Florida commits $1 billion to climate resilience. After Hurricane Ian, some question the state’s development practices

Jason Diaz awoke in the center of the night time to the sound of trickling water.

Outside his first-floor condo the place he had slept, Hurricane Ian moved violently and slowly over the Florida inside, dropping monumental quantities of rain on the low-slung panorama pockmarked in all places with lakes and rivers, ponds and canals. The headwaters of the Everglades start right here. To the east the St. Johns River, the state’s longest river, flows north. Ian’s lumbering tempo meant these waterways crammed rapidly.

By the time Diaz landed his toes on the ground and stood up, the water inside his condo was ankle-deep. The subsequent few hours could be a blur of evacuating relations and neighbors, and swimming by means of 5 toes of water. Three hours later he went again for one neighbor who had simply undergone surgical procedure and couldn’t wade by means of the flood water with an open wound.

“Fortunately he was on top of his table, so he wasn’t standing in the water,” mentioned Diaz, 54. “But it was getting much higher. It’s a good thing they had an airboat come rescue him.”

Days later Diaz sat dazed beneath a shady tree outdoors the Kissimmee Civic Center, which had been became a shelter for the displaced like him. Virtually all the things he owned was swamped again in his condo. A 20-year Floridian, he had been by means of hurricanes earlier than however nothing like Ian. He had no concept what he was going to do subsequent.

“I might get emotional. I had a collection of collectables for my grandkids that I had been collecting for 30 years,” he mentioned, eyeing photos of the toys and comics on his cellphone. “That’s all gone. I don’t have a lot of money, and that was sort of my way of giving my grandkids something that they can either use or sell in the future.”

LISTEN ON NPR: Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ climate change coverage is underneath scrutiny after Hurricane Ian

In the lower than two weeks since Ian made landfall on Sept. 28 as a near-Category 5 storm, officers in Florida have been centered on searches and rescues, restoring energy and accumulating the lifeless, a grim tally that tops 100, according to the Associated Press. But the dialog in Florida has began to flip towards coverage, together with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ strategy to climate change in a state that’s amongst these most susceptible to impacts from world warming.

DeSantis’ focus has been on making an attempt to adapt Florida to climate change, what he calls “resilience,” and underneath his management, the state is beginning to spend at the least $1 billion to gird in opposition to impacts from future excessive climate by means of a brand new Resilient Florida program established by legislation he signed in May of 2021. The laws acknowledged Florida as “particularly vulnerable” to flooding from rising rainfall, storm surge and extreme climate.

It is just not the solely resilience spending in the state, however his administration calls it the largest funding in Florida’s historical past to put together communities for the impacts of climate change, together with sea degree rise, intensified storms and flooding. DeSantis has largely ignored the different piece of the climate coverage equation—decreasing the predominant driver of climate change, greenhouse fuel emissions.

But Hurricane Ian has proven simply what Florida is up in opposition to in a world the place world warming is, as climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe described not too long ago, “putting hurricanes on steroids.” Ian blew ashore with winds of 150 miles per hour, and pushed storm surges of 12 to 18 feet earlier than shifting throughout central Florida, the place it triggered intensive inland flooding.

Ian splintered and washed away houses, broke bridges, toppled bushes, tossed boats, submerged roads and fell energy strains in communities like Fort Myers, Sanibel Island, Naples and the Orlando space. It triggered $45 billion to $55 billion in property harm, in accordance to a preliminary estimate from Moody’s Analytics. There at the moment are fears that Ian will make the state’s insurance coverage trade, already pushed to the brink by earlier hurricanes, tip additional toward collapse.

A core drawback, specialists mentioned, is that too many individuals reside in high-risk areas in a state with the highest threat from hurricanes.

Florida’s new spending on resilience is essential, mentioned Richard S. Olson, professor and director of the Extreme Events Institute and the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University. “I am not going to say it’s a Band-Aid; it is helping, of course,” mentioned Olson, who researches the political fallout from disasters. “But is it enough when you consider we have had 70-plus years of coastal and barrier island development?”

In the Nineteen Fifties, Florida’s inhabitants was lower than 3 million. Now, there are 22 million Floridians. “A lot of those people wanted to live near the water,” Olson mentioned. “Florida is a peninsula surrounded on three sides by warm water, in a hurricane zone. What could possibly go wrong? You have to question the development model.”

