Latest news with #FutureRiskIndex
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
FEMA quietly removes access to New England coastal erosion hazard tool
Part of the Nantucket coastline, shored up with 'geotubes' to slow erosion. (Photo by Jennifer Smith/CommonWealth Beacon) At some point between February and early March, as seasonal wind and rain hammered New England coasts, a relatively new but enthusiastically embraced tool for predicting erosion slipped off the Federal Emergency Management Agency website. This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Pioneered on Nantucket in 2020, the Coastal Erosion Hazard viewer that covered all of New England is now unavailable. It predicted erosion risk across the coast for the years 2030, 2050, and 2100, and until recently was publicly accessible on an online map used by planners and individuals alike. 'The tool was really helpful,' said Leah Hill, Nantucket's coastal resilience coordinator, 'because erosion is episodic. So, an area can be stable for five, 10, 15 years, maybe lose like a foot [of beach] or so, or nothing, and then a storm could come and it could lose a bunch.' Historical erosion data and flood maps kept by the state are useful, she said, but the FEMA maps incorporated sea level rise to project potential future erosion over time. The Biden administration promoted the tool for homeowners, business owners, and community officials making resiliency decisions based on erosion concerns. Hill is acutely aware of climate risks to the small island, which has one of the highest erosion rates in the state. These erosion maps, which resulted in a detailed Nantucket erosion assessment, have become baked into her work to inform residents about their property risks. 'Prospective homeowners or homeowners will call me and say, 'You know, I'm thinking about purchasing this property. What are the risks associated with it?'' Hill said. 'I'll create, using the best available data, a risk assessment for that property. I don't give real estate advice, but I can tell them about certain risk criteria. … And in order to do so, I use the FEMA erosion projection maps.' When Hill went to the site in early March, the page that used to open up the ArcGIS erosion maps instead took her to a login screen with no way to access the maps. When the maps remained inaccessible for weeks, she reached out to the Woods Hole Sea Grant for help connecting with the FEMA Region 1 team, which covers New England, receiving a brief email response on March 24. 'FEMA is currently taking swift action to ensure the alignment with President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem's direction,' wrote Kerry Bogdan, the risk analysis branch chief at FEMA Region 1. 'To that end, FEMA Region 1's Coastal Erosion Hazard viewer will be unavailable at this time.' FEMA did not respond to request for comment on the timing or rationale of removing the maps. Business magazine Fast Company reported that two software engineers were able to save and recreate data from FEMA's Future Risk Index tool when it, too, quietly vanished in February. The index mapped the projected economic losses from climate change down to the county level, based on hazards like flooding, drought, heat waves, and wildfires under different emissions scenarios. The FEMA future erosion maps are what's known as 'non-regulatory products,' essentially tools that are designed to be accessible and user-friendly, geared toward communicating information to the public, while regulatory products like FEMA floodplain maps are required by law and determine floodplain management, mitigation, and insurance policy. For instance, if a building is in a FEMA regulatory floodplain, there may be rules for resiliency improvements. But if a parcel is a long-term future erosion risk, the way to protect it or develop it is often up to the owner's discretion and informed by the available public information. 'I'm scrambling a little bit,' Hill said. She saved some of the GIS maps, but not all of them, and it isn't yet clear if the data sets have been saved elsewhere. The map scrubbing is an abrupt about-face on federal data sets, just six months after the federal government touted them as a way to help people plan for a future in the face of climate change. Bogdan told The Connecticut Mirror in September 2024 that an assortment of FEMA tools like erosion maps and forward-looking flood risk maps offered critical and helpful insights for municipalities and individuals alike. 'They're not going to tell you where you can develop, how to develop, what your insurance rate should be, but they are going to convey that hazard risk,' Bogdan said. 'What the risk is so people can plan for it.' Communities have incorporated the erosion map viewer with enthusiasm, she said. 'Some of our severely impacted communities from coastal erosion have really embraced this tool, and they're incorporating it into their long-term planning for things like grid retreat, placement of utilities, water lines, gas lines, that kind of stuff,' Bogdan told The Mirror. The Trump administration has, in its first three months, taken steps to roll back policies around climate resiliency planning. On March 25, FEMA announced that it stopped implementing certain floodplain management requirements for federally funded projects. This Obama-era standard, which was a mechanism for federal agencies to manage risk by requiring federally funded projects to be located out of flood risk areas or constructed to reduce the effects of current and future flood hazards, was halted under the first Trump administration, reinstated by Biden, and is now off again. 