Every region in the U.S. is experiencing year after year of record-breaking heat. More households now require home cooling solutions to maintain safe and liveable indoor temperatures. Over the last two decades, U.S. consumers and the private sector have leaned heavily into purchasing and marketing conventional air conditioning (AC) systems, such as central air conditioning, window units and portable ACs, to cool down overheating homes. 

While AC can offer immediate relief, the rapid scaling of AC has created dangerous vulnerabilities: rising energy bills are straining people’s wallets and increasing utility debt, while surging electricity demand increases reliance on high-polluting power infrastructure and mounts pressure on an aging power grid increasingly prone to blackouts. There is also an increasing risk of elevated demand for electricity during a heat wave, overloading the grid and triggering prolonged blackouts, causing whole regions to lose their sole cooling strategy. This disruption could escalate into a public health emergency as homes and people overheat, leading to hundreds of deaths. 

What Americans need to be prepared for more extreme temperatures is a resilient cooling strategy. Resilient cooling is an approach that works across three interdependent systems — buildings, communities, and the electric grid — to affordably maintain safe indoor temperatures during extreme heat events and reduce power outage risks. 

This toolkit introduces a set of Policy Principles for Resilient Cooling and outlines a set of actionable policy options and levers for state and local governments to foster broader access to resilient cooling technologies and strategies. For example, states are the primary regulators of public utility commissions, architects of energy and building codes, and distributors of federal and state taxpayer dollars. Local governments are responsible for implementing building standards and zoning codes, enforcing housing and health codes, and operating public housing and retrofit programs that directly shape access to cooling. 

The Policy Principles for Resilient Cooling for a robust resilient cooling strategy are:

• Expand Cooling Access and Affordability. Ensuring that everyone can affordably access cooling will reduce the population-wide risk of heat-related illness and death in communities and the resulting strain on healthcare systems. Targeted financial support tools — such as subsidies, rebates, and incentives — can reduce both upfront and ongoing costs of cooling technologies, thereby lowering barriers and enabling broader adoption. 
• Incorporate Public Health Outcomes as a Driver of Resilience. Indoor heat exposure and heat-driven factors that reduce indoor air quality — such as pollutant accumulation and mold-promoting humidity  — are health risks. Policymakers should embed heat-related health risks into building codes, energy standards, and guidelines for energy system planning, including establishing minimum indoor temperature and air quality requirements, integrating health considerations into energy system planning standards, and investing in multi-solving community system interventions like green infrastructure.
• Advance Sustainability Across the Cooling Lifecycle. Rising demand for air conditioning is intensifying the problem it aims to solve by increasing electricity consumption, prolonging reliance on high-polluting power plants, and leaking refrigerants that release powerful greenhouse gases. Policymakers can adopt codes and standards that reduce reliance on high-emission energy sources and promote low-global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants and passive cooling strategies.
• Promote Solutions for Grid Resilience. The U.S. electric grid is struggling to keep up with rising demand for electricity, creating potential risks to communities’ cooling systems. Policymakers can proactively identify potential vulnerabilities in energy systems’ ability to sustain safe indoor temperatures. Demand-side management strategies, distributed energy resources, and grid-enhancing technologies can prepare the electric grid for increased energy demand and ensure its reliability during extreme heat events.
• Build a Skilled Workforce for Resilient Cooling. Resilient cooling provides an opportunity to create pathways to good-paying jobs, reduce critical workforce gaps, and bolster the broader economy. Investing in a workforce that can design, install, and maintain resilient cooling systems can strengthen local economies, ensure preparedness for all kinds of risks to the system, and bolster American innovation.

By adopting a resilient cooling strategy, state and local policymakers can address today’s overlapping energy, health, and affordability crises, advance American-made innovation, and ensure their communities are prepared for the hotter decades ahead.

The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 4420, the Cool Corridors Act of 2025, which would reauthorize the Healthy Streets program through 2030 and seeks to increase green and other shade infrastructure in high-heat areas.  

Science has shown that increasing sources of shade, including tree canopy and other shade infrastructure, can cool surrounding areas as much as 10 degrees, protecting people and critical infrastructure. The Cool Corridors Act of 2025 would create a unique and reliable funding source for communities to build out their shade infrastructure.

“Extreme heat is a serious threat to public health and critical infrastructure,” says Grace Wickerson, Senior Manager for Climate and Health at the Federation of American Scientists. “Increasing tree canopies and shade infrastructure is a key recommendation in FAS’ 2025 Heat Policy Agenda and we commend Reps Lawler and Strickland for taking action on this.”

Methane is a potent gas with increasingly alarming effects on the climate, human health, agriculture, and the economy. Rapidly rising concentrations of atmospheric methane have contributed about a third of the global warming we’re experiencing today. Methane emissions also contribute to the formation of ground-level ozone, which causes an estimated 1 million premature deaths around the world annually and poses a significant threat to staple crops like wheat, soybeans, and rice. Overall, methane emissions cost the United States billions of dollars each year.

Most methane mitigation efforts to date have rightly focused on reducing methane emissions. However, the increasingly urgent impacts of methane create an increasingly urgent need to also explore options for methane removal. Methane removal is a new field exploring how methane, once in the atmosphere, could be broken down faster than with existing natural systems alone to help lower peak temperatures, and counteract some of the impact of increasing natural methane emissions. This field is currently in the “earliest stages of knowledge discovery”, meaning that there is a tremendous opportunity for the United States to establish its position as the unrivaled world leader in an emerging critical technology – a top goal of the second Trump Administration. Global interest in methane means that there is a largely untapped market for innovative methane-removal solutions. And investment in this field will also generate spillover knowledge discovery for associated fields, including atmospheric, materials, and biological sciences.

Congress and the Administration must move quickly to capitalize on this opportunity. Following the recommendations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)’s October 2024 report, the federal government should incorporate early-stage methane removal research into its energy and earth systems research programs. This can be achieved through a relatively small investment of $50–80 million annually, over an initial 3–5 year phase. This first phase would focus on building foundational knowledge that lays the groundwork for potential future movement into more targeted, tangible applications. 

Challenge and Opportunity

Methane represents an important stability, security, and scientific frontier for the United States. We know that this gas is increasing the risk of severe weather, worsening air quality, harming American health, and reducing crop yields. Yet too much about methane remains poorly understood, including the cause(s) of its recent accelerating rise. A deeper understanding of methane could help scientists better address these impacts – including potentially through methane removal. 

Methane removal is an early-stage research field primed for new American-led breakthroughs and discoveries. To date, four potential methane-removal technologies and one enabling technology have been identified. They are: 

1. Ecosystem uptake enhancement: Increasing microbes’ consumption of methane in soils and trees or getting plants to do so.
2. Surface treatments: Applying special coatings that “eat” methane on panels, rooftops, or other surfaces. 
3. Atmospheric oxidation enhancement: Increasing atmospheric reactions conducive to  methane breakdown. 
4. Methane reactors: Breaking down methane in closed reactors using catalysts, reactive gases, or microbes. 
5. Methane concentrators: A potentially enabling technology that would separate or enrich methane from other atmospheric components.

Figure 1. Atmospheric Methane Removal Technologies. (Source: National Academies Research Agenda)

Many of these proposed technologies have analogous traits to existing carbon dioxide removal methods and other interventions. However, much more research is needed to determine the net climate benefit, cost plausibility and social acceptability of all proposed methane removal approaches. The United States has positioned itself to lead on assessing and developing these technologies, such as through NASEM’s 2024 report and language included in the final FY24 appropriations package directing the Department of Energy to produce its own assessment of the field. The United States also has shown leadership with its civil society funding some of the earliest targeted research on methane removal.

But we risk ceding our leadership position – and a valuable opportunity to reap the benefits of being a first-mover on an emergent technology – without continued investment and momentum. Indeed, investing in methane removal research could help to improve our understanding of atmospheric chemistry and thus unlock novel discoveries in air quality improvement and new breakthrough materials for pollution management. Investing in methane removal, in short, would simultaneously improve environmental quality, unlock opportunities for entrepreneurship, and maintain America’s leadership in basic science and innovation. New research would also help the United States avoid possible technological surprises by competitors and other foreign governments, who otherwise could outpace the United States in their understanding of new systems and approaches and leave the country unprepared to assess and respond to deployment of methane removal elsewhere. 

Plan of Action

The federal government should  launch a five-year Methane Removal Initiative pursuant to the recommendations of the National Academies. A new five-year research initiative will allow the United States to evaluate and potentially develop important new tools and technologies to mitigate security risks arising from the dangerous accumulation of methane in the atmosphere while also helping to maintain U.S. global leadership in innovation. A well-coordinated, broad, cross-cutting federal government effort that fosters collaborations among agencies, research universities, national laboratories, industry, and philanthropy will enable the United States to lead science and technology improvements to meet these goals. To develop any new technologies on timescales most relevant for managing earth system risk, this foundational research should begin this year at an annual level of $50–$80 million per year. Research should last ideally five years and inform a more applied second-phase assessment recommended by the National Academies. 

Consistent with the recommendations from the National Academies’ Atmospheric Methane Removal Research Agenda and early philanthropic seed funding for methane removal research, the Methane Removal Initiative would:

1. Establish a national methane removal research and development program involving key science agencies, primarily the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with contributions from other agencies including the US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Interior, and Environmental Protection Agency. 
2. Focus early investments in foundational research to advance U.S. interests and close knowledge gaps, specifically in the following areas:
   • The “sinks” and sources of methane, including both ground-level and atmospheric sinks as well as  human-driven and natural sources (40% of research budget), 
   • Methane removal technologies, as described below (30% of research budget); and 
   • Potential applications of methane removal, such as demonstration and deployment systems and their interaction with other climate response strategies (30% of research budget). 

The goal of this research program is ultimately to assess the need for and viability of new methods that could break down methane already in the atmosphere faster than natural processes already do alone. This program would be funded through several appropriations subcommittees in Congress, most notably Energy & Water Development and Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies. Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Interior and Environment also have funding recommendations relevant to their subcommittees. As scrutiny grows on the federal government’s fiscal balance, it should be noted that the scale of proposed research funding for methane removal is relatively modest and that no funding has been allocated to this potentially critical area of research to date. Forgoing these investments could result in neglecting this area of innovation at a critical time where there is an opportunity for the United States to demonstrate leadership. 

Conclusion

Emissions reductions remain the most cost-effective means of arresting the rise in atmospheric methane, and improvements in methane detection and leak mitigation will also help America increase its production efficiency by reducing losses, lowering costs, and improving global competitiveness. The National Academies confirms that methane removal will not replace mitigation on timescales relevant to limiting peak warming this century, but the world will still likely face “a substantial methane emissions gap between the trajectory of increasing methane emissions (including from anthropogenically amplified natural emissions) and technically available mitigation measures.” This creates a substantial security risk for the United States in the coming decades, especially given large uncertainties around the exact magnitude of heat-trapping emissions from natural systems. A modest annual investment of $50–80 million can pay much larger dividends in future years through new innovative advanced materials, improved atmospheric models, new pollution control methods, and by potentially enhancing security against these natural systems risks. The methane removal field is currently at a bottleneck: ideas for innovative research abound, but they remain resource-limited. The government has the opportunity to eliminate these bottlenecks to unleash prosperity and innovation as it has done for many other fields in the past. The intensifying rise of atmospheric methane presents the United States with a new grand challenge that has a clear path for action.

On the left is the Bankside Power Station in 1953. That vast relic of the fossil era once towered over London, oily smoke pouring from its towering chimney. These days, Bankside looks like the right:

Bankside Power Station in 1953 via A London Inheritance; Bankside today via the Telegraph.

The old power plant’s vast turbine hall is now at the heart of the airy Tate Modern Art Museum; sculptures rest where the boilers once churned.

Bankside’s evolution into the Tate illustrates that transformations, both literal and figurative, are possible for our energy and economic systems. Some degree of demolition – if paired with a plan – can open up space for something innovative and durable.

Today, the entire energy sector is undergoing a massive transformation. After years of flat energy demand served by aging fossil power plants, solar energy and battery storage are increasingly dominating energy additions to meet rising load. Global investment in clean energy will be twice as big as investment in fossil fuels this year. But in the United States, the energy sector is also undergoing substantial regulatory demolition, courtesy of a wave of executive and Congressional attacks and sweeping potential cuts to tax credits for clean energy. 

What’s missing is a compelling plan for the future. The plan certainly shouldn’t be to cede leadership on modern energy technologies to China, as President Trump seems to be suggesting; that approach is geopolitically unwise and, frankly, economically idiotic. But neither should the plan be to just re-erect the systems that are being torn down. Those systems, in many ways, weren’t working. We need a new plan – a new paradigm – for the next era of climate and clean energy progress in the United States.

Asking Good Questions About Climate Policy Designs

How do we turn demolition into a superior remodel? First, we have to agree on what we’re trying to build. Let’s start with what should be three unobjectionable principles.

