Trump’s Victory Imperils America’s Climate Defenses

November 5 was one of the hottest US Election Days in history. Barely a month earlier, two destructive hurricanes tore through the southwest of the country, charged with power from a rapidly warming ocean. Vast tracts of the US have suffered record heatwaves, monstrous floods, and runaway wildfires this year alone.

And yet, on November 6, Donald Trump, an avowed climate denier, was elected to the presidency (again). His Republican Party also swept the Senate and is likely to control the House of Representatives, too (though the final outcome won’t be known for days if not weeks). A conservative, anti-climate, pro-fossil fuel movement will soon take control of the world’s richest and most powerful country.

This bodes ill for international efforts to rein in greenhouse gases and stop global temperatures from spiraling higher. That much is clear from Trump’s own riffs on climate and his party’s desire to yank the US out of the Paris Agreement — and perhaps the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change altogether. Congressional Republicans are also keen on gutting President Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, along with much of the rest of his pro-climate legacy.

A ‘Corrosive’ Agenda

What is less certain is how climate adaptation and resilience efforts in the US will fare under a second Trump presidency. Experts are hedging their forecasts — at least for now.

“Trump’s presence will be corrosive — but not completely destructive — of ongoing efforts, both from the market and from the US government, to move forward on, let’s say disaster risk reduction, climate mitigation, climate adaptation policies, many of which are already in play,” says Daniel Aldrich, Professor and Director of the Resilience and Security Studies Program at Northeastern University.

Make no mistake, the incoming Trump presidency is likely to undermine efforts made by President Biden these last four years to climate-proof the US. As explained in Monday’s newsletter, Project 2025 — a 922-page blueprint for a Republican administration drawn up by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups — includes plans to scrap climate regulations and cripple climate-related federal agencies. On the adaptation and resilience front, this could throttle spending on climate resilience projects and hobble the production of accurate and reliable climate data.

For example, Project 2025 calls for the breaking up and downsizing of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which under Biden has crafted tools and struck partnerships with the private sector with the aim of building a climate-ready nation. Timely extreme weather forecasts for state and local governments could also become a thing of the past if the National Weather Service — which NOAA oversees — is scrapped.

“Trump has claimed that [NOAA] will be done away with,” says Aldrich. “Same with parts of the Department of Education and maybe even subsections like the National Science Foundation. That move would certainly make research harder. It would make it harder for information for citizens to get out there [on], for example, should we evacuate or not [from a disaster]?” 

Federal efforts to force companies and financial institutions to report more information on their climate risks and opportunities are likely to be halted, too. Under Biden, the Securities and Exchange Commission has toiled to bring a climate risk disclosure rule into effect, which would have unlocked an untold volume of information on climate hazards and companies’ efforts to confront them. Republicans have railed against the regulation, and under a new Commission the rule is likely to be junked. State-level disclosure initiatives, like California’s SB 219, could also be challenged by an anti-climate federal government. 

“I worry that we may have a bit of a more difficult time discussing the real impacts that climate change is having across the country,” says Robert Young, Professor of Geosciences at Western Carolina University, although he adds that “one can always find partners” in any presidential administration.

Taken together, these measures will diminish the store of publicly available climate risk information. Private actors could rush in to fill the gap. Companies like Jupiter, Floodbase, Fathom, and Climate X may find themselves with more customers if businesses and local governments can’t get what they need from federal agencies.

Of course, this will mean climate data is only available to those who can afford it. Those with big enough budgets should be able to buy what they need, while poorer entities — and vulnerable communities — will likely have to fend for themselves.

Undermining Resilience

Federal investment in climate-resilient infrastructure could crater under Trump, too. The Department of Transportation, which has disbursed millions for hardened roads, airports, and other transit hubs under the Biden administration, would be curbed if Project 2025 is enacted as written. The blueprint also calls for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be shrunk, an agency which has taken steps under Biden to address climate risks to public housing.