'Stopping implementation will reduce the total timeline to rebuild in disaster-impacted communities and eliminate additional costs previously required to adhere to these strict requirements,' the FEMA announcement said in late March. Last week, FEMA announced that it is ending the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, which has given states and communities billions of dollars to protect against natural disasters. The agency is also canceling all BRIC applications from fiscal years 2020-2023. FEMA said the BRIC program is 'more concerned with climate change than helping Americans affected by natural disasters' in a statement announcing the cuts. There has been no official statement on removing public mapping software that anticipates future flood or erosion risk. Other pages removed include the agency's 2022 'Guide to Expanding Mitigation: Making the Connection to the Coast,' which supplied emergency managers, community planners, coastal and floodplain managers, and other community stakeholders with resources and ideas to mitigate risk. A banner atop FEMA's website reads: ' is being updated to comply with President Trump's Executive Orders. Thank you for your patience and understanding.' Shannon Hulst, a floodplain and community rating system specialist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Sea Grant and Cape Cod Cooperative Extension, who was able to connect Hill with FEMA Region 1, said ad-hoc data removal is cause for concern. 'It's disconcerting,' said Hulst, who works on projects like developing flood insurance programs for towns along Cape Cod. 'And it certainly can make our jobs more challenging. I know, on our end, we're working on downloading some of that data to make sure we continue to have access to it.' In her capacity, Hulst mostly relies on regulatory products like the floodplain maps, which are 'a whole different ball game.' There is no word that the flood maps will be taken down, Hulst said, and Massachusetts keeps state-level flood maps as back-up. 'We'll still be OK with that data,' she said of the flood maps, but the disappearance of solid predictive data is an issue for consistent long-term planning. 'When we know that there is a risk, and that is what we were using as the best available data to inform us about that risk, and we're trying to manage our communities to the best of our ability to protect ourselves from that risk,' she said, 'it makes it difficult.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Japan Times
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Japan Times
Volunteers on 'right side of history' fight Trump data purge
In defiance of an executive order that wiped reams of data from U.S. government websites, volunteers are reversing the "act of official vandalism" and ensuring open access to censored climate, LGBTQ+ and health stats. Scores of activists are working to safeguard and then make public data they had archived for safe-keeping after President Donald Trump's administration targeted "gender ideology extremism" and environmental policies with deletion. "We're moving past the initial phase and approaching the next: ensuring that there's public access to everything that we have preserved," data scientist Jonathan Gilmour said via video call. Gilmour belongs to Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of environmental, justice and policy organizations committed to "public access to federal environmental data". They are working with other volunteers — environmental coders at Earth Hacks, archivists such as the Internet Archive, data consultants Fulton Ring — to build new public access tools from the purged data. The Trump administration has gutted several federal agencies, fired tens of thousands of employees and altered or deleted thousands of government webpages since taking office in January. First in Trump's firing line were health, climate and LGBTQ+ datasets that fell foul of his ideology. These include stats gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as the social vulnerability index and environmental justice index — measures used to quantify the health risks faced by different Americans. Among those working to restore the deleted data are former government workers and staff who were put on leave by Trump. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employee placed on leave helped make a new map that shows improvements in air pollution monitoring systems and upgrades of aging sewer systems made under environmental justice grants. "It's miraculous what (we've) been able to do — take these tools ... and protect them from this act of official vandalism," the employee, who requested anonymity to speak more freely, said. Those who are leading efforts to restore access to the missing data say they are understaffed, underfunded and persisting in their work despite risking retaliation from the Trump government, which has targeted lawyers it considered hostile. "There's certainly a concern of retribution from the administration, but we feel strongly we're on the right side of history here," Gilmour said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment before time of publication. Data for all Rajan Desai and Jeremy Herzog, founders of Fulton Ring, were motivated to volunteer by reports of government censorship. "This is like (George Orwell's dystopian novel) '1984.' It made it very real for us," Desai said in a video call from New York. The duo built a new version of the government's Future Risk Index, showing the cost of climate change to U.S. communities. The administration removed the original, managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in January. FEMA did not respond to a request for comment before time of publication. The new version resurrects the dead data — and also processes it faster and better on smartphones, even fixing some of its old bugs. The aim is to arm ordinary Americans with the sort of valuable information that is currently held in private hands. "A lot of this disaster data, flooding data (is used by) insurance and financial institutions in some capacity. The only person that seems not to have any visibility into this is the average consumer who might use it to buy a house," Desai said. He hopes that by turning these obscure datasets into new and open tools, citizens can make more informed decisions. Preserving data Getting the data back online is only the first step. It must then be protected from further takedowns, Gilmour said. The coalition is backing up its tools over an array of platforms, including the research site Figshare, Canadian repository Borealis and Harvard University's Dataverse, an indefinite storage network across 216 locations over 36 countries. A diverse network bolsters protection against a government that might aim to restrict information within its borders. The repository hosts data from research institutes, academics and more, ranging from small Excel spreadsheets to astronomical or biomedical data that can be thousands of terabytes bigger, such as a file that can fill four iPhone 16 Pro smartphones. Another challenge is keeping the records up to date since stagnant data loses relevance every day. "(Gathering new data) is incredibly labor-intensive when you don't have the power of an agency or the resources of the U.S. government to request data from the states," Gilmour said. His volunteer network is fundraising to pay workers, but they know some information will be lost. There are "tools that include geospatial data from NASA satellites. If NASA stops providing that information, we're not going to go launch our own satellites," Gilmour said. Work in progress or internal tools that were not public-facing could be irretrievable if the Trump administration defies federal laws on record retention, the EPA employee said. An EPA spokesperson said that it was working to implement Trump's executive orders. "President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship in his first term, and the EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment in his second term," the spokesperson said via email. Despite the challenges, Gilmour said the volunteers would keep at their mission to save the people's data. "We're preserving these tools and datasets that have been paid for by the American people and developed for all of us."
Gulf Today
07-04-2025
- Politics
- Gulf Today
Volunteers on ‘right side of history' fight Trump data purge
Adam Smith, Reuters In defiance of an executive order that wiped reams of data from US government websites, volunteers are reversing 'this act of official vandalism' and ensuring open access to the censored climate, LGBTQ+ and health stats. Scores of activists are working to safeguard and then make public data they had archived for safe-keeping after President Donald Trump's administration targeted 'gender ideology extremism' and environmental policies with deletion. 'We're moving past the initial phase and approaching the next: ensuring that there's public access to everything that we have preserved,' data scientist Jonathan Gilmour told the Thomson Reuters Foundation via video call. Gilmour belongs to Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of environmental, justice and policy organisations committed to 'public access to federal environmental data'. They are working with other volunteers — environmental coders at Earth Hacks, archivists such as the Internet Archive, data consultants Fulton Ring — to build new public access tools from the purged data. Trump has gutted several federal agencies, fired tens of thousands of employees and altered or deleted thousands of government webpages since taking office in January. First in Trump's firing line were health, climate and LGBTQ+ datasets that fell foul of his ideology. These include stats gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as the social vulnerability index and environmental justice index — measures used to quantify the health risks faced by different Americans. Among those working to restore the deleted data are former government workers and staff who were put on leave by Trump. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employee placed on leave helped make a new map that shows improvements in air pollution monitoring systems and upgrades of aging sewer systems made under environmental justice grants. 'It's miraculous what (we've) been able to do — take these tools ... and protect them from this act of official vandalism,' the employee, who requested anonymity to speak more freely, said. Those who are leading efforts to restore access to the missing data say they are understaffed, underfunded and persist in their work despite risking retaliation from the Trump government, which has targeted lawyers it considered hostile. 'There's certainly a concern of retribution from the administration, but we feel strongly we're on the right side of history here,' Gilmour said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment before time of publication. Rajan Desai and Jeremy Herzog, founders of Fulton Ring, were motivated to volunteer by reports of government censorship. 'This is like (George Orwell's dystopian novel) '1984.' It made it very real for us,' Desai said in a video call from New York. The duo built a new version of the government's Future Risk Index, showing the cost of climate change to US communities. The administration removed the original, managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in January. FEMA did not respond to a request for comment before time of publication. The new version resurrects the dead data and also processes it faster and better on smartphones, even fixing some of its old bugs. The aim is to arm ordinary Americans with the sort of valuable information that is currently held in private hands. 'A lot of this disaster data, flooding data (is used by) insurance and financial institutions in some capacity. The only person that seems not to have any visibility into this is the average consumer who might use it to buy a house,' Desai said. He hopes that by turning these obscure datasets into new and open tools, citizens can make more informed decisions. Getting the data back online is only the first step. It must then be protected from further takedowns, Gilmour said. The coalition is backing up its tools over an array of platforms, including the research site Figshare, Canadian repository Borealis and Harvard University's Dataverse, an indefinite storage network across 216 locations over 36 countries. A diverse network bolsters protection against a government that might aim to restrict information within its borders. The repository hosts data from research institutes, academics and more, ranging from small Excel spreadsheets to astronomical or biomedical data that are thousands of terabytes bigger, such as a file that can fill four iPhone 16 Pro smartphones. Another challenge is keeping the records up to date since stagnant data loses relevance every day. '(Gathering new data) is incredibly labour-intensive when you don't have the power of an agency or the resources of the US government to request data from the states,' Gilmour said. His volunteer network is fundraising to pay workers, but they know some information will be lost. There are 'tools that include geospatial data from NASA satellites. If NASA stops providing that information, we're not going to go launch our own satellites,' Gilmour said.
The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Trump's ‘climate' purge deleted a new extreme weather risk tool. We recreated it
When Donald Trump won November's election, a small team working on a key new US government tool charting impacts of the climate crisis scrambled into action. They hastily renamed the resource to remove the word 'climate' and quietly released it without fanfare in December, before Trump's return to the White House. However, the unusual precautions taken by staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) weren't enough to save the tool, which they had rebadged as the Future Risk Index. The new Trump administration, which has eliminated mentions of the climate crisis and its consequences across multiple government websites, deleted the index last month, dashing several years of work and with it hopes it would help cities, states and businesses across the US prepare for worsening storms, wildfires and floods. 'We changed the name of it, removed mentions of emissions scenarios, tried to not get it any attention,' said a source familiar with the Fema project, who asked not to be named. 'But it was taken down because there is now a fear of anything climate-related. There is such a culture of fear and uncertainty in Fema, people are worried about getting fired or defunded.' The Guardian is now helping resurrect and display the short-lived tool, which was keenly awaited within Fema as the first free, localized resource showing how much climate change impacts will cost American communities. Drawing data from across federal government agencies, the index has county-by-county information on projected annual losses this century from threats including extreme heat, coastal flooding , wildfires, hurricanes and drought, all of which are worsened by human-caused global heating. Each county was also given an overall risk rating, which ranked how vulnerable its particular population is to climate shocks. Such information is crucial for planning by local governments, insurers, utilities and others that look to Fema to help contend with a growing list of disasters now rending American communities, according to Victoria Salinas, who was deputy administrator of resilience at Fema during Joe Biden's administration. 'It doesn't matter if you call it climate change or not, the consequences are getting worse and so we were trying to play catch-up,' said Salinas. 'If you're making a decision about rebuilding a school, would you put it in the same place if it will flood again in 15 years? We have forced people to rebuild in the same places until now because we didn't have this sort of data. Taking this information down really erodes the nation's ability to keep communities safe and curtails effective disaster response.' Aside from the Future Risk Index, Trump's Fema has also axed its main climate webpage, which called the climate crisis a 'priority for emergency managers', and expunged a page on future conditions that acknowledges the consequences of global heating. The agency does retain the overall National Risk Index, which shows current risk hazards across the US, but has stripped away anything that might be related to the climate crisis or diversity, equity and inclusion. 'We've seen whole pages taken down that relate to hazard reduction for wildfires, things that shouldn't be politicized, just because they mention climate change,' said the current Fema worker. 'It's all very intense and chaotic.' The Future Risk Index was initially restored to public view by Fulton Ring, a software and data company. The company's founders, Rajan Desai and Jeremy Herzog, said they were aghast at the Trump administration's removal of online climate data and didn't want taxpayer-funded work to go to waste. 'We knew this was in the crosshairs because other tools like it have been shut down,' said Herzog. 'We felt this would be a high-integrity action to take, more impactful than just protesting. People should be asking why these datasets are being taken down for political motivations.' The sidelining of climate concerns within Fema comes as the agency is increasingly strained by a growing number of catastrophes that are being fueled by rising global temperatures. Last year was the hottest ever recorded in the US and the world. America was hit by 27 disasters costing $1bn or more in damages, including two enormous hurricanes that ravaged large areas of the country's south-east. Then, shortly before Trump took office in January, entire neighborhoods of Los Angeles were razed by wildfires that scientists said were worsened by the climate crisis. The president, however, has continued to call the climate crisis 'a giant hoax' and has even threatened to dismantle Fema and hand over its functions to the states, which experts say could not foot the ballooning costs of disaster response and recovery. The Future Risk Index shows that such climate-driven impacts will only multiply if planet-heating emissions are not significantly cut. By the 2050s, counties in New Jersey, New York and Texas will be among those at the highest risk from coastal flooding, while the counties that contain Las Vegas, Nevada, Dallas, Texas and St Louis, Missouri, will be most vulnerable to extreme heat. Los Angeles, a site of January's devastating wildfires, is among four places in California most at risk from fires by mid-century, the others being San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino. Meanwhile counties in Florida, including Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, home of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, dominate the list of the most at-risk places from hurricanes by the mid-part of the century, if emissions are not cut. The projected losses affecting counties from climate-driven events could reach as much as $191m or more each year by mid-century, depending on a variety of conditions such as the path of hurricanes and wildfires and the trend of planet-heating emissions. The biggest losses are mostly anticipated in counties with high hurricane risk in states including Texas, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana. The resurrected Future Risk Index provides a snapshot in time of these projected impacts, which will invariably alter as America's population moves, often into harm's way, and demographics evolve. Fema has ended work on updating the index to account for such changes. But the climate crisis is already being felt by its warping of the US's insurance market, making it difficult or impossible for many homeowners to get insured and therefore a mortgage, and the increasing drumbeat of disasters that costs the economy about $150bn a year. Rising heat is also imperiling endangered species, prized ecosystems and US food security. 'We need to better understand these risks so that we can plan to save lives and also save dollars,' said Michael Coen, a former chief of staff to the Fema administrator. 'It's reckless to take down information that can save lives without taking the time to understand the consequences. It makes me very concerned about the next four years.' Fema was approached for comment, but did not respond. Methodology The underlying data behind Fema's Future Risk Index, last updated 2 December 2024, was preserved by the data consultancy Fulton Ring. The index uses data from government and private organizations to project the changes in extreme weather events' frequency and intensity across US counties. It calculates the relative risk and economic losses from these events under four climate scenarios. The losses are categorized in two ways, as projected annual losses and as projected risk ratings. In both cases, each county is sorted into a risk tier relative to other counties (from 'very low' to 'very high'). Projected annual losses factor in each weather event's frequency and intensity and the number of human lives and physical assets at risk. To help compare areas' future risk with their current risk from Fema's National Risk Index, each counties' average expected annual losses are placed in a static dollar range shared by the two indices. The other measure of losses, projected risk rating, includes the same estimate of economic losses due to extreme weather events' impact on physical assets and loss of human lives, but it then factors in social vulnerability and community resilience. These social factors increase or decrease the estimated economic losses. The risk rating is not presented in dollar amounts because future social conditions are unpredictable and dollar estimates could be misleading. The climate scenarios include two time ranges, mid-century (2036 to 2065) and late-century (2070 to 2099), and two emission scenarios (lower and higher). The lower emission scenario (known as RCP 4.5) represents the most realistic, in which emissions peak around 2040 but the Paris agreement climate policies are not met. The higher emissions scenario (known as RCP 8.5) is the 'worst-case', in which emissions increase throughout the century. The risk ratings for counties with no recorded incident of the weather event are categorized as 'not applicable'. Those with no projected increase in risk, sometimes due to data issues, are categorized as 'no rating'. The original index provided four different inputs to calculate risk for extreme heat events. For simplicity we chose to present one: temperatures in the 95th percentile and above using the Localized Constructed Analogs version 2 (LOCA2) data source. See the Future Risk Index's full technical documentation here.