Principle 1. Climate change is a problem worth fixing – fast. Climate change is staggeringly expensive. Climate change also wrecks entire cities, takes lives, and generally makes people more miserable. Climate change, in short, is a problem we must fix. Ignoring and defunding climate science is not going to make it go away.

Principle 2. What we do should work. Tackling the climate crisis isn’t just about cleaning up smokestacks or sewer outflows; it’s about shifting a national economic system and physical infrastructure that has been rooted in fossil fuels for more than a century. Our responses must reflect this reality. To the extent possible, we will be much better served by developing fit-for-purpose solutions rather than just press-ganging old institutions, statutes, and technologies into climate service. 

Principle 3. What we do should last. The half-life of many climate strategies in the United States has been woefully short. The Clean Power Plan, much touted by President Obama, never went into force. The Trump administration has now turned off California’s clean vehicle programs multiple times. Much of this hyperpolarized back-and-forth is driven by a combination of far-right opposition to regulation as a matter of principle and the fossil fuel industry pushing mass de-regulation for self-enrichment – a frustrating reality, but one that can only be altered by new strategies that are potent enough to displace vocal political constituencies and entrenched legacy corporate interests.

With these principles in mind, the path forward becomes clearer. We can agree that ambitious climate policy is necessary; protecting Americans from climate threats and destabilization (Principle 1) directly aligns with the founding Constitutional objectives of ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, and promoting general welfare. We can also agree that the problem in front of us is figuring out which tools we need, not how to retain the tools we had, regardless of their demonstrated efficacy (Principle 2). And we can recognize that achieving progress in the long run requires solutions that are both politically and economically durable (Principle 3).

Below, we consider how these principles might guide our responses to this summer’s crop of regulatory reversals and proposed shifts in federal investment.

Honing Regulatory Approaches

The Trump Administration recently announced that it plans to dismantle the “endangerment finding” – the legal predicate for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and transportation; meanwhile, the Senate revoked permission for California to enforce key car and truck emission standards. It has also proposed to roll back key power plant toxic and greenhouse gas standards. We agree with those who think that these actions are scientifically baseless and likely illegal, and therefore support efforts to counter them. But we should also reckon honestly with how the regulatory tools we are defending have played out so far.

Federal and state pollution rules have indisputably been a giant public-health victory. EPA standards under the Clean Air Act led directly to dramatic reductions in harmful particulate matter and other air pollutants, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and avoiding millions of cases of asthma and other respiratory diseases. Federal regulations similarly caused mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants to drop by 90% in just over a decade. Pending federal rollbacks of mercury rules thus warrant vocal opposition. In the transportation sector, tailpipe emissions standards for traditional combustion vehicles have been impressively effective. These and other rules have indeed delivered some climate benefits by forcing the fossil fuel industry to face pollution clean-up costs and driving development of clean technologies.

But if our primary goal is motivating a broad energy transition (i.e., what needs to happen per Principle 1), then we should think beyond pollution rules as our only tools – and allocate resources beyond immediate defensive fights. Why? The first reason is that, as we have previously written, these rules are poorly equipped to drive that transition. Federal and state environmental agencies can do many things well, but running national economic strategy and industrial policy primarily through pollution statutes is hardly the obvious choice (Principle 2). 

Consider the power sector. The most promising path to decarbonize the grid is actually speeding up replacement of old coal and gas plants with renewables by easing unduly complex interconnection processes that would speed adding clean energy to address rising demand, and allow the old plants to retire and be replaced – not bolting pollution-control devices on ancient smokestacks. That’s an economic and grid policy puzzle, not a pollution regulatory challenge, at heart. Most new power plants are renewable- or battery-powered anyway. Some new gas plants might be built in response to growing demand, but the gas turbine pipeline is backed up, limiting the scope of new fossil power, and cheaper clean power is coming online much more quickly wherever grid regulators have their act together. Certainly regulations could help accelerate this shift, but the evidence suggests that they may be complementary, not primary, tools.

The upshot is that economics and subnational policies, not federal greenhouse gas regulation, have largely driven power plant decarbonization to date and therefore warrant our central focus. Indeed, states that have made adding renewable infrastructure easy, like Texas, have often been ahead of states, like California, where regulatory targets are stronger but infrastructure is harder to build. (It’s also worth noting that these same economics mean that the Trump Administration’s efforts to revert back to a wholly fossil fuel economy by repealing federal pollution standards will largely fail – again, wrong tool to substantially change energy trajectories.)

The second reason is that applying pollution rules to climate challenges has hardly been a lasting strategy (Principle 3). Despite nearly two decades of trying, no regulations for carbon emissions from existing power plants have ever been implemented. It turns out to be very hard, especially with the rise of conservative judiciaries, to write legal regulations for power plants under the Clean Air Act that both stand up in Court and actually yield substantial emissions reductions. 

In transportation, pioneering electric vehicle (EV) standards from California – helped along by top-down economic leverage applied by the Obama administration – did indeed begin a significant shift and start winning market share for new electric car and truck companies; under the Biden administration, California doubled down with a new set of standards intended to ultimately phase out all sales of gas-powered cars while the EPA issued tailpipe emissions standards that put the industry on course to achieve at least 50% EV sales by 2030. But California’s EV standards have now been rolled back by the Trump administration and a GOP-controlled Congress multiple times; the same is true for the EPA rules. Lest we think that the Republican party is the sole obstacle to a climate-focused regulatory regime that lasts in the auto sector, it is worth noting that Democratic states led the way on rollbacks. Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Vermont all paused, delayed, or otherwise fuzzed up their plans to deploy some of their EV rules before Congress acted against California. The upshot is that environmental standards, on their own, cannot politically sustain an economic transition at this scale without significant complementary policies.

Now, we certainly shouldn’t abandon pollution rules – they deliver massive health and environmental benefits, while forcing the market to more accurately account for the costs of polluting technologies, But environmental statutes built primarily to reduce smokestack and tailpipe emissions remain important but are simply not designed to be the primary driver of wholesale economic and industrial change. Unsurprisingly, efforts to make them do that anyway have not gone particularly well – so much so that, today, greenhouse gas pollution standards for most economic sectors either do not exist, or have run into implementation barriers. These observations should guide us to double down on the policies that improve the economics of clean energy and clean technology — from financial incentives to reforms that make it easier to build — while developing new regulatory frameworks that avoid the pitfalls of the existing Clean Air Act playbook. For example, we might learn from state regulations like clean electricity standards that have driven deployment and largely withstood political swings.

To mildly belabor the point – pollution standards form part of the scaffolding needed to make climate progress, but they don’t look like the load-bearing center of it.

Refocusing Industrial Policy

Our plan for the future demands fresh thinking on industrial policy as well as regulatory design. Years ago, Nobel laureate Dr. Elinor Ostrom pointed out that economic systems shift not as a result of centralized fiat, from the White House or elsewhere, but from a “polycentric” set of decisions rippling out from every level of government and firm. That proposition has been amply borne out in the clean energy space by waves of technology innovation, often anchored by state and local procurement, regional technology clusters, and pioneering financial institutions like green banks.

The Biden Administration responded to these emerging understandings with the  CHIPS and Science Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – a package of legislation intended to shore up U.S. leadership in clean technology through investments that cut across sectors and geographies. These bills included many provisions and programs with top-down designs, but the package as a whole but did engage with, and encourage, polycentric and deep change.

Here again, taking a serious look at how this package played out can help us understand what industrial policies are most likely to work (Principle 2) and to last (Principle 3) moving forward.

We might begin by asking which domestic clean-technology industries need long-term support and which do not in light of (i) the multi-layered and polycentric structure of our economy, and (ii) the state of play in individual economic sectors and firms at the subnational level. IRA revisions that appropriately phase down support for mature technologies in a given sector or region where deployment is sufficient to cut emissions at an adequate pace could be worth exploring in this light – but only if market-distorting supports for fossil-fuel incumbents are also removed. We appreciate thoughtful reform proposals that have been put forward by those on the left and right.

More directly: If the United States wants to phase down, say, clean power tax credits, such changes should properly be phased with removals of support for fossil power plants and interconnection barriers, shifting the entire energy market towards a fair competition to meet increasing load, as well as new durable regulatory structures that ensure a transition to a low-carbon economy at a sufficient pace. Subsidies and other incentives could appropriately be retained for technologies (e.g., advanced battery storage and nuclear) that are still in relatively early stages and/or for which there is a particularly compelling argument for strengthening U.S. leadership. One could similarly imagine a gradual shift away from EV tax credits – if other transportation system spending was also reallocated to properly balance support among highways, EV charging stations, transit, and other types of transportation infrastructure. In short, economic tools have tremendous power to drive climate progress, but must be paired with the systemic reforms needed to ensure that clean energy technologies have a fair pathway to achieving long-term economic durability.

Our analysis can also touch on geopolitical strategy. It is true that U.S. competitors are ahead in many clean technology fields; it is simultaneously true that the United States has a massive industrial and research base that can pivot ably with support. A pure on-shoring approach is likely to be unwise – and we have just seen courts enjoin the administration’s fiat tariff policy that sought that result. That’s a good opportunity to have a more thoughtful conversation (in which many are already engaging) on areas where tariffs, public subsidies, and other on-shoring planning can actually position our nation for long-term economic competition on clean technology. Opportunities that rise to the top include advanced manufacturing, such as for batteries, and critical industries, like the auto sector. There is also a surprising but potent national security imperative to center clean energy infrastructure in U.S. industrial policy, given the growing threat of foreign cyberattacks that are exploiting “seams” in fragile legacy energy systems.

Finally, our analysis suggests that states, which are primarily responsible for economic policy in their jurisdictions, have a role to play in this polycentric strategy that extends beyond simply replicating repealed federal regulations. States have a real opportunity in this moment to wed regulatory initiatives with creative whole-of-the-economy approaches that can actually deliver change and clean economic diversification, positioning them well to outlast this period of churn and prosper in a global clean energy transition.

A successful and “sticky” modern industrial policy must weave together all of the above considerations – it must be intentionally engineered to achieve economic and political durability through polycentric change, rather than relying solely or predominantly on large public subsidies. 

Conclusion

The Trump Administration has moved with alarming speed to demolish programs, regulations, and institutions that were intended to make our communities and planet more liveable. Such wholesale demolition is unwarranted, unwise, and should not proceed unchecked. At the same time, it is, as ever, crucial to plan for the future. There is broad agreement that achieving an effective, equitable, and ethical energy transition requires us to do something different. Yet there are few transpartisan efforts to boldly reimagine regulatory and economic paradigms. Of course, we are not naive: political gridlock, entrenched special interests, and institutional inertia are formidable obstacles to overcome. But there is still room, and need, to try – and effort bears better fruit when aimed at the right problems. We can begin by seriously debating which past approaches work, which need to be improved, which ultimately need imaginative recasting to succeed in our ever-more complex world. Answers may be unexpected. After all, who would have thought that the ultimate best future of the vast oil-fired power station south of the Thames with which we began this essay would, a few decades later, be a serene and silent hall full of light and reflection?

DC’s first-ever Climate Week brought with it many chances to discuss the hottest-button topics in climate innovation and policy. FAS took the opportunity to do just that, by hosting a panel to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), energy, and climate issues with leading experts. Dr. Oliver Stephenson, FAS’ Associate Director of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Policy, sat down with Dr. Tanya Das, Dr. Costa Samaras, and Charles Hua to discuss what’s at stake at this critical crossroads moment. 

Missed the panel? Don’t fret. Read on to learn the need-to-knows. Here’s how these experts think we can maximize the “good” and minimize the “bad” of AI and data centers, leverage research and development (R&D) to make AI tools more successful and efficient, and how to better align incentives for AI growth with the public good.

First, Some Level Setting 

The panelists took their time to make sure the audience understood two key facts regarding this space. First, not all data centers are utilized for AI. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) estimates that AI applications are only used in about 10-20% of data centers. The rest? Data storage, web hosting capabilities, other cloud computing, and more.

Second, load growth due to the energy demand of data centers is happening, but the exact degree still remains unknown. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) models project that data centers in the US will consume anywhere between 6.7% and 12% of US electricity generation by 2028. For a country that consumes roughly 4 trillion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity each year, this estimation spans a couple hundred billion kWh/year from the low end to the high. Also, these projections are calculated based on different assumptions that factor in AI energy efficiency improvements, hardware availability, regulatory decisions, modeling advancements, and just how much demand there will be for AI. When each of these conditions are evolving daily, even the most credible projections come with a good amount of uncertainty.

There is also ambiguity in the numbers and in the projections at the local and state levels, as many data center companies shop around to multiple utilities to get the best deal. This can sometimes lead to projects getting counted twice in local projections. Researchers at LBNL have recently said they can confidently make data center energy projections out to 2028. Beyond that, they can’t make reasonable assumptions about data center load growth amid growing load from other sectors working to electrify—like decarbonizing buildings and electric vehicle (EV) adoption.

