With this year’s Hurricane season rapidly approaching, the Reinsurance Association of America (RAA) has welcomed the Biden Administration’s pledge for $1 billion in funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program.
The program was created in order to help communities better prepare for extreme weather events.
Frank Nutter, president of the RAA, commented: “We applaud the Administration’s commitment to resilience initiatives. Without question, there is a need, particularly in vulnerable coastal communities that are most at risk from significant natural disasters.”
He believes that to do this successfully, the public sector will need to work on resilience with the help of private sector investments.
“To that end, the RAA has recently proposed a Community Disaster Resilience Zones (CDRZ) infrastructure proposal that would direct public and private sector resources to communities that are most in need and most at risk of natural disasters,” he continued.
“In general, RAA’s proposal would create a federal structure that directs public and private-sector funding for infrastructure resilience projects to communities most in need and most at risk from significant natural disasters.
Nutter explained that it would address the impact of climate change through data-driven analysis whilst establishing community disaster resilience zones, or CDRZ, for communities most in need and most at risk of significant natural disasters.
It would also direct and incentivize public and private-sector investment in the CDRZ to improve infrastructure resilience.
“A guiding principle of the Federal government’s natural disaster policy should be to protect the American taxpayer by managing the nation’s escalating natural disaster risks and reducing those risks over the long-term. We can do that by enacting common-sense resilience and infrastructure initiatives,” he concluded.