DeSantis was elected governor in 2018, is up for reelection in November and is taken into account a possible front-runner for the GOP nomination in the 2024 presidential race. First, although, he’s dealing with former Gov. Charlie Crist, a Democrat and former Republican who not too long ago stepped down from the U.S. House of Representatives. Crist served as governor from 2007 to 2011 and had been a frontrunner in the Republican Party on climate, placing ahead a 2008 climate action plan meant to “reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions and provide a framework for climate change adaptation strategies to guide Florida over the coming years and decades.”

Crist was adopted by Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican. Scott, who now represents Florida in the U.S. Senate, was seen by many as indifferent or hostile to issues about the climate. At the time of DeSantis’ election, environmental advocates have been relieved he was not a full-on climate change denier, after eight years of Scott.

Some environmental advocates agree that the Resilient Florida program is a mandatory, if not lengthy overdue, effort to get Florida communities to assess their vulnerabilities and safe funding for tasks to cut back these dangers.

Project funding approved up to now embrace elevating or hardening sea partitions, elevating roads, bettering drainage, renovating wastewater pump stations, buying and defending wetlands, and changing septic tanks with sewers.

“He has put a lot of money towards resilience, predominantly federal money, and very little state money, but money nonetheless,” mentioned Aliki Moncrief, govt director of Florida Conservation Voters, which tracks state authorities, of DeSantis. The resilience spending is “all good,” she added.

But the program is simply too new to make a lot of a distinction with Ian, she mentioned. She wonders how significantly better ready Florida may need been to tackle climate change impacts together with hurricanes had Crist’s 2008 plan not been “trash-canned.”

DeSantis’ rollout has additionally been a bit bumpy, she added. The DeSantis administration ought to have by now already developed a statewide plan for spending the cash primarily based on a statewide vulnerability research.

“There’s a list of projects that are supposed to get money, like wastewater infrastructure projects, road-lifting projects and that sort of thing,” Moncrief mentioned. “These are all being done without the benefit of that larger vulnerability assessment to really identify target areas.”

Florida Conservation Voters’ budget tracker exhibits state lawmakers’ resilience budgets leaping from $23 million in 2020 to $530 million in 2021—a 2,204 % enhance—with $500 million coming from President Biden’s American Rescue Plan. The legislature allotted one other $493 million to resilience this yr, with $200 million coming from the federal authorities, in accordance to Florida Conservation Voters.

Resiliency spending apart, Moncrief mentioned it’s “irresponsible” for the state to be “spending all this money without any real policy changes” to tackle “the root cause of the climate crisis.”

DeSantis’ chief resilience officer, Wesley Brooks, referred a request for an interview to DeSantis’ press workplace, which declined to make Brooks obtainable immediately.

Friday, throughout a cease in Daytona Beach, DeSantis mentioned he’s seen that newer infrastructure fared higher in opposition to Hurricane Ian.

“The core infrastructure did very very well, by and large,” he mentioned. “And I would say the same thing with some of the roads, some of the bridges. The stuff that was new, you do see the impact of that. And so I think we were right to do things like we have, with the resilient coastline.”

In one other current media interview, when DeSantis was requested about climate change, he touted the $1 billion Resilient Florida program. Local communities are in a position to get cash that’s matched by cash from the Resilient Florida program “to be able to make improvements and harden their infrastructure,” he mentioned. “It’s a two year old program so they haven’t completed it but that is a lot of money to put in the system.”

DeSantis has additionally confronted criticism for taking credit score for spending federal financial stimulus cash whereas at the identical time criticizing President Joe Biden, a Democrat, for reckless spending, and on at the least one event calling himself “DeSantis Claus,” the Orlando Sentinel has reported.

Since Hurricane Ian, the governor has additionally mentioned his administration is dedicated to rebuilding hard-hit communities like Sanibel Island in southwest Florida, which was left nearly unrecognizable after the hurricane.

“You want to get back to some semblance of normalcy as quickly as possible,” DeSantis mentioned throughout a news briefing the day after Ian. “It’s going to be harder in some areas than others but I want to. Let’s work on Sanibel. And let’s bring it back to where it was as soon as we can.”

Hurricane Andrew slammed into South Florida in 1992 as a Category 5, the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with wind speeds of 165 miles per hour, destroying greater than 25,000 houses and damaging 101,000 others, whereas killing 26 folks.

The state responded by upgrading its constructing codes, requiring stronger resistance to wind.

Those wind codes have labored, however Hurricane Ian, with its highly effective storm surge and widespread torrential rains, exhibits that much more wants to be completed to tackle water from hurricanes, mentioned Lee Constantine, a Republican member of the Seminole County Commission. He’s a former state senator who labored on water and vitality points in addition to hurricane constructing codes whereas a state lawmaker.

