FEMA Updates Its National Flood Insurance Program to Account for Climate Risks

On October 1, 2021, the Federal Emergency Management Agency published an update to its Flood Insurance Manual, titled Risk Rating 2.0: Equity in Action, which updates its National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) to account for increasing flood trends. This is the first update to its NFIP rating methodology since the 1970s, and it follows a 2017 Department of Homeland Security report which found significant inadequacies in FEMA’s previous methodology. The manual explains that “FEMA’s new rating methodology leverages catastrophe modeling, geospatial technology, and NFIP mapping data to estimate risk and determine the cost of flood insurance for each individual building.” FEMA released a report in April 2021 that documents the Risk Rating 2.0 methodology and data sources.