Maximizing the Good, Minimizing the Bad

As data center clusters continue to proliferate across the United States, their impacts—on energy systems and load growth, water resources, housing markets, and electricity rates—will be most acutely felt at the state and local levels. DC’s nearby neighbor Northern Virginia has become a “data center alley” with more than 200 data centers in Loudoun County alone, and another 117 in the planning stages. 

States ultimately hold the power to shape the future of the industry through utility regulation, zoning laws, tax incentives, and grid planning – with specific emphasis on state Public Utility Commissions (PUCs). PUCs have a large influence on where data centers can be connected to the grid and the accompanying rate structure for how each data center pays for its power—whether through tariffs, increasing consumer rates, or other cost agreements. It is imperative that vulnerable ratepayers are not left to shoulder the costs and risks associated with the rapid expansion of data centers, including higher electricity bills, increased grid strain, and environmental degradation.

Panelists emphasized that despite the potential negative impacts of AI and data centers expansion, leaders have a real opportunity to leverage AI to maximize positive outcomes—like improving grid efficiency, accelerating clean energy deployment, and optimizing public services—while minimizing harms like overconsumption of energy and water, or reinforcing environmental injustice. Doing so, however, will require new economic and political incentives that align private investment with public benefit.

Research & Development at the Department of Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is uniquely positioned to help solve the challenges AI and data centers pose, as the agency sits at the critical intersection of AI development, high-performance computing, and energy systems. DOE’s national laboratories have been central to advancing AI capabilities: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) was indeed the first to integrate graphics processing units (GPUs) into supercomputers, pioneering a new era of AI training and modeling capacity. DOE also runs two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers – Aurora at Argonne National Lab and Frontier at ORNL – cementing the U.S.’ leadership in high-performance computing.  

Beyond computing, DOE plays a key role in modernizing grid infrastructure, advancing clean energy technologies, and setting efficiency standards for energy-intensive operations like data centers. The agency has also launched programs like the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security and Technology (FASST), overseen by the Office of Critical and Emerging Tech (CET), to coordinate AI-related activities across its programs.

As the intersection of AI and energy deepens—with AI driving data center expansion and offering tools to manage its impact—DOE must remain at the center of this conversation, and it must continue to deliver. The stakes are high: how we manage this convergence will influence not only the pace of technological innovation but also the equity and sustainability of our energy future.

Incentivizing Incentives: Aligning AI Growth with the Public Good 

The U.S. is poised to spend a massive amount of carbon to power the next wave of artificial intelligence. From training LLMs to supporting real-time AI applications, the energy intensity of this sector is undeniable—and growing. That means we’re not just investing financially in AI; we’re investing environmentally. To ensure that this investment delivers public value, we must align political and economic incentives with societal outcomes like grid stability, decarbonization, and real benefits for American communities.

One of the clearest opportunities lies in making data centers more responsive to the needs of the electric grid. While these facilities consume enormous amounts of power, they also hold untapped potential to act as flexible loads—adjusting their demand based on grid conditions to support reliability and integrate clean energy. The challenge? There’s currently little economic incentive for them to do so. One panelist noted skepticism that market structures alone will drive this shift without targeted policy support or regulatory nudges.

Instead, many data centers continue to benefit from “sweetheart deals”—generous tax abatements and economic development incentives offered by states and municipalities eager to attract investment. These agreements often lack transparency and rarely require companies to contribute to local energy resilience or emissions goals. For example, in several states, local governments have offered multi-decade property tax exemptions or reduced electricity rates without any accountability for climate impact or grid contributions.

New AI x Energy Policy Ideas Underway

If we’re going to spend gigatons of carbon in pursuit of AI-driven innovation, we must be strategic about where and how we direct incentives. That means:

• Conditioning public subsidies on data center flexibility and efficiency performance.
• Requiring visibility into private energy agreements and emissions footprints.
• Designing market signals—like time-of-use pricing or demand response incentives—that reward facilities for operating in sync with clean energy resources.

We don’t just need more incentives—we need better ones. And we need to ensure they serve public priorities, not just private profit. Through our AI x Energy Policy Sprint, FAS is working with leading experts to develop promising policy solutions for the Trump administration, Congress, and state and local governments. These policy memos will address how to: mitigate the energy and environmental impacts of AI systems and data centers, enhance the reliability and efficiency of energy systems using AI applications, and unlock transformative technological solutions with AI and energy R&D. 

Right now, we have a rare opportunity to shape U.S. policy at the critical intersection of AI and energy. Acting decisively today ensures we can harness AI to drive innovation, revolutionize energy solutions, and sustainably integrate transformative technologies into our infrastructure.

More Extreme Weather Leads to More Public Health Emergencies

Extreme heat and wildfire smoke both pose significant and worsening public health threats in the United States. Extreme heat causes the premature deaths of an estimated 10,000 people in the U.S. each year, while more frequent and widespread wildfire smoke exposure has set back decades of progress on air quality in many states. Importantly, these two hazards are related: extreme heat can worsen and prolong wildfire risk, which can increase smoke exposure. 

Extreme heat and wildfire smoke events are independently becoming more frequent and severe, but what is overlooked is that they are often occurring in the same place at the same time. Emerging research suggests that the combined impact of these hazards may be worse than the sum of their individual impacts. These combined impacts have the potential to put additional pressure on already overburdened healthcare systems, public budgets, and vulnerable communities. Failing to account for these combined impacts could leave communities unprepared for these extreme weather events in 2025 and beyond.

To ensure resilience and improve public health outcomes for all, policymakers should consider the intersection of wildfire smoke and extreme heat at all levels of government. Our understanding of how extreme heat and wildfire smoke compound is still nascent, which limits national and local capacity to plan ahead. Researchers and policymakers should invest in understanding how extreme heat and wildfire smoke compound and use this knowledge to design synergistic solutions that enhance infrastructure resilience and ultimately save lives. 

Intersecting Health Impacts of Extremely Hot, Smoky Days

Wildfire smoke and extreme heat can each be deadly. As mentioned, exposure to extreme heat causes the premature deaths of an estimated 10,000 people in the U.S. a year. Long-term exposure to extreme heat can also worsen chronic conditions like kidney disease, diabetes, hypertension, and asthma. Exposure to the primary component of wildfire smoke, known as fine particulate matter (PM_2.5), contributes to an additional estimated 16,000 American deaths annually. Wildfire smoke exacerbates and causes various respiratory and cardiovascular effects along with other health issues, such as asthma attacks and heart failure, increasing risk of early death. 

New research suggests that the compounding health impacts of heat and smoke co-exposure could be even worse. For example, a recent analysis found that the co-occurrence of extreme heat and wildfire smoke in California leads to more hospitalizations for cardiopulmonary problems than on heat days or smoke days alone. 

Extreme heat also contributes to the formation of ground-level ozone. Like wildfire smoke, ground-level ozone can cause respiratory problems and exacerbate pre-existing conditions. This has already happened at scale: during the 2020 wildfire season, more than 68% of the western U.S. – about 43 million people – were affected in a single day by both ground-level ozone extremes and fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke.

Impacts on Populations Most Vulnerable to Combined Heat and Smoke

While extreme heat and wildfire smoke can pose health risks to everyone, there are some groups that are more vulnerable either because they are more likely to be exposed, they are more likely to suffer more severe health consequences when they are exposed, or both. Below, we highlight groups that are most vulnerable to extreme heat and smoke and therefore may be vulnerable to the compound impacts of these hazards. More research is needed to understand how the compound impacts will affect the health of these populations.

Housing-Vulnerable and Housing-Insecure People

Access to air conditioning at home and work, tree canopy cover, buildings with efficient wildfire smoke filtration and heat insulation and cooling capacities, and access to  smoke centers are all important protective factors against the effects of extreme heat and/or wildfire smoke. People lacking these types of infrastructure are at higher risk for the health effects of these two hazards as a result of increased exposure. In California, for example, communities with lower incomes and higher population density experience a greater likelihood of negative health impacts from hazards like wildfire smoke and extreme heat. 

Outdoor Workers

Representing about 33% of the national workforce, outdoor workers — farmworkers, firefighters, and construction workers — experience much higher rates of exposure to environmental hazards, including wildfire smoke and extreme heat, than other workers. Farmworkers are particularly vulnerable even among outdoor workers; in fact, they face a 35 times greater risk of heat exposure death than other outdoor workers. Additionally, outdoor workers are often lower-income, making it harder to afford protections and seek necessary medical care. Twenty percent of agricultural worker families live below the national poverty line.

Wildfire smoke exposure is estimated to have caused $125 billion in lost wages annually from 2007 to 2019 and extreme heat exposure is estimated to cause $100 billion in wage losses each year. Without any changes to policies and practice, these numbers are only expected to rise. These income losses may exacerbate inequities in poverty rates and economic mobility, which determine overall health outcomes.

Pregnant Mothers and Infants

Extreme heat and wildfire smoke also pose a significant threat to the health of pregnant mothers and their babies. For instance, preterm birth is more likely during periods of higher temperatures and during wildfire smoke events. This correlation is significantly stronger among people who were simultaneously exposed to extreme heat and wildfire smoke PM_2.5.

Preterm birth comes with an array of risks for both the pregnant mothers and baby and is the leading cause of infant mortality. Babies born prematurely are more likely to have a range of serious health complications in addition to long-term developmental challenges. For the parent, having a preterm baby can have significant mental health impacts and financial challenges.

Children

Wildfire smoke and extreme heat both have significant impacts on children’s health, development, and learning. Children are uniquely vulnerable to heat because their bodies do not regulate temperatures as efficiently as adults, making it harder to cool down and putting their bodies under stress. Children are also more vulnerable to air pollution from wildfire smoke as they inhale more air relative to their weight than adults and because their bodies and brains are still developing.  PM_2.5 exposure from wildfires has been attributed to neuropsychological effects, such as ADHD, autism, impaired school performance, and decreased memory. 

When schools remain open during extreme weather events like heat and smoke, student learning is impacted. Research has found that each 1℉ increase in temperature leads to 1% decrease in annual academic achievement. However, when schools close due to wildfire smoke or heat events, children lose crucial learning time and families must secure alternative childcare.

Low-income students are more likely to be in schools without adequate air conditioning because their districts have fewer funds available for school improvement projects. This barrier has only been partially remedied in recent years through federal investments.

Older Adults

Older adults are more likely to have multiple chronic conditions, many of which increase vulnerability to extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and their combined effects. Older adults are also more likely to take regular medication, such as beta blockers for heart conditions, which increase predisposition to heat-related illness.

The most medically vulnerable older adults are in long-term care facilities. There is currently a national standard for operating temperatures for long-term care facilities, requiring them to operate at or below 81℉. There is no correlatory standard for wildfire smoke. Preliminary studies have found that long-term care facilities are unprepared for smoke events; in some facilities the indoor air quality is no better than the outdoor air quality.

Challenges and Opportunities for the Healthcare Sector

The impacts of extreme heat and smoke have profound implications for public health and therefore for healthcare systems and costs. Extreme heat alone is expected to lead to $1 billion in U.S. healthcare costs every summer, while wildfire smoke is estimated to cost the healthcare system $16 billion every year from respiratory hospital visits and PM_2.5 related deaths. 

Despite these high stakes, healthcare providers and systems are not adequately prepared to address wildfire smoke, extreme heat, and their combined effects. Healthcare preparedness and response is limited by a lack of real-time information about morbidity and mortality expected from individual extreme heat and smoke events. For example, wildfire smoke events are often reported on a one-month delay, making it difficult to anticipate smoke impacts in real time. Further, despite the risks posed by heat and smoke independently and when combined, healthcare providers are largely not receiving education about environmental health and climate change. As a result, physicians also do not routinely screen their patients for health risk and existing protective measures, such as the existence of air conditioning and air filtration in the home. 

Potential solutions to improve preparedness in the healthcare sector include developing more reliable real-time information about the potential impacts of smoke, heat, and both combined; training physicians in screening patients for risk of heat and smoke exposure; and training physicians in how to help patients manage extreme weather risks. 

Challenges and Opportunities for Federal, State, and Local Governments 

State and local governments have a role to play in building facilities that are resilient to extreme heat and wildfire smoke as well as educating people about how to protect themselves. However, funding for extreme heat and wildfire smoke is scarce and difficult for local jurisdictions in need to obtain. While some federal funding is available specifically to support smoke preparedness (e.g., EPA’s Wildfire Smoke Preparedness in Community Buildings Grant Program) and heat preparedness (e.g. NOAA NIHHIS’ Centers of Excellence), experts note that the funding landscape for both hazards is “limited and fragmented.” To date, communities have not been able to secure federal disaster funding for smoke or heat events through the Public Health Emergency Declaration or the Stafford Act. FEMA currently excludes the impacts on human health from economic valuations of losses from a disaster. As a result, many of these impacted communities never see investments from post-disaster hazard mitigation, which could potentially build community resilience to future events. Even if a declaration was made, it would likely be for one “event”, e.g. wildfire smoke or extreme heat, with recovery dollars targeted towards mitigating the impacts of that event. Without careful consideration, rebuilding and resilience investments might be maladaptive for addressing the combined impacts.