The Resilient Florida program is an effective starting however was by no means meant to meet all of Florida’s climate adaptation wants, mentioned Constantine, whose Seminole County was flooded throughout Ian.

“We could do a better job in planning when it comes to flooding,” he mentioned. Hurricanes are going to flood rivers, lakes and streams “but we don’t have to build homes right in the middle of our floodplains,” Constantine mentioned. Climate change, he mentioned, with oceans rising and making hurricanes extra harmful, solely makes it extra pressing to embrace land-use reform in resiliency planning, he added.

In adapting to the future, Florida may even have to tackle the development errors of the previous, he mentioned.

“We are going to have to pay for the consequences of significant damage from not caring about future consequences,” he added.

For too lengthy, too many individuals in Florida didn’t acknowledge the actuality of climate change or take it critically, mentioned Dawn Shirreffs, the Florida director for the Environmental Defense Fund, a nationwide group engaged on Florida climate points.

“We lost a solid decade of preparation that we really needed to help deal with the changing realities of more intense storms,” she mentioned. But that’s altering.

Hurricanes are altering, too, scientists say, intensifying quicker and dropping extra rain.

They are pure phenomena however human-caused climate change is making them extra harmful and rising the devastation they trigger, Hayhoe, the chief scientist with the Nature Conservancy and a professor at Texas Tech, wrote in a LinkedIn post in the speedy aftermath of Ian.

Ian went by means of fast intensification, and the first preliminary attribution study on Ian discovered that human-induced climate change elevated Ian’s excessive rainfall charges by greater than 10 %, in accordance to researchers at Stony Brook University and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

“While we are now in a space where we are aggressively as a state looking forward and developing a comprehensive statewide (adaptation) strategy, we are still in the early days,” Shirreffs cautioned. “We’re still in the process of developing what that statewide strategy is going to look like.

“We are way behind and we are going to have to move faster and more strategically as a result,” she mentioned.

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Ian has come and gone, although restoration will take years.

As communities anticipate future hurricanes and different excessive climate fueled at the least partially by climate change, the 2021 laws that created Resilient Florida is now requiring communities to doc their vulnerabilities and compete for grants for resilience spending. That laws “was absolutely transformational in the state of Florida,” mentioned Erin Deady, an environmental lawyer and planning marketing consultant who works with communities to safe resilience funding.

Communities looking for state funding to make infrastructure enhancements should now take climate change into consideration, comparable to factoring in sea degree rise and adjustments in precipitation patterns for all the things from street work to water administration.

If a venture is to be constructed inland, then “it needs to be resilient to a higher-volume, more-frequent, bad-rain event. If you’re on the coast, then it’s got to be resilient to the compounded effects of sea level rise and rainfall,” she mentioned. “This program is forcing that conversation.”

But destroyed communities like the one on Sanibel Island and excessive devastation elsewhere exhibits that Florida has a good distance to go to higher stand up to a blow from a significant hurricane, she mentioned. Ian offers a possibility to make smarter choices about the place development ought to or shouldn’t happen, or the way it ought to happen, she added.

“I’m hopeful that (Ian) will promote a larger policy discussion with local governments about how they allow and if they allow people to rebuild, especially on those barrier islands,” Deady mentioned. “We’ve got barrier islands all over the state of Florida.”

In central Florida, officers have described the widespread flooding as historic. In some spots, the excessive waters weren’t anticipated to crest for every week or extra after Hurricane Ian, prompting continued flooding and evacuations.

In Altamonte Springs, north of Orlando, in a single neighborhood alongside the Little Wekiva River some 40 houses both have been inundated or inaccessible due to flooded roadways two days after the hurricane.

The neighborhood is in a floodplain and had skilled excessive waters in the previous, most notably after Hurricane Irma in 2017, however residents mentioned these have been nothing like this. Many had evacuated, and some have been getting round in kayaks.

Altamonte Springs Commissioner Jim Turney, who lives close by however was not flooded, was hopeful officers would assist flood victims. But he mentioned he was additionally involved a couple of potential “moral hazard” of enabling folks to reside in a identified floodplain in the first place.

“So you end up encouraging people to take risky behavior and put themselves in harm’s way at the expense of other people who made decisions to stay away and considered that when they purchased their home,” he mentioned. “How do you reach that balance?”

This story was produced in partnership with Inside Climate News.