AMWA submitted comments to the President’s State, Local and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness on September 19. The Task Force was established by President Obama in conjunction with Executive Order 13653, “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change,” to provide recommendations “on removing barriers to resilient investments, modernizing Federal grant and loan programs to better support local efforts, and developing the information and tools they need to prepare, among other measures.”
AMWA provided three recommendations to the Task Force, aimed at facilitating disaster recovery and resilience for water infrastructure as well as the modernization of grant and loan programs.
These are:
- Improve collaboration among federal agencies to consider holistic, consistent cross-sector approaches to resilience in federal policy and regulation. Provide ample opportunities for public-input on cross-sector resilience initiatives.
- Build a federal framework for funding infrastructure that incorporates resilience before it is needed rather than only providing funding for rebuilding post-disaster.
- More clarity and streamlining is needed in the application and administration of disaster relief funding to ensure that rebuilding is done in such a way as to reduce infrastructure risks to future extreme events and disasters.
The full text of AMWA’s recommendations is available on AMWA’s Sustainability Committee webpage. AMWA also submitted a copy of the comments to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and plans to schedule a meeting for follow-up discussions with CEQ.