Next Steps

The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission report offers a number of recommendations to improve how the federal government can better support communities in preparing for the impacts of wildfire smoke and acknowledges the need for more research on how heat and wildfire smoke compound. FAS has also developed a whole-government strategy towards extreme heat response, resilience, and preparedness that includes nearly 200 recommendations and notes the need for more data inputs on compounding hazards like wildfire smoke. Policymakers at the federal level should support research at the intersection of these topics and explore opportunities for providing technical assistance and funding that builds resilience to both hazards.

Understanding and planning for the compound impacts of extreme heat and wildfire smoke will improve public health preparedness, mitigate public exposure to extreme heat and wildfire smoke, and minimize economic losses. As the overarching research at this intersection is still emerging, there is a need for more data to inform policy actions that effectively allocate resources and reduce harm to the most vulnerable populations. The federal government must prioritize protection from both extreme heat and wildfire smoke, along with their combined effects, to fulfill its obligation to keep the public safe.

It’s official: 2024 was the hottest year on record. But Americans don’t need official statements to tell them what they already know: our country is heating up, and we’re deeply unprepared.

Extreme heat has become a national economic crisis: lowering productivity, shrinking business revenue, destroying crops, and pushing power grids to the brink. The impacts of extreme heat cost our Nation an estimated $162 billion in 2024 – equivalent to nearly 1% of the U.S. GDP.

Extreme heat is also taking a human toll. Heat kills more Americans every year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. The number of heat-related illnesses is even higher. And even when heat doesn’t kill, it severely compromises quality of life. This past summer saw days when more than 100 million Americans were under a heat advisory. That means that there were days when it was too hot for a third of our country to safely work or play.

We have to do better. And we can.

Attached is a comprehensive 2025 Heat Policy Agenda for the Trump Administration and 119^th Congress to better prepare for, manage, and respond to extreme heat. The Agenda represents insights from hundreds of experts and community leaders. If implemented, it will build readiness for the 2025 heat season – while laying the foundation for a more heat-resilient nation.

Core recommendations in the Agenda include the following:

1. Establish a clear, sustained federal governance structure for extreme heat. This will involve elevating, empowering, and dedicating funds to the National Interagency Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS), establishing a National Heat Executive Council, and designating a National Heat Coordinator in the White House.
2. Amend the Stafford Act to explicitly define extreme heat as a “major disaster”, and expand the definition of damages to include non-infrastructure impacts.
3. Direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to consider declaring a Public Health Emergency in the event of exceptional, life-threatening heat waves, and fully fund critical HHS emergency-response programs and resilient healthcare infrastructure.
4. Direct the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to include extreme heat as a core component of national preparedness capabilities and provide guidance on how extreme heat events or compounding hazards could qualify as major disasters.
5. Finalize a strong rule to prevent heat injury and illness in the workplace, and establish Centers of Excellence to protect troops, transportation workers, farmworkers, and other essential personnel from extreme heat.
6. Retain and expand home energy rebates, tax credits, LIHEAP, and the Weatherization Assistance Program, to enable deep retrofits that cut the costs of cooling for all Americans and prepare homes and other infrastructure against threats like power outages.
7. Transform the built and landscaped environment through strategic investments in urban forestry and green infrastructure to cool communities, transportation systems to secure safe movement of people and goods, and power infrastructure to ready for greater load demand.

The way to prevent deaths and losses from extreme heat is to act before heat hits. Our 60+ organizations, representing labor, industry, health, housing, environmental, academic and community associations and organizations, urge President Trump and Congressional leaders to work quickly and decisively throughout the new Administration and 119th Congress to combat the growing heat threat. America is counting on you.

Executive Branch

Federal agencies can do a great deal to combat extreme heat under existing budgets and authorities. By quickly integrating the actions below into an Executive Order or similar directive, the President could meaningfully improve preparedness for the 2025 heat season while laying the foundation for a more heat-resilient nation in the long term. 

Streamline and improve extreme heat management.

More than thirty federal agencies and offices share responsibility for acting on extreme heat. A better structure is needed for the federal government to seamlessly manage and build resilience. To streamline and improve the federal extreme heat response, the President must:

• Establish the National Integrated Heat-Health Information System (NIHHIS) Interagency Committee (IC). The IC will elevate the existing NIHHIS Interagency Working Group and empower it to shape and structure multi-agency heat initiatives under current authorities. 
• Establish a National Heat Executive Council comprising representatives from relevant stakeholder groups (state and local governments, health associations, infrastructure professionals, academic experts, community organizations, technologists, industry, national laboratories, etc.) to inform the NIHHIS IC.
• Appoint a National Heat Coordinator (NHC). The NHC would sit in the Executive Office of the President and be responsible for achieving national heat preparedness and resilience. To be most effective, the NHC should:
  • Work closely with the IC to create goals for heat preparedness and resilience in accordance with the National Heat Strategy, set targets, and annually track progress toward implementation.
  • Each spring, deliver a National Heat Action Plan and National Heat Outlook briefing, modeled on the National Hurricane Outlook briefing, detailing how the federal government is preparing for forecasted extreme heat.
  • Find areas of alignment with efforts to address other extreme weather threats.
• Direct the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the National Guard Bureau, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to create an incident command system for extreme heat emergencies, modeled on the National Hurricane Program.
• Direct the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to review agency budgets for extreme heat activities and propose crosscut budgets to support interagency efforts.

Boost heat preparedness, response, and resilience in every corner of our nation.

Extreme heat has become a national concern, threatening every community in the United States. To boost heat preparedness, response, and resilience nationwide, the President must:

• Direct FEMA to ensure that heat preparedness is a core component of national preparedness capabilities. At minimum, FEMA should support extreme heat regional scenario planning and tabletop exercises; incorporate extreme heat into Emergency Support Functions, the National Incident Management System, and the Community Lifelines program; help states, municipalities, tribes, and territories integrate heat into Hazard Mitigation Planning; work with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to provide language-accessible alerts via the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System; and clarify when extreme heat becomes a major disaster.
• Direct FEMA, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), and other agencies that use Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) for funding decisions to ensure that BCA methodologies adequately represent impacts of extreme heat, such as economic losses, learning losses, wage losses, and healthcare costs. This may require updating existing methods to avoid systematically and unintentionally disadvantaging heat-mitigation projects.
• Direct FEMA, in accordance with Section 322 of the Stafford Act, to create guidance on extreme heat hazard mitigation and eligibility criteria for hazard mitigation projects.
• Direct agencies participating in the Thriving Communities Network to integrate heat adaptation into place-based technical assistance and capacity-building resources.
• Direct the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to form a working group on accelerating resilience innovation, with extreme heat as an emphasis area. Within a year, the group should deliver a report on opportunities to use tools like federal research and development, public-private partnerships, prize challenges, advance market commitments, and other mechanisms to position the United States as a leader on game-changing resilience technologies.

Usher in a new era of heat forecasting, research, and data.

Extreme heat’s impacts are not well-quantified, limiting a systematic national response. To usher in a new era of heat forecasting, research, and data, the President must:

• Direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Weather Service (NWS) to expand the HeatRisk tool to include Alaska, Hawaii, and U.S. territories; provide information on real-time health impacts; and integrate sector-specific data so that HeatRisk can be used to identify risks to energy and the electric grid, health systems, transportation infrastructure, and more.
• Direct NOAA, through NIHHIS, to rigorously assess the impacts of extreme heat on all sectors of the economy, including agriculture, energy, health, housing, labor, and transportation. In tandem, NIHHIS and OMB should develop metrics tracking heat impact that can be incorporated into agency budget justifications and used to evaluate federal infrastructure investments and grant funding.
• Direct the NIHHIS IC to establish a new working group focused on methods for measuring heat-related deaths, illnesses, and economic impacts. The working group should create an inventory of federal datasets that track heat impacts, such as the National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS) datasets and power outage data from the Energy Information Administration. 
• Direct NWS to define extreme heat weather events, such as “heat domes”, which will help unlock federal funding and coordinate disaster responses across federal agencies.

Protect workers and businesses from heat.

Americans become ill and even die due to heat exposure in the workplace, a moral failure that also threatens business productivity. To protect workers and businesses, the President must:

• Finalize a strong rule to prevent heat injury and illness in the workplace. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA)’s August 2024 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is a crucial step towards a federal heat standard to protect workers. OSHA should quickly finalize this standard prior to the 2025 heat season.
• Direct OSHA to continue implementing the agency’s National Emphasis Program on heat, which enforces employers’ obligation to protect workers against heat illness or injury. OSHA should additionally review employers’ practices to ensure that workers are protected from job or wage loss when extreme heat renders working conditions unsafe.
• Direct the Department of Labor (DOL) to conduct a nationwide study examining the impacts of heat on the U.S. workforce and businesses. The study should quantify and monetize heat’s impacts on labor, productivity, and the economy.
• Direct DOL to provide technical assistance to employers on tailoring heat illness prevention plans and implementing cost-effective interventions that improve working conditions while maintaining productivity.

Prepare healthcare systems for heat impacts.

Extreme heat is both a public health emergency and a chronic stress to healthcare systems. Addressing the chronic disease epidemic will be impossible without treating the symptom of extreme heat. To prepare healthcare systems for heat impacts, the President must:

• Direct the HHS Secretary to consider using their authority to declare a Public Health Emergency in the event of an extreme heat wave.
• Direct HHS to embed extreme heat throughout the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), including by:
  • Developing heat-specific response guidance for healthcare systems and clinics.
  • Establishing thresholds for mobilizing the National Disaster Medical System.
  • Providing extreme heat training to the Medical Reserve Corps.
  • Simulating the cascading impacts of extreme heat through Medical Response and Surge Exercise scenarios and tabletop exercises.
• Direct HHS and the Department of Education to partner on training healthcare professionals on heat illnesses, impacts, risks to vulnerable populations, and treatments.
• Direct the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to integrate resilience metrics, including heat resilience, into its quality measurement programs. Where relevant, environmental conditions, such as chronic high heat, should be considered in newly required screenings for the social determinants of health.
• Direct the CDC’s Collaborating Office for Medical Examiners and Coroners to develop a standard protocol for surveillance of deaths caused or exacerbated by extreme heat.

Ensure affordably cooled and heat-resilient housing, schools, and other facilities.

Cool homes, schools, and other facilities are crucial to preventing heat illness and death. To prepare the build environment for rising temperatures, the President must:

Promote Housing and Cooling Access

• Direct HUD to protect vulnerable populations by (i) updating Manufactured Home Construction and Safety Standards to ensure that manufactured homes can maintain safe indoor temperatures during extreme heat, (ii) stipulating that mobile home park owners applying for Section 207 mortgages guarantee resident safety in extreme heat (e.g., by including heat in site hazard plans and allowing tenants to install cooling devices, cool walls, and shade structures), and (iii) guaranteeing that renters receiving housing vouchers or living in public housing have access to adequate cooling.
• Direct the Federal Housing Finance Agency to require that new properties must adhere to the latest energy codes and ensure minimum cooling capabilities in order to qualify for a Government Sponsored Enterprise mortgage.
• Ensure access to cooling devices as a medical necessity by directing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to include high-efficiency air conditioners and heat pumps in Publication 502, which defines eligible medical expenses for a variety of programs.
• Direct HHS to (i) expand outreach and education to state Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) administrators and subgrantees about eligible uses of funds for cooling, (ii) expand vulnerable populations criteria to include pregnant people, and (iii) allow weatherization benefits to apply to cool roofs and walls or green roofs.
• Direct agencies to better understand population vulnerability to extreme heat, such as by integrating the Census Bureau’s Community Resilience Estimates for Heat into existing risk and vulnerability tools and updating the American Community Survey with a question about cooling access to understand household-level vulnerability.
• Direct the Department of Energy (DOE) to work with its Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) contractors to ensure that home energy audits consider passive cooling interventions like cool walls and roofs, green roofs, strategic placement of trees to provide shading, solar shading devices, and high-efficiency windows. 
• Extend the National Initiative to Advance Building Codes (NIABC), and direct agencies involved in that initiative to (i) develop codes and metrics for sustainable and passive cooling, shade, materials selection, and thermal comfort, and (ii) identify opportunities to accelerate state and local adoption of code language for extreme heat adaptation.

Prepare Schools and Other Facilities

• Direct the Department of Education to collect data to better understand how schools are experiencing and responding to extreme heat, and to strengthen education and outreach on heat safety and preparedness for schools. This should include sponsored sports teams and physical activity programs. The Department should also collaborate with USDA on strategies to braid funding for green and shaded schoolyards.
• Direct the Administration for Children and Families to develop extreme heat guidance and temperature standards for Early Childhood Facilities and Daycares.
• Direct USDA to develop a waiver process for continuing school food service when extreme heat disrupts schedules during the school year.
• Direct the General Services Administration (GSA) to identify and pursue opportunities to demonstrate passive and resilient cooling strategies in public buildings.
• Direct the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to increase coordination with long-term care facilities during heat events to ensure compliance with existing indoor temperature regulations, develop plans for mitigating excess indoor heat, and build out energy redundancy plans, such as back-up power sources like microgrids.
• Direct the Bureau of Prisons, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to collect data on air conditioning coverage in federal prisons and detention facilities and develop temperature standards that ensure thermal safety of inmates and the prison and detention workforce.
• Direct the White House Domestic Policy Council to create a Cool Corridors Federal Partnership, modeled after the Urban Waters Federal Partnership. The partnership of agencies would leverage data, research, and existing grant programs for community-led pilot projects to deploy heat mitigation efforts, like trees, along transportation routes.

