GAO Issues Governmental Framework for Disaster Resilience

Here’s something entirely unexpected, yet promising. A federal agency today developed a guide designed to “boost resilience to natural disasters.” At first blush, you’d think something like this would come from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Well, think again. This initiative is a product of the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The guide, or a framework in this case, aims to help governmental managers explore opportunities to promote disaster resilience and reduce the mounting costs associated with the federal response to climate and weather disasters. GAO has previously reported that funding disaster resilience primarily in reaction to disasters that have already occurred has created and exacerbated fragmentation across federal programs with different timelines and purposes, making it more difficult for nonfederal partners to pursue whole system solutions to risk reduction.

“This important new tool is designed to help federal agencies and others refine their response to the growing threat posed by natural disasters,” said U.S. Comptroller General and GAO head Gene Dodaro. “Investments in disaster resilience are a promising way to reduce the overall impact of future disasters and minimize the federal government’s fiscal exposure.”

GAO has determined that federal financial assistance for disaster response and recovery since 2005 is about $500 billion, most recently for catastrophic hurricanes, flooding, wildfires and other losses in 2017 and 2018. The need to better manage the federal government’s fiscal exposure to climate change has been on GAO’s High Risk List to Congress since 2013. The High Risk List brings attention to federal programs and activities vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement or needing transformation.

GAO’s disaster resilience framework, entitled “Disaster Resilience Framework: Principles for Analyzing Federal Efforts to Facilitate and Promote Resilience to Natural Disasters,” is organized around three approaches or principles that managers who oversee disaster response efforts may find useful in strengthening national disaster resilience. They are: (1) accessing information that is authoritative and understandable to help decisionmakers identify current and future risk and the impact of risk reduction strategies; (2) integrating analysis and planning to help decisionmakers take coherent and coordinated resilience actions; and (3) providing incentives to help make long-term, forward-looking risk-reduction investments more viable and attractive among competing priorities.

It will be interesting to see if this tool is used to achieve its intended purposes. We hope so.

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