Then there’s disaster recovery and response. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) became a Trump punching bag in the wake of Hurricane Helene, with the now President-Elect falsely claiming that it exhausted its budget “on bringing in murderers [and] bringing in illegal migrants.” In reality, FEMA has approved US$2.7bn of spending to date on communities affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. 

Again, Project 2025 offers a clue as to how FEMA could be reshaped under the incoming president. Today, the agency covers at least 75% of the cost of major disasters. This could be slashed to as little as 25% under Project 2025 proposals, shifting the financial burden onto state and local governments which may not have the resources to bear them.

However, it may not make political sense for Trump and Republicans to get the federal government out of the business of disaster relief entirely. “Trump’s constituency are in incredibly disaster-prone parts of the country,” says Michael Berkowtiz, Executive Director of the Climate Resilience Institute at the University of Miami. “It’s one thing to write it [shrinking FEMA] in Project 2025, but it’s another thing to actually do it. I think the core component of how we rebuild after a disaster is going to keep ticking on, that would be my guess.”

If FEMA disaster aid is cut, though, state and local governments may be strongly motivated to invest more in adaptation and resilience so that they can lower the dollar toll of climate-driven catastrophes when they occur. But many of these entities lack the financial heft of the federal government, and may not be able to spend what’s needed to defend themselves from climate shocks.

Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, Director at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Earth Institute, at Columbia University, does not think the federal government will halt all climate-proofing work. However, he thinks this spending will look very different under Trump than it did under Biden. “I suspect that initiatives focused on climate adaptation will largely continue in some fashion but will be promoted as disaster mitigation,” he says.

“There will likely be a de-emphasis on any kind of equity initiatives as well as explicit climate change references. This may undo recent efforts to more directly bring climate change into disaster policy,” he adds.

Will Investors Step Up?

Still, the federal government does not operate in a vacuum. It is a major force, for sure, but many other actors can and will continue the work of climate adaptation and resilience without the imprimatur of the White House or Congress. This is what gives some observers hope.

“During the previous Trump administration, market-led initiatives such as the TCFD [Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures] advanced even in the face of government disinterest,” says Craig Davies, CEO of adaptation consultancy Cadlas, referring to the voluntary climate risk disclosure system popularized by Michael Bloomberg and a coalition of companies and financial institutions. “It may be that markets once again need to take the initiative on climate action themselves independently of government leadership, responding to the undeniable economic and human costs of climate change.”

Private investors are unlikely to retreat from the adaptation space. After all, climate shocks aren’t going away, no matter who’s in the White House. There will be an increasing need for adaptation and resilience solutions in the coming years, and the market will do its thing by producing an expanding universe of companies and technologies to supply them.

“We anticipate steady growth in demand, as the need for innovative solutions to address climate risks remains high,” says John Robinson, partner at climate adaptation technology investor Mazarine Ventures. “While a Trump administration may pose setbacks for those reliant on federal programs and legislation, the underlying demand for CAT [climate adaptation technology] solutions is likely to strengthen as climate-related hazards persist.”

Even those investors not active in CAT or adjacent markets should want the adaptation finance gap to close out of pure self-interest, says Stacy Swann, co-founder of Resilient Earth Capital, a climate-focused angel investor community: “Smart investors who want to protect upside and returns across all time horizons would be prudent to think about climate risk and resilience as an investment lens, given the increasing financial risk to returns as the world warms — whether they’ve bought into the opportunities that climate change presents or not.”

Still, asking private actors to try closing a climate adaptation finance gap made wider by a less engaged federal government could be a stretch. It’s proving difficult even under the current administration to incentivize private capital into adaptation and resilience — though the rise of investment taxonomies may help to change this. This obstacle will only get tougher with a retrenchment of federal help.

Financial innovation may go some way to help overcome this, says Berkowitz. “We have always known we needed to tap more private sector money. And the scarcity of government money may drive us to think in more creative ways about how to do that.”

Thanks for reading!

Louie Woodall
Editor