Legislative Branch

Congress can support the President in combating extreme heat by increasing funds for heat-critical federal programs and by providing new and explicit authorities for federal agencies.

Treat extreme heat like the emergency it is.

Extreme heat has devastating human and societal impacts that are on par with other federally recognized disasters. To treat extreme heat like the emergency it is, Congress must:

• Institutionalize and provide long-term funding for the National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS), the NIHHIS Interagency Committee (IC), and the National Heat Executive Council (NHEC), including functions and personnel. NIHHIS is critical to informing heat preparedness, response, and resilience across the nation. An IC and NHEC will ensure federal government coordination and cross-sector collaboration.
• Create the National Heat Commission, modeled on the Wildfire Mitigation and Management Commission. The Commission’s first action should be creating a report for Congress on whole-of-government solutions to address extreme heat.
• Adopt H.R. 3965, which would amend the Stafford Act to explicitly include extreme heat in the definition of “major disaster”. Congress should also define the word “damages” in Section 102 of the Stafford Act to include impacts beyond property and economic losses, such as learning losses, wage losses, and healthcare costs.
• Direct and fund FEMA, NOAA, and CDC to establish a real-time heat alert system that aligns with the World Meteorological Organization’s Early Warnings for All program. 
• Direct the Congressional Budget Office to produce a report assessing the costs of extreme heat to taxpayers and summarizing existing federal funding levels for heat.
• Appropriate full funding for emergency contingency funds for LIHEAP and the Public Health Emergency Program, and increase the annual baseline funding for LIHEAP.
• Update the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act to prohibit residential utilities from shutting off beneficiaries’ power during periods of extreme heat due to overdue bills.
• Adopt S. 2501, which would keep workers safe by requiring basic labor protections, such as water and breaks, in the event of indoor and outdoor extreme temperatures.
• Establish sector-specific Centers of Excellence for Heat Workplace Safety, beginning with military, transportation, and farm labor.

Build community heat resilience by readying critical infrastructure.

Investments in resilience pay dividends, with every federal dollar spent on resilience returning $6 in societal benefits. Our nation will benefit from building thriving communities that are prepared for extreme heat threats, adapted to rising temperatures, and capable of withstanding extreme heat disruptions. To build community heat resilience, Congress must:

• Establish the HeatSmart Grids Initiative as a partnership between DOE, FEMA, HHS, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). This initiative will ensure that electric grids are prepared for extreme heat, including risk of energy system failures during extreme heat and the necessary emergency and public health responses. This program should (i) perform national audits of energy security and building-stock preparedness for outages, (ii) map energy resilience assets such as long-term energy storage and microgrids, (iii) leverage technologies for minimizing grid loads such as smart grids and virtual power plants, and (iv) coordinate protocols with FEMA’s Community Lifelines and CISA’s Critical Infrastructure for emergency response.  
• Update the LIHEAP formula to better reflect cooling needs of low-income Americans.
• Amend Title I of the Elementary & Secondary Education Act to clarify that Title I funds may be used for school infrastructure upgrades needed to avoid learning loss; e.g., replacement of HVAC systems or installation of cool roofs, walls, and pavements and solar and other shade canopies, green roofs, trees and green infrastructure to keep school buildings at safe temperatures during heat waves. 
• Direct the HHS Secretary to submit a report to Congress identifying strategies for maximizing federal childcare assistance dollars during the hottest months of the year, when children are not in school. This could include protecting recent increased childcare reimbursements for providers who conform to cooling standards.
• Direct the HUD Secretary to submit a report to Congress identifying safe residential temperature standards for federally assisted housing units and proposing strategies to ensure compliance with the standards, such as extending utility allowances to cooling.
• Direct the DOT Secretary to conduct an independent third-party analysis of cool pavement products to develop metrics to evaluate thermal performance over time, durability, road subsurface temperatures, road surface longevity, and solar reflectance across diverse climatic conditions and traffic loads. Further, the analysis should assess (i) long-term performance and maintenance and (ii) benefits and potential trade-offs.
• Fund FEMA to establish a new federal grant program for community heat resilience, modeled on California’s “Extreme Heat and Community Resilience” program and in line with H.R. 9092. This program should include state agencies and statewide consortia as eligible grantees. States should be required to develop and adopt an extreme heat preparedness plan to be eligible for funds. 
• Authorize and fund a new National Resilience Hub program at FEMA. This program would define minimum criteria that must be met for a community facility to be federally recognized as a resilience hub, and would provide funding to subsidize operations and emergency response functions of recognized facilities. Congress should also direct the FEMA Administrator to consider activities to build or retrofit a community facility meeting these criteria as eligible activities for Section 404 Hazard Mitigation Grants and funding under the Building Resilience Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program.
• Authorize and fund HHS to establish an Extreme Weather Resilient Health System Grant Program to prepare low-resource healthcare institutions (such as rural hospitals or federally qualified health centers) for extreme weather events.
• Fund the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to establish an Extreme Heat program and clearinghouse for design, construction, operation, and maintenance of buildings and infrastructure systems under extreme heat events.
• Fund HUD to launch an Affordable Cooling Housing Challenge to identify opportunities to lower the cost of new home construction and retrofits adapted to extreme heat.
• Expand existing rebates and tax credits (including HER, HEAR, 25C, 179D, Direct Pay) to include passive cooling tech such as cool walls, pavements, and roofs (H.R. 9894), green roofs, solar glazing, and solar shading. Revise 25C to be refundable at purchase.
• Authorize a Weatherization Readiness Program (H.R. 8721) to address structural, plumbing, roofing, and electrical issues, and environmental hazards with dwelling units unable to receive effective assistance from WAP, such as for implementing cool roofs.
• Fund the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Urban and Community Forestry (UCF) Program to develop heat-adapted tree nurseries and advance best practices for urban forestry that mitigates extreme heat, such as strategies for micro forests. 

Leveraging the Farm Bill to build national heat resilience.

Farm, food, forestry, and rural policy are all impacted by extreme heat. To ensure the next Farm Bill is ready for rising temperatures, Congress should:

• Double down on urban forestry, including by:
  • Reauthorizing the UCF Grant program. 
  • Funding and directing the USFS UCF Program to support states, locals and Tribes on maintenance solutions for urban forests investments.
  • Funding and authorizing a Green Schoolyards Grant under the UCF Program.
• Reauthorize the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Program, which supports employers in improving working conditions for farm workers.
• Reauthorize the Rural Emergency Health Care Grants and Rural Hospital Technical Assistance Program to provide resources and technical assistance to rural hospitals to prepare for emerging threats like extreme heat
• Direct the USDA Secretary to submit a report to Congress on the impacts of extreme heat on agriculture, expected costs of extreme heat to farmers (input costs and losses), consumers and the federal government (i.e. provision of SNAP benefits and delivery of insurance and direct payment for losses of agricultural products), and available federal resources to support agricultural and food systems adaptation to hotter temperatures.
• Authorize the following expansions:
  • Agriculture Conservation Easement Program to include agrivoltaics.
  • Environmental Quality Incentives Program to include facility cooling systems 
  • The USDA’s 504 Home Repair program to include funding for high-efficiency air conditioning and other sustainable cooling systems.
  • The USDA’s Community Facilities Program to include funding for constructing resilience centers.These resilience centers should be constructed to minimum standards established by the National Resilience Hub Program, if authorized.
  • The USDA’s Rural Business Development Grant program to include high-efficiency air conditioning and other sustainable cooling systems.

Funding critical programs and agencies to build a heat-ready nation.

To protect Americans and mitigate the $160+ billion annual impacts of extreme heat, Congress will need to invest in national heat preparedness, response, and resilience. The tables on the following pages highlight heat-critical programs that should be extended, as well as agencies that need more funding to carry out heat-critical work, such as key actions identified in the Executive section of this Heat Policy Agenda.

The incoming administration should establish a $500 million pull-financing facility to ensure infrastructure and asset resiliency with partner nations by catalyzing the private sector to develop cutting-edge technologies. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events, which caused over $200 billion in global economic losses in 2023, is disrupting global supply chains and exacerbating migration pressures, particularly for the U.S. Investing in climate resilience abroad offers a significant opportunity for U.S. businesses in technology, engineering, and infrastructure, while also supporting job creation at home. 

Pull-finance mechanisms can maximize the efficiency and impact of U.S. investments, fostering innovation and driving sustainable solutions to address global vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional funding which second-guesses the markets by supporting only selected innovators, pull financing drives results by relying on the market to efficiently allocate resources to achievement, fostering competition and rewarding the most impactful solutions. Managed and steered by the U.S. government, the pull-financing facility would fund infrastructure and asset resiliency results delivered by the world’s cutting-edge innovators, mitigating the effects of extreme weather events and ultimately supporting U.S. interests abroad. 

Challenge and Opportunity 

The increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events pose significant risks to global economic stability, with direct implications for U.S. interests. In 2023 alone, natural disasters caused over $200 billion in global economic losses with much of the damage concentrated in regions critical to global supply chains. U.S. businesses that depend on these supply chains face rising costs and disruptions, which translate into higher costs for U.S. businesses and consumers, undermining economic competitiveness.

Beyond the economic dimension, these vulnerabilities exacerbate socio-political pressures. Climate-induced displacement is accelerating, with 32.6 million people internally displaced by disasters in 2022. Most displaced individuals that cross borders migrate to countries neighboring their own, which are ill-equipped to handle the influx, often further destabilizing fragile states. For the U.S., this translates into increased migration pressures at its southern border, where natural disasters are already a driving force behind migration from Central America. Addressing these root causes through proactive resiliency investments abroad would reduce long-term strain on the U.S. and bolster stability in strategically important regions.

In addition to economic and social risks, resilience is now a key front in global competition. The People’s Republic of China has rapidly expanded its influence in developing nations through initiatives like the Belt and Road, financing over $200 billion in energy and infrastructure projects since 2013. A significant portion of these projects focus on resiliency investments, enabling China to position itself as a partner of choice for nations with asset and infrastructure exposure. This growing influence comes at the expense of U.S. global leadership.

In the context of these challenges, it is especially concerning that much of the U.S.’s existing spending may not be achieving the results it could. A recent audit of USAID climate initiatives highlights concerns around limited transparency and effectiveness in its development funding. The inefficient use of this funding is leaving opportunities on the table for U.S. businesses and workers. Global investments in adaptation and resiliency are projected to reach $500 billion annually by 2050. Resilience projects abroad could open substantial markets for American engineering, technology, and infrastructure firms. For instance, U.S.-based companies specializing in resilient agriculture, flood defense systems, advanced irrigation technologies, and energy infrastructure stand to benefit from increased demand. Domestically, the manufacturing and export of these solutions could generate significant economic activity, supporting high-quality jobs and revitalizing industrial sectors.

Pull finance presents an opportunity to increase the cost effectiveness of resiliency funding—and ensure this funding achieves U.S. interests. Pull finance mechanisms like results-based financing and Advance Market Commitments (AMC) reward successful solutions that meet specific criteria, promoting private sector engagement and market-driven problem-solving. Unlike traditional “push” financing, which funds chosen teams or projects directly, pull financing sets a goal and allows any innovator who reaches it to claim the reward, fostering      competitive problem-solving without pre-selected winners. This approach includes various mechanisms – such as prize challenges, milestone payments, advance market commitments, and subscription models – each suited to different issues and industries.

Pull financing is particularly effective for addressing complex challenges with unclear or emerging solutions, or in areas with limited commercial incentives. It has proven successful in various contexts, such as the first Trump Administration’s rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed and GAVI’s introduction of the pneumococcal vaccine in low-income countries. These initiatives highlight how pull financing can stimulate breakthrough innovations that efficiently address immediate needs in collaboration with private actors through effective incentives.  

Pull finance can be used to efficiently advance infrastructure and asset resilience goals while also providing opportunities for U.S. innovators and industry. By stimulating demand for critically needed technologies for development like resilient seeds and energy storage solutions, as detailed in Box 1, well-designed pull finance would help link U.S. technology innovators to addressing needs of U.S. partners. As such, pull finance can play a critical role in positioning the U.S. as a partner of first choice for countries seeking to access U.S. innovation to meet resilience needs.

What would the design of a pull financing mechanism look like in practice?  

Resilient Seeds

Agriculture in Africa is highly susceptible to extreme weather events, with limited adoption of effective farming technologies. Developing new seed varieties capable of withstanding these events and optimizing resource use has the potential to yield significant societal benefits.

