Reduce Taxpayer Burdens from Flooding

Key Points

1. 1) Many policies, like the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), are ironically incentivizing people to put themselves and their property at higher risk.
2. 2) Rather than focusing on additional spending, good resilience policy should center around how existing duplicative resilience efforts can be coordinated to maximize benefits.
3. 3) Even if climate change was not a factor, rising coastal wealth is increasing the costs associated with storm-related flooding and damages. Making coastal resilience programs more efficient is good policy, even if we manage to avoid the costs of climate change.