With little more than a week before the start of the 2021 hurricane season, President Joe Biden is turning his attention to natural disasters, announcing Monday that his administration will double the budget of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as part of a broader effort to combat climate change and help communities prepare for extreme weather events.
The announcement came ahead of President Biden's visit to FEMA headquarters on Monday, where he received a briefing on the upcoming hurricane season and the country's preparedness for severe weather.
"Today's briefing is a reminder that we don't have a moment to lose in preparing for 2021," Biden said, noting that we've "learned a few lessons from last year" in readying for the upcoming hurricane season.
"I'm here today to make it clear that I will insist on nothing less than readiness for all these challenges," the president said.
"It’s not about red states and blue states," Biden said in a push for bipartisanship. "It’s about having people’s backs."
In a statement, the White House said it will designate $1 billion to FEMA – double the amount provided in 2020 – which will be distributed to state and local governments for "pre-disaster mitigation resources."
The Biden administration is also slated to begin working with NASA on the development of an "Earth System Observatory" – a sophisticated, first-of-its-kind data system that will track, from space, how climate change is directly impacting the Earth's atmosphere – and the detrimental effect it has on our land, oceans and ice.
The announcement comes just days after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its annual hurricane forecast, which predicts an "above-average" hurricane season in the Atlantic. Scientists said they anticipate 13 to 20 "named" storms to form in the next year – and of those, six to 10 are likely to become full-blown hurricanes, with winds of 75 mph or greater.
NOAA also predicts three to five "major" hurricanes to form in the Atlantic; i.e., those that classify as a Category 3 storm or above.
The White House announcement also comes on the heels of a record-breaking year for extreme weather: In 2020, a whopping 30 named storms were formed in the Atlantic, surpassing the 28 from 2005.
An average season, according to the NOAA, has 12 named storms, six hurricanes and three major hurricanes.
These hurricanes alone cost the U.S. billions of dollars – but they weren't the only extreme weather events wreaking havoc on the lives and the land of Americans everywhere.
According to a NOAA report released earlier this year, the U.S. suffered 22 separate billion-dollar disasters in 2020 alone, including hurricanes, wildfires, tornado outbreaks and other severe storms, amounting to a staggering $95 billion in damages.
"As climate change threatens to bring more extreme events like increased floods, sea level rise, and intensifying droughts and wildfires, it is our responsibility to better prepare and support communities, families, and businesses before disaster - not just after," the White House said in a statement. "This includes investing in climate research to improve our understanding of these extreme weather events and our decision making on climate resilience, adaptation, and mitigation. It also means ensuring that communities have the resources they need to build resilience prior to these crises."
"In the big picture, I think understanding and preparing for extremes is the core of the climate challenge," Chris Field, chair of Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment, told The Washington Post. "Extreme events are always the sharp end of the climate spear. But they are also super challenging to understand and forecast."
"If we want to understand where things are headed with climate-change impacts, understanding and forecasting extreme events is where we need to go," Field added.