and Wyoming—each received a total score of 0.

The scoring exercise revealed some broader trends:

• Only half of states had a dedicated section for extreme heat in their plans. It was combined with other hazards, such as cold or drought, in 18 of those 25 plans.
• The latest FEMA guidelines emphasize hazards as discrete events, but heat is often subtle and chronic. Requirements for hazard-specific mitigation efforts provide few incentives for states to include heat as a hazard when mitigation strategies are uncertain or funding sources are difficult to identify.
• The risk assessment of heat relative to other hazards is less robust within current state plans because climate change is not adequately incorporated.

“We’ve spent a lot of time in the United States teaching people how to respond to and evacuate from hurricanes, saving many lives,” Ward said. “We haven’t created the infrastructure yet to help people understand the risk of and take action to protect themselves against extreme heat.”

FEMA requires states to have the five-year hazard mitigation plans to be eligible for certain nonemergency disaster funds and funding for mitigation projects. As 36 states prepare to update their plans in 2023, Ward and Clark outlined four recommendations to address extreme heat under the new FEMA guidance:

• Establish a state-specific, standardized definition of extreme heat.
• Account for variations in the vulnerability of different groups of people environmentally exposed to extreme heat.
• Adequately incorporate climate change into assessments for extreme heat.
• Develop appropriate mitigation and resilience strategies for extreme heat based on recommendations from states throughout the region and community stakeholder engagement. 

“Ultimately, planners want to help the people they serve stay safe in the face of extreme events,” Ward said. “What we want to do is to make that job as streamlined and easy as possible by providing practical solutions to ensure robust planning and preparedness around extreme heat.”