By Dena Adler, Michael Burger, Rob Moore, Joel Scata. Copyright © 2019 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. Reprinted with permission from ELR®.
Congress established the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in 1968 to reduce flood damages nationwide and ease the federal government’s financial burden for providing disaster recovery.
Theoretically, the NFIP should have deterred development in flood-prone areas, ensured that any new development in the floodplain was designed to minimize the risk of flood damage, and reduced federal expenditures on disaster recovery costs. In practice, the rising debts of the program and growing severity and frequency of flood disasters imply the opposite is true.
This Comment will assess the current state of the NFIP and the threats to it from climate change (Part I). In addition, it explores several strategies to change the NFIP for a changing climate.
Read the report Changing the National Flood Insurance Program for a Changing Climate in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive.