The U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Climate Crisis has released its final report, Solving the Climate Crisis 2022: Key Accomplishments and Additional Opportunities. The Select Committee, chaired by Representative Kathy Castor (D-FL), spent the last year listening to stakeholders, experts, and individuals impacted by climate change to develop a set of recommendations for addressing climate change. In addition to trumpeting successes in climate change-related work accomplished through recent legislative packages such as the “Inflation Reduction Act,” the bipartisan infrastructure law, and other efforts, the report details what the committee views as important agenda items for the coming years.
Recommendations cover a range of climate change-related work, including pollution reduction, clean energy creation, and job creation, but also address disaster recovery reform efforts. The recommendations dealing with disaster recovery reform mirror the recommendations made by the NLIHC-led Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC), a group of nearly 900 national, state, and local organizations, including many working directly with disaster-impacted communities and with first-hand experience recovering after disasters. The DHRC works to ensure that federal disaster recovery efforts reach the lowest-income and most marginalized survivors.
In addition, the document cites a recent report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights regarding recovery efforts following Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Maria. That report included testimony from NLIHC President and CEO Diane Yentel, as well as several DHRC members.
The new report recommends the following measures:
- Permanently authorize the HUD CDBG-DR program to reduce payment delays, prioritizing funds and technical assistance to low- and moderate-income survivors and ensuring that funds are distributed equitably and benefit the hardest-hit communities.
- Clarify guidelines to apply for aid, streamline the portal for the intake of all federal disaster assistance, and develop a process to share data across all responding agencies on the federal, state, and local levels.
- Focus the recovery and mitigation process on survivors with the greatest needs, particularly people of color, low-income people, people with disabilities, immigrants, members of LGBTQ communities, and other marginalized individuals, and provide a sufficient number of staff fluent in the various languages spoken in the affected areas.
- Increase housing assistance program funds, including for the national Housing Trust Fund and the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, to support affordable construction and retrofits to mitigate and adapt to the increased risks of floods, wildfires, extreme heat, and other impacts of climate change.
- Require that HUD, USDA, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and other agencies that manage federal housing initiatives provide clear guidance and technical assistance to housing assistance agencies and communities to enable adoption and enforcement of climate-resilient building and retrofitting practices for affordable housing.
- Provide protection and assistance to low- and moderate-income people who are seeking federal disaster recovery assistance to relocate from flood- or wildfire-prone areas to comparable replacement housing in less risky areas.
Read the text of the report here.