While push financing can support the development of resource-efficient and productive seeds, it often lacks the ability to ensure they meet essential quality standards, like flavor and appearance, and are user-friendly across farming, transport and marketing stages. In contrast, pull financing can effectively incentivize private sector innovation across all critical dimensions, including end-user take-up. 

A pull mechanism for resilient seeds, using a milestone payment mechanism, could cover a portion of R&D costs initially, with additional payments tied to successful lab trials. Depending on the obstacles to scaling – whether they arise from the innovator/distributor side or the farmer side – a small per-user payment to the innovator or per-user subsidy could help sustain market demand.

The design and scale of a pull financing mechanism to promote the rollout of new seeds and crop varieties will largely depend on the market readiness of the various seed types involved. Establishing effective pull mechanisms for seed development is estimated to cost between $50 million and $100 million, aiming for significant outreach to farmers. Along with supporting improved livelihoods for farmers, this small investment would open opportunities for U.S. technology innovators and companies. 

Pull Finance Initiative for Infrastructure and Asset Resiliency in the Caribbean

The Caribbean is one of the regions most vulnerable to extreme weather events, making it critical to engage the private sector in developing and adopting technologies suited to Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Challenges such as limited demand and high costs hinder innovation and investment in these small markets, leaving key areas like agriculture and access underserved. Overcoming these market failures requires innovative approaches to create sustainable incentives for private sector involvement.

Pull finances offers a promising solution to drive resiliency in SIDS. By tying payments to measurable outcomes, this approach will incentivize the development and deployment of technologies that might otherwise remain inaccessible. 

For example, pull finance could be used to stimulate the creation of energy storage solutions designed to withstand extreme weather conditions in remote areas. This could be help address the critical needs of SIDS’ such as Guyana which face energy security challenges linked to extreme weather conditions, especially in remote and dispersed areas. Energy storage technologies exist, but companies are not motivated to invest in tailored innovation for local needs because end-users cannot pay prices that compensate for innovation efforts. Pull finance could address this by committing to purchase an amount large enough that nudges companies to develop a tailored product, without raising market prices. Success would require partnerships with local SMEs, caps in installation costs, and specifications on storage capacity, along with relevant technology partners such as those in the U.S.. This approach would support immediate adaptation needs and lay the foundation for sustainable, market-driven solutions that ensure long-term resilience for SIDS.

Plan of Action 

The new administration should establish a dedicated pull-financing facility to accelerate the scale-up and deployment of development solutions with partner nations. In line with other major U.S. climate initiatives, this facility could be managed by USAID’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment and Food Security (REFS), with significant support from USAID’s Innovation, Technology, and Research (ITR) Hub, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State. By leveraging USAID’s deep expertise in development and SPEC’s strategic diplomacy, this collaboration would ensure the facility addresses LMIC-specific needs while aligning with broader U.S. objectives.

The recent audit of USAID climate initiatives referenced above highlights concerns on the limited transparency and effectiveness in its climate funding. Thus, we recommend that USAID assesses the impact of its climate spending under the 2020-2024 administration and reallocates a portion of funds from less effective or stalled initiatives to this new facility. We recognize that it may be challenging to quickly identify $500 million in underperforming projects to close and reassign. Therefore, in addition to reallocating existing resources, we strongly recommend appealing to new funding for this initiative. This approach will ensure the new facility has the financial backing it needs to drive meaningful outcomes. Additional resources could also be sourced from large multilateral organizations such as the World Bank.

To enhance the facility’s impact, we recommend the active participation of agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOOA), particularly through the Climate and Societal Interactions Division (CSI)   in the Steering Committee,

We propose that this facility draw on the example of the UK’s planned Climate Innovation Pull Facility (CIPF), a £185 million fund which aims to fund development-relevant pull finance projects in LMICs such as those proposed by the Center for Global Development and Instiglio. This can be achieved through the following steps:

Recommendation 1. Establish the pull-finance facility, governance and administration with an initial tranche of $500 million. 

The initiative proposes establishing a pull-finance facility with an initial fund of $500 million. This facility will be overseen by a steering board chaired by USAID and comprising senior representatives from USAID, the State Department, NOOA , which will set the strategic direction and make final project selections. 

A facility management team, led by USAID, will be responsible for ensuring the successful implementation of the facility, including the selection and delivery of 8 to 16 projects. The final number of projects will depend on the launch readiness of prioritized technologies and their potential impact, with the selection process guided by criteria that align with the facility’s strategic goals. The facility management team will also be responsible for contracting with project and evaluation partners, compliance with regulations, risk management, monitoring and evaluation, as well as payouts. Additionally, the facility management team will provide incubation support for selected initiatives, including technical consultations, financial modeling, contracting expertise, and feasibility assessments.

Designing pull financing mechanisms is complex and requires input from specialized experts, including scientists, economists, and legal advisors, to identify suitable market gaps and targets. An independent Technical Advisory Group (TAG) led by USAID and comprised of such experts should be established to provide technical guidance and quality assurance. The TAG will identify priority resilience topics, such as reducing crop-residue burning or developing resilient crops. It will also focus on sectors where the U.S. can enhance its global competitiveness, which faces high upfront costs and risks. Additionally, the TAG will be responsible for technical review and recommendations of the shortlisted project proposals to inform final selection, as well as provide general advice and challenge to the facility management team and steering board.

We suggest starting with $500 million as the minimum required to be credible and relevant as well as responsive to the scale of global need. Further, experience shows that pull mechanisms need to be of sufficient scale to sustainably shift markets. For instance, GAVI’s pneumococcal vaccine AMC entailed a $1.5 billion commitment and Frontier’s carbon capture AMC likewise entails over $1 billion in commitments.  

Recommendation 2. Set up a performance management system to measure, assess and ensure impact.

The U.S. pull financing facility will implement a robust monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) framework to track and enhance its impact and drive ongoing improvement through feedback and learning. 

The facility manager will develop a logical framework (logframe) that includes key performance indicators (KPIs) and a progress and risk dashboard to track monthly performance. These tools will enable effective monitoring of progress, assessment of impact, and proactive risk management, allowing for quick responses to unexpected challenges or underperformance.

Monthly check-ins with an independent evaluation partner, along with oversight from a dedicated MEL committee, will ensure consistent and rigorous evaluation as well as continuous learning. Additionally, knowledge management and dissemination activities will facilitate the sharing of insights and best practices across the program.

Recommendation 3. Establish a knowledge management hub to facilitate the sharing of results and insights and ensure coordination across pull-financing projects. 

The hub will work closely with community partners and stakeholders – such as industry and tech leaders and manufacturers – in areas like resiliency-focused finance and innovation to build strong support and develop resources on essential topics, including the effectiveness of pull financing and optimal design strategies. Additionally, the hub will promote collaboration across projects focused on similar technological and production advancements, generating synergies that enhance their collective impact and benefits.

Once the proof of concept is established through clear evidence and learning, the facility will likely secure further stakeholder buy-in and attract additional funding for a scale up phase covering a larger portfolio of projects. 

Conclusion 

The federal government should establish a $500 million pull-financing facility to accelerate technologies for resilience in the face of growing development challenges. This initiative will unlock high-return investments and increase cost effectiveness of resiliency spending, driving economic and geopolitical goals. Managed and steered by USAID and the State Department, with support from NOOA, the facility would foster breakthroughs in critical areas like resilient infrastructure, energy, and technology, benefiting both U.S. businesses and our international partners. By investing strategically, the U.S. can ensure both national and global stability.

The authors thank FAS for the reviews and feedback, along with Ranil Dissanayake, Florence Oberholtzer, and Laura Mejia Villada for their valuable contribution to this piece.

This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.

PLEASE NOTE (February 2025): Since publication several government websites have been taken offline. We apologize for any broken links to once accessible public data.

Across the United States, thousands of communities, particularly rural ones, don’t have the capacity to identify, apply for, and manage federal grants. And more than half of Americans don’t feel that the federal government adequately takes their interests into account. These factors make it difficult to build climate resilience in our most vulnerable populations. AmeriCorps can tackle this challenge by providing the human power needed to help communities overcome significant structural obstacles in accessing federal resources. Specifically, federal agencies that are part of the Thriving Communities Network can partner with the philanthropic sector to place AmeriCorps members in Community Disaster Resilience Zones (CDRZs) as part of a new Resilient Communities Corps. Through this initiative, AmeriCorps would provide technical assistance to vulnerable communities in accessing deeply needed resources. 

There is precedent for this type of effort. AmeriCorps programming, like AmeriCorps VISTA, has a long history of aiding communities and organizations by directly helping secure grant monies and by empowering communities and organizations to self-support in the future. The AmeriCorps Energy Communities is a public-private partnership that targets service investment to support low-capacity and highly vulnerable communities in capitalizing on emerging energy opportunities. And the Environmental Justice Climate Corps, a partnership between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and AmeriCorps, will place AmeriCorps VISTA members in historically marginalized communities to work on environmental justice projects. 

A new initiative targeting service investment to build resilience in low-capacity communities, particularly rural communities, would help build capacity at the local level, train a new generation of service-oriented individuals in grant writing and resilience work, and ensure that federal funding gets to the communities that need it most.

Challenge and Opportunity  

A significant barrier to getting federal funding to those who need it the most is the capacity of those communities to search and apply for grants. Many such communities lack both sufficient staff bandwidth to apply and search for grants and the internal expertise to put forward a successful application. Indeed, the Midwest and Interior West have seen under 20% of their communities receive competitive federal grants since the year 2000. Low-capacity rural communities account for only 3% of grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s flagship program for building community resilience. Even communities that receive grants often lack the capacity for strong grant management, which can mean losing monies that go unspent within the grant period.

This is problematic because low-capacity communities are particularly vulnerable to natural disasters from flooding to wildfires. Out of the nearly 8,000 most at-risk communities with limited capacity to advocate for resources, 46% are at risk for flooding, 36% are at risk for wildfires, and 19% are at risk for both.

Ensuring communities can access federal grants to help them become more climate resilient is crucial to achieving an equitable and efficient distribution of federal monies, and to building a stronger nation from the ground up. These objectives are especially salient given that there is still a lot of federal money available through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) that low-capacity communities can tap into for climate resilience work. As of April 2024, only $60 billion out of the $145 billion in the IRA for energy and climate programs had been spent. For the IIJA, only half of the nearly $650 billion in direct formula funding had been spent. 

The Biden-Harris Administration has tried to address the mismatch between federal resilience funding and community capacity in a variety of ways. The Administration has deployed resources for low-capacity communities, agencies tasked with allocating funds from the IRA and IIJA have held information sessions, and the IRA and IIJA contain over a hundred technical assistance programs. Yet there still is not enough support in the form of human capacity at the local level to access grants and other resources and assistance provided by federal agencies. AmeriCorps members can support communities in making informed decisions, applying for federal support, and managing federal financial assistance. Indeed, state programs like the Maine Climate Corps, include aiding communities with both resilience planning and emergency management assistance as part of their focus. Evening the playing field by expanding deployment of human capital will yield a more equitable distribution of federal monies to the communities that need it the most. 

AmeriCorps’ Energy Communities initiative serves as a model for a public-private partnership to support low-capacity communities in meeting their climate resilience goals. Over a three-year period, the program will invest over $7.8 million from federal agencies and philanthropic dollars to help communities designated by the Interagency Working Group on Coal & Power Plant Communities & Economic Revitalization on issues revolving around energy opportunity, environmental cleanup, and economic development to help communities capitalize on emerging energy opportunities. 

There is an opportunity to replicate this model towards resilience. Specifically, the next Administration can leverage the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA’s) Community Disaster Resilience Zone (CDRZ) designations to target AmeriCorps support to the communities that need it most. Doing so will not only build community resilience, but will help restore trust in the federal government and its programs (see FAQ).

Plan of Action

The next administration can support vulnerable communities in building climate resilience by launching a new Resilient Communities Corps through AmeriCorps. The initiative can be launched through a three-part Plan of Action: (1) find a philanthropic partner to fund AmeriCorps placements in CDRZs, (2) engage federal agencies that are part of the Thriving Communities Network to provide resilience training and support to Corps members, and (3) use the CDRZ designations to help guide where AmeriCorps members should be placed.  

Recommendation 1. Secure philanthropic funding 

American service programs have a history of utilizing philanthropic monies to fund programming. The AmeriCorps Energy Communities is funded with philanthropic monies from Bloomberg Philanthropies. California Volunteers Fund (CVF), the Waverly Street Foundation, and individual philanthropists helped fund the state Climate Corps. CVF has also provided assistance and insights for state Climate Corps officials as they develop their programs. 

A new Resilient Communities Corps under the AmeriCorps umbrella could be funded through one or several major philanthropic donors, and/or through grassroots donations. Widespread public support for AmeriCorps’ ACC that transcends generational and party lines presents the opportunity for new grassroots donations to supplement federal monies allocated to the program along with tapping the existing network of foundations, individuals, companies, and organizations that have provided past donations. The Partnership for the Civilian Climate Corps (PCCC), which has had a history of collaborating with the ACC’s federal partners, would be well suited to help spearhead this grassroots effort. 

America’s Service Commissions (ASC), which represents state service commissions, can also help coordinate with state service commissions to find local philanthropic monies to fund AmeriCorps work in CDRZs. There is precedent for this type of fundraising. Maine’s state service commission was able to secure private monies for one Maine Service Fellow. The fellow has since worked with low-capacity communities in Maine on climate resilience. ASC can also work with state service commissions to identify current state, private, and federally funded service programming that could be tapped to work in CDRZs or are currently working in CDRZs. This will help tie in existing local service infrastructure.  

Recommendation 2. Engage federal agencies participating in the Thriving Communities Network and the American Climate Corps (ACC) interagency working group. 

Philanthropic funding will be helpful but not sufficient in launching the Resilient Communities Corps. The next administration should also engage federal agencies to provide AmeriCorps members participating in the initiative with training on climate resilience, orientations and points of contact for major federal resilience programs, and, where available, additional financial support for the program. The ACC’s interagency working group has centered AmeriCorps as a multiagency initiative that has directed resources and provides collaboration in implementing AmeriCorps programming. The Resilient Communities Corps will be able to tap into this cross-agency collaboration in ways that align with the resilience work already being done by partnership members. 

There are currently four ACC programs that are funded through cooperation with other federal agencies. These are the Working Lands Climate Corps with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Natural Resources and Conservation Service, AmeriCorps NCCC Forest Corps with the USDA Forest Service, Energy Communities AmeriCorps with the Department of Interior and the Department of Commerce, and the Environmental Justice Corps, which was announced in September 2024 and will launch in 2025, with the EPA. The Resilient Communities Corps could be established as a formal partnership with one or more federal agencies as funding partners.

In addition, the Resilient Communities Corps can and should leverage existing work that federal agencies are doing to build community capacity and enhance community climate resilience. For instance, USDA’s Rural Partners Network helps rural communities access federal funding while the EPA’s Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers Program provides training and assistance for communities to build the capacity to navigate, develop proposals, and manage federal grants. The Thriving Communities Network provides a forum for federal agencies to provide technical assistance to communities trying to access federal monies. Corps members, through the network, can help federal agencies provide communities they are working with building capacity to access this technical assistance. 

Recommendation 3. Use CDRZ designations and engage with state service commissions to guide Resilient Communities Corps placements

FEMA, through its National Risk Index, has identified communities across the country that are most vulnerable to the climate crisis and need targeted federal support for climate resilience projects. CDRZs provide an opportunity for AmeriCorps to identify low-capacity communities that need their assistance in accessing this federal support. With assistance from partner agencies and philanthropic dollars, the AmeriCorps can fund Corps members to work in these designated zones to help drive resources into them. As part of this effort, the ACC interagency working group should be broadened to include the Department of Homeland Security (which already sponsors FEMA Corps).

In 2024, the Biden-Harris Administration announced Federal-State partnerships between state service commissions and the ACC. This partnership with state service commissions will help AmeriCorps and partner agencies identify what is currently being done in CDRZs, what is needed from communities, and any existing service programming that could be built up with federal and philanthropic monies. State service commissions understand the communities they work with and what existing programming is currently in place. This knowledge and coordination will prove invaluable for the Resilient Communities Corps and AmeriCorps more broadly as they determine where to allocate members and what existing service programming could receive Resilient Communities Corps designation. This will be helpful in deciding where to focus initial/pilot Resilient Communities Corps placements.

Conclusion

A Resilient Communities Corps presents an incredible opportunity for the next administration to support low-capacity communities in accessing competitive grants in CDRZ-designated areas. It will improve the federal government’s impact and efficiency of dispersing grant monies by making grants more accessible and ensure that our most vulnerable communities are better prepared and more resilient in the face of the climate crisis, introduce a new generation of young people to grant writing and public service, and help restore trust in federal government programs from communities that often feel overlooked.

This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.

PLEASE NOTE (February 2025): Since publication several government websites have been taken offline. We apologize for any broken links to once accessible public data.

Polar regions – both the Arctic and Antarctic – are an important venue for strategic competition and loom as emerging and future national security challenges. As recognized during the first Trump Administration, ceding U.S. leadership at the poles threatens our future and emboldens our adversaries. The recent actions that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia have taken in the Arctic undermine regional stability as both nations aim to take economic advantage of newly available resources, such as oil, invest in research with dual military-civil applications, and take on an increasingly dominant role in regional governance. 

The Antarctic is the next security frontier. U.S. leadership in the Antarctic is eroding as U.S. investments dwindle and nations, including the PRC, establish new outposts and operations there. Simultaneously, polar change threatens to upend U.S. coastal communities and global security as ice-melt and glacier collapse could lead to catastrophic sea level rise, fueling extreme property loss, conflict, and mass migration. Glacier resilience, defined as the capacity of glacier systems to withstand and adapt to climate-driven stressors while maintaining their critical functions, is essential to mitigating these risks. Despite a longstanding treaty, the United States and our strategic partners have woefully underinvested in the development of tools, technologies, models, and monitoring infrastructure to inform glacial management, enable solutions to mitigate risks, and to shape U.S. security and foreign policy. 

Building on the prior Trump Administration’s plans for additional polar security icebreakers to protect national interests in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, Congress and the incoming Trump Administration should work together to reinforce the U.S. position in the regions, recognizing the role Antarctica in particular may have in a changing global order and its significance for sea-level rise.

We propose a Polar/Antarctic strategy for the incoming Trump Administration to enhance U.S. national security, promote American leadership, deter our adversaries, and prevent disastrous ice sheet collapse. This strategy involves research and development of engineering methods to slow the loss of glaciers and rates of sea-level rise by reducing the forces that drive glacier change and sensitivity of glaciers to those forces. Consistent with and reinforcing of the Antarctic Treaty System, this plan would focus investment across four areas:

• Critical infrastructure to enhance American presence at the poles with enhanced monitoring capabilities – forecasting ice-sheet change and sea-level rise.
• Exploratory research and pilot demonstrations of new, innovative, and protective technologies to stabilize glaciers and mitigate against catastrophic glacial collapse.
• Research to better understand ice sheets and the surrounding oceans, glacier dynamics, and monitoring needs.
• Policies to protect American interests and ensure our allies contribute their fair share to address the glacial resilience challenge.

Challenge and Opportunity 

The threat of sea-level rise is often seen as manageable, with increases of centimeters or inches. However, projections indicate that the collapse of the Thwaites Glacier and West Antarctic Ice Sheet could result in“doomsday scenarios” characterized by sea-level rises of as much as 10 feet worldwide. The probabilities of these occurrences have increased recently. If these possibilities became reality, then sea level would inundate major U.S. coastal regions and cities that are home to 12 million people and trillions of dollars of property and infrastructure. Globally, hundreds of millions of people would be at risk, fueling mass migration, refugee crises, and security challenges that threaten U.S. interests. Protecting Thwaites and the Antarctic Ice Sheet from collapse is crucial for a manageable future, making glacial resilience essential in any domestic and international national security strategy.  

There are many ideas about how to slow glacial collapse and protect the ice to hold back sea level rise; however, this research and technology development receives almost no federal funding. We must take this threat seriously and dramatically ramp up our infrastructure at the poles to monitor glaciers and demonstrate new technologies to protect the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

While the current Antarctic treaty prohibits military activity in the region, it allows scientific research and other activities that could have military applications. At the same time, U.S. polar research infrastructure and funding is woefully insufficient to support the necessary innovation and operations required to address the sea-level rise challenge and maintain American leadership. Federal science funding agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) play a critical role in supporting research in the Antarctic and on glacial processes. While these efforts have yielded some tools and understanding of glacial dynamics, there is no comprehensive, sustained approach to learn about and monitor changes to the ice sheets over time or to develop and test new strategies for glacial resilience. As a result, U.S. scientific infrastructure in the Antarctic has been largely neglected. The data produced by prior funded Antarctic studies have been insufficient to build an authoritative projection model of sea-level rise, a necessity to inform Antarctic management and to inform adaptation measures required by decision makers, coastal communities, and other stakeholders. 

A glacial resilience initiative that leverages space-based commercial and governmental satellite systems, long-duration unmanned aerial radar capabilities, and other observational capabilities would revitalize American leadership in polar regions at a critical time, as the PRC and other adversaries increase their polar presence – particularly in the Antarctic.

Plan of Action 

To strengthen glacial resilience and U.S. polar security, the next Administration should launch a comprehensive initiative to build critical world-leading infrastructure, promote innovation in glacial resilience technologies, enhance research on glacial dynamics and monitoring, and pursue policies that preserve U.S. national security interests. The recommendations below address each of these areas.

Develop and maintain world-leading critical infrastructure for glacial monitoring and resilience research and innovation.

NSF and the Air Force currently maintain operations for the U.S. in the Antarctic, but these facilities are in such a deplorable state that NSF has recently canceled all new field research and indefinitely delayed high priority experiments slated to be built at the South Pole. As the primary physical presence for the U.S. government, this infrastructure must be upgraded so that NSF can support scaled research and monitoring efforts. 

Expand glacial monitoring capabilities, utilizing space, air, and on-ice methods through NASA, NOAA, DOD, and NSF.

This effort should maximally leverage existing commercial and governmental space-based assets and deploy other air-based, long-duration unmanned aerial capabilities. The next  administration should also create national glacier models to provide detailed and timely information about glacier dynamics and sea-level rise to inform coastal planning and glacial resilience field efforts.

Pilot development and demonstration of glacier resilience technologies.

There is currently extremely limited investment in technology development to enhance glacier resilience. Agencies such as NSF and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) should support innovation and grand challenges to spur development of new ideas and technologies. The PRC is already investing in this kind of research and the United States and our strategic partners are far behind in ensuring we are the ones to develop the technology and set the standards for its use. 

Support a robust research program to improve understanding of glacier dynamics.

To address critical gaps and develop a coordinated, sustained approach to glacier research, the U.S. must invest in basic science to better understand ice sheet dynamics and destabilization. Investments should include field research as well as artificial intelligence (AI), modeling, and forecasting capabilities through NSF, NASA, DOD, and NOAA. These efforts rely on the infrastructure discussed above and will be used to better develop future infrastructure, creating a cycle of innovation that supports the U.S. operational presence and leadership and giving us a comparative advantage over our adversaries.  

Protect national security interests and maintain American leadership by promoting glacial resilience in international contexts.

There is a major void in international polar discussions about the importance of glacial resilience and extremely limited attention to developing technologies that would prevent ice sheet collapse and catastrophic sea level rise. The next  administration should play a leadership role in advancing global investment, ensuring that our allies contribute to this effort and the U.S. alone does not bear its costs. International research collaboration with our strategic allies will prevent the PRC and other competitors from expanding their influence and from surpassing the United States as the leader in Antarctic and polar research and innovation.

Support a new legislative package focused on advancing critical Antarctic research.

The Arctic Research and Policy Act of 1982 provides “for a comprehensive national policy dealing with national research needs and objectives in the Arctic.” Modeled on the Arctic Research and Policy Act, a new legislative package could include:

• Increased authorization for Antarctic research appropriations, including glacier resilience research through agencies like NSF and NASA, and investments in needed technologies and modeling initiatives specifically targeting Antarctic ice melt, glacier resilience, and sea level rise. 
• Establishment of an interagency policy committee to spearhead activities across government, similar to (or expanding the mandate of) the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee (IARPC). 
• Authorization for international collaborations to study ice sheet dynamics and global impacts.
• A mandate for interagency coordination among NSF, NASA, DOD, NSC, DHS, and NOAA to integrate Antarctic risks into national preparedness strategies, and the creation of a national strategy for addressing catastrophic sea-level rise risks, integrating scientific research into adaptation and emergency response plans.

This legislation would elevate Antarctic research as a crucial part of a national security strategy and ensure the United States is prepared to confront the risks and consequences of Antarctic ice sheet collapse.

Conclusion 

The U.S. faces an important moment to address polar challenges that threaten both national security and global stability. As adversaries like PRC and Russia expand their presence and influence in the Arctic and Antarctic, the U.S. must reclaim leadership. Glacial resilience is a strategic imperative, given the catastrophic risks of sea-level rise and its impacts on coastal communities, migration, and security. By prioritizing investment in polar infrastructure, advancing cutting-edge technologies to mitigate glacial collapse, and strengthening international collaboration, the U.S. can lead a global effort to safeguard polar regions. A robust, coordinated strategy will bolster American interests, deter adversaries, and build resilience against one of the most pressing challenges we face today.

This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.

PLEASE NOTE (February 2025): Since publication several government websites have been taken offline. We apologize for any broken links to once accessible public data.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Innovation and Jobs Act are set to drive $300 billion in energy infrastructure investment by 2030. Without permitting reform, lengthy review processes threaten to make these federal investments one-third less effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why Congress has been grappling with reforming the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for almost two years. Yet, despite the urgency to reform the law, there is a striking lack of available data on how NEPA actually works. Under these conditions, evidence-based policy making is simply impossible. With access to the right data and with thoughtful teaming, the next administration has a golden opportunity to create a roadmap for permitting software that maximizes the impact of federal investments.

Challenge and Opportunity

NEPA is a cornerstone of U.S. environmental law, requiring nearly all federally funded projects—like bridges, wildfire risk-reduction treatments, and wind farms—to undergo an environmental review. Despite its widespread impact, NEPA’s costs and benefits remain poorly understood. Although academics and the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) have conducted piecemeal studies using limited data, even the most basic data points, like the average duration of a NEPA analysis, remain elusive. Even the Government Accountability Office (GAO), when tasked with evaluating NEPA’s effectiveness in 2014, was unable to determine how many NEPA reviews are conducted annually, resulting in a report aptly titled “National Environmental Policy Act: Little Information Exists on NEPA Analyses.”

The lack of comprehensive data is not due to a lack of effort or awareness. In 2021, researchers at the University of Arizona launched NEPAccess, an AI-driven program aimed at aggregating publicly available NEPA data. While successful at scraping what data was accessible, the program could not create a comprehensive database because many NEPA documents are either not publicly available or too hard to access, namely Environmental Assessments (EAs) and Categorical Exclusions (CEs). The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) also built a language model to analyze NEPA documents but contained their analysis to the least common but most complex category of environmental reviews, Environmental Impact Statements (EISs).

Fortunately, much of the data needed to populate a more comprehensive NEPA database does exist. Unfortunately, it’s stored in a complex network of incompatible software systems, limiting both public access and interagency collaboration. Each agency responsible for conducting NEPA reviews operates its own unique NEPA software. Even the most advanced NEPA software, SOPA used by the Forest Service and ePlanning used by the Bureau of Land Management, do not automatically publish performance data.

Analyzing NEPA outcomes isn’t just an academic exercise; it’s an essential foundation for reform. Efforts to improve NEPA software have garnered bipartisan support from Congress. CEQ recently published a roadmap outlining important next steps to this end. In the report, CEQ explains that organized data would not only help guide development of better software but also foster broad efficiency in the NEPA process. In fact, CEQ even outlines the project components that would be most helpful to track (including unique ID numbers, level of review, document type, and project type).

Put simply, meshing this complex web of existing softwares into a tracking database would be nearly impossible (not to mention expensive). Luckily, advances in large language models, like the ones used by NEPAccess and PNNL, offer a simpler and more effective solution. With properly formatted files of all NEPA documents in one place, a small team of software engineers could harness PolicyAI’s existing program to build a comprehensive analysis dashboard.

Plan of Action

The greatest obstacles to building an AI-powered tracking dashboard are accessing the NEPA documents themselves and organizing their contents to enable meaningful analysis. Although the administration could address the availability of these documents by compelling agencies to release them, inconsistencies in how they’re written and stored would still pose a challenge. That means building a tracking board will require open, ongoing collaboration between technologists and agencies.

• Assemble a strike team: The administration should form a cross-disciplinary team to facilitate collaboration. This team should include CEQ; the Permitting Council; the agencies responsible for conducting the greatest number of NEPA reviews, including the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; technologists from 18F; and those behind the PolicyAI tool developed by PNNL. It should also decide where the software development team will be housed, likely either at CEQ or the Permitting Council.
• Establish submission guidelines: When handling exorbitant amounts of data, uniform formatting ensures quick analysis. The strike team should assess how each agency receives and processes NEPA documents and create standardized submission guidelines, including file format and where they should be sent. 
• Mandate data submission: The administration should require all agencies to submit relevant NEPA data annually, adhering to the submission guidelines set by the strike team. This process should be streamlined to minimize the burden on agencies while maximizing the quality and completeness of the data; if possible, the software development team should pull data directly from the agency. Future modernization efforts should include building APIs to automate this process.
• Build the system: Using PolicyAI’s existing framework, the development team should create a language model to feed a publicly available, searchable database and dashboard that tracks vital metadata, including:
  • The project components suggested in CEQ’s E-NEPA report, including unique ID numbers, level of review, document type, and project type
  • Days spent producing an environmental review (if available; this information may need to be pulled from agency case management materials instead)
  • Page count of each environmental review
  • Lead and supporting agencies
  • Project location (latitude/longitude and acres impacted, or GIS information if possible) 
  • Other laws enmeshed in the review, including the Endangered Species Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the National Forest Management Act
  • When clearly stated in a NEPA document, cost of producing the review
  • When clearly stated in a NEPA document, staff hours used to produce the review
  • When clearly stated in a NEPA document, jobs and revenue created by the project
  • When clearly stated in a NEPA document, carbon emissions mitigated by the project

Conclusion

The stakes are high. With billions of dollars in federal climate and infrastructure investments on the line, a sluggish and opaque permitting process threatens to undermine national efforts to cut emissions. By embracing cutting-edge technology and prioritizing transparency, the next administration can not only reshape our understanding of the NEPA process but bolster its efficiency too.

This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.

PLEASE NOTE (February 2025): Since publication several government websites have been taken offline. We apologize for any broken links to once accessible public data.

Climate change is already impacting agriculture and forestry production in the U.S. However, these sectors also hold the key to adaptation and mitigation. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is at the forefront of addressing these challenges and developing solutions. Understanding the implications of climate change in agriculture and forestry is crucial for our nation to forge ahead with effective strategies and outcomes, ensuring our food and shelter resources remain secure.

Currently, the atmosphere contains more key greenhouse gasses (nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide, methane) than ever in history thanks to human activities. Industrial, agricultural, and deforestation practices add to the abundance of these critical gasses that are warming our planet. This has become more noticeable through more frequent severe weather and natural disasters with record heat waves, droughts, tornadoes, and rainfall. In 2023, global climate records of temperatures were broken and hit the highest in the last 174 years. Ocean temperatures are reaching record levels, along with major melts in ice sheets. All these changes will affect forestry and agriculture in profound ways. Crop damaging insects and diseases, along with other stresses caused by extreme changes, will also have cascading effects.

Adjustments or adaptations in response to climate change have progressed globally, with planning and implementation across multiple sectors and regions. While much attention is being paid to reforestation and reducing deforestation, gaps still exist and will need continued attention and financial input to address current and future challenges. Agriculture and forestry are two sectors worth exploring as they can open up climate adaptation and mitigation solutions that have positive cascading benefits across regions.

Challenges in the Agriculture and Forestry Sector

Agriculture contributes to greenhouse gas emissions through several activities, such as burning crop residues, soil management and fertilization, animal manure management, and rice cultivation. In addition, agriculture requires significant amounts of energy for vehicles, tractors, harvest, and irrigation equipment. Agriculture involves complex systems that include inputs of fertilizers and chemicals, management decisions, social factors, and interactions between climate and soil.

Most agriculture operations need fertilizers to produce goods, but the management and specific use of fertilizers need further focus. According to the Inventory of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, agriculture contributes 9.4% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

Agriculture is particularly vulnerable to climate change because many operations are exposed to climatic changes in the natural landscape. There has been widespread economic damage in agriculture due to climate change. Individuals and farms have been affected by flooding, tornadoes, extreme wildfires, droughts, and excessive rains. Loss of property and income, human health, and food security is real for agriculture producers. Adverse impacts will continue to be felt in agricultural systems, particularly in crop production, water availability, animal health, and pests and diseases.

Forestry is a major industry in the U.S. and plays a key role in regulating the climate by transferring carbon within ecosystems and the atmosphere^.. Forests remove carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere and store it in trees and soils. Forestry has seen a decline in the last few decades due to development and cropland expansion. The decline in forestry acres affects essential services such as air purification, regulating water quantity and quality, wood products for shelter, outdoor recreation, medicines, and wildlife habitat. Many Indigenous people and Tribal Nations depend on forest ecosystems for food, timber, culture, and traditions. Effective forest management is crucial for human well-being and is influenced by social and economic factors.

Land cover types and distribution of the United States. Forest lands have decreased in the last two decades. (Source: Fifth National Climate Assessment)

Forests are affected by climate change on local or regional levels based on climate conditions such as rainfall and temperature. The West has been significantly affected, with higher temperatures and drought leading to more wildfires. Higher temperatures come with higher evaporation rates, leading to drier forests that are susceptible to fires. The greater amount of dry wood causes extensive fires that burn more intensely. Fire activity is projected to increase with further warming and less rain. Since 1990, these extensive fires have produced greater greenhouse gas emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂). Other regions of the country with forests that typically receive more rain, like the southeast and northeast, are challenging to predict fire hazards. Other climate change effects include insects, diseases, and invasive species, which change forest ecosystems’ growth, death, and regeneration. Various degrees of disruption can impact a forest’s dynamics.

Current Adaptation Approaches in Agriculture and Forestry

Since agriculture’s largest contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is agriculture soil management, emphasis is being placed on reducing emissions from this process. Farmers are tilling less and using cover crops to keep the ground covered, which helps soils perform the important function of carbon storage. These techniques can also help lower soil temperatures and conserve moisture. In addition, those working in the agriculture sector are taking measures to adapt to the changing climate by developing crops that can withstand higher temperatures and water stress. Ecosystem-based solutions such as wetland restoration to reduce flooding have also been effective. Another potential solution is agroforestry, in which trees are planted, and other agricultural products are grown between the trees or livestock is grazed within a forestry system. This system provides shade to the animals and enhances biodiversity. It protects water bodies by keeping the soil covered with vegetation throughout the year. The perennial vegetation also stores carbon in above-ground vegetation and below-ground roots.

In the forestry space, land managers and owners are developing plans to adapt to climate challenges by building adaptations in key areas such as relationships and connections of land stewardship, research teamwork, and education curriculum. Several guides, assessments, and frameworks have been designed to help private forest owners, Tribal lands, and federally managed forests. Tribal adaptation plans also include Tribal values and cultural considerations for forests. The coasts will be adapting to more frequent flooding, and relocation of recreation areas in vulnerable areas is being planned. In major forestry production areas in the West, forestry agencies are developing plans for prescribed burning to keep dead wood lower, eliminate invasive species, and enable fire-adapted ecosystems to thrive, all while reducing severe wildfires. Thinning forests and fuel removal also help with reducing wildfire risk.      

While both sectors have made progress in quickly adjusting their practices, much more needs to be done to ensure that land managers and affected communities are better prepared for both the short-term and long-term effects of climate change. The federal government, through USDA, can drive adaptation efforts to help these communities.

Current Policy

The USDA created the Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan in response to Executive Order 14008, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, which requires all federal agencies to develop climate adaptation plans in all public service aspects, including management, operations, missions, and programs. 

The adaptation plan focuses on key threats to agriculture and forestry, such as:

• Outreach and education to promote the adoption and application of climate-smart strategies;
• Investments in soil and forest health to build resilience across landscapes;
• Building access to climate data at regional and local scales for USDA and stakeholders and leveraging USDA Climate Hubs to support USDA in delivering adaptation science, technology, and tools; and
• Increasing support and research for climate-smart practices and technologies to help producers and land managers.

Many USDA agencies have developed actions to address the impacts of climate change in different mission areas of USDA. These adaptation plans provide information for farmers, ranchers, forest owners, rural communities, trade and foreign affairs on ways to address the impact of climate change that affects them the most. For example, farm and ranch managers can use COMET Farm, a user-friendly online tool co-developed by Colorado State University and USDA that helps compare land management practices and account for carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.

USDA has invested $3.1 billion in Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, encompassing 141 projects that involve small and underserved producers. The diverse projects are matched financially with non-federal funds and include over 20 tribal projects, 100 universities, including 30 minority-serving institutions, and others. The goals of the federal and private sector funding include:

• Developing markets and promote climate-smart commodities;
• Piloting cost-effective and innovative methods for understanding, monitoring, and reporting greenhouse gas emissions; and
• Providing technical and financial assistance to producers to implement climate-smart production practices such as reduced tillage and cover crops. 

The USDA Forest Service has also developed its own Climate Adaptation Plan that comprehensively incorporates climate adaptation into its mission and operations. The Forest Service has cultivated partnerships with the Northwest Climate Hub, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, University of Washington, and the Climate Impacts Group to develop tools and data to help with decision-making, evaluations, and developing plans for implementation. One notable example is the Sustainability and Climate website, which provides information on adaptation, vulnerability assessments, carbon, and other aspects of land management. 

Conclusion

While sustained government incentives can help drive adaptation efforts, it is important for everyone to play a role in adapting to climate change, especially in the agriculture and forestry sectors. Purchasing products that are grown sustainably and in climate-smart ways will help protect natural resources and support these communities. Understanding the significance of resilience against climate changes and disruptions is crucial, both in the short and long term. These challenges require collaborators to work together to creatively solve problems in addressing greenhouse gas contributions. Climate models can help solve complex problems and test different scenarios and solutions. As the Fifth National Climate Assessment of the United States notes, greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing, global warming is on the rise, and climate change is currently happening. The choices we make now can have a significant impact on our future.

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