Thumb through the massive infrastructure measure that President Joe Biden signed into law Monday, and a word keeps popping up: Resiliency.
Referring to hardening the planet for a more unforgiving climate, a form of it is mentioned 200 times.
Adding resiliency can come in many forms. In practice, it means better preparing infrastructure and communities for extreme weather events like floods, hurricanes, forest fires or tornadoes.
The term "resiliency" as a mainstream catchphrase in political messaging is about a decade in the making — arguably with roots in the months after Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 storm along the east coast that killed more than 200 people. Not long after, the Obama administration directed about $900 million for projects that would protect flood-prone areas around New York City.
Many deadly disasters later, federal money targeted for resiliency has surged. Some $47 billion of the $1.2 trillion dollar law Biden just signed is directed to resiliency, much of it to hardening critical spaces to unforgiving weather. (The pot of money is also directed to protecting sensitive cyberspace, which has lately also proven dangerously vulnerable.)
And there may be even more funds on the way with another major spending bill yet to pass Congress: President Biden's $1.85 trillion Build Back Better Act, which aims to increase spending on social programs and climate change. In total, the bill calls for over $550 billion toward climate change and environmental justice initiatives, including $105 billion for resiliency projects.
Should that second, larger bill become law, the U.S. government will have allocated more than 150 times the original bucket of money to resiliency measures this year than after Hurricane Sandy.
“What we've seen is a really huge change in the conversation," Amy Chester, managing director of Rebuild by Design, told Spectrum News. "No matter if you're from a red state or a blue state, everyone is talking about this."
The organization that was established after Hurricane Sandy to rethink large-scale infrastructure, today it brings together different sectors to adapt communities to a changing climate.
With ample funds, officials are now thinking about exactly how to spend the money. Some resiliency projects, completed or contemplated, are flashier than others — a series of eye-pleasing barriers ringing Manhattan called “The Big U” to prevent a repeat of the devastation Sandy wrought; a nearby series of breakwaters on Staten Island, where 24 people were killed; a park in Milwaukee that collects stormwater runoff for a recreated marsh; a flood control project in the Houston area Buffalo Bayou.
There are also resiliency projects aimed at upgrading electrical grids, or girding against wildfires and drought, like a water recycling project that would lessen concerns in Las Vegas.
“Nobody anticipated that Nevada would have the population — or Southern Nevada would have the population — that it does today. So we get the smallest share of Colorado River Water,” Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., said in an interview with Spectrum News.
“If you can find other ways to get water, like recycling, that would certainly be an example of resiliency," Titus continued.
“The idea of resilience is really rethinking the infrastructure that we have today and modernizing it for climate change,” added Chester.
Resilience is also growing as a term used elsewhere — psychological resilience or resilience in engineering, for instance. As for resilience in the infrastructure bill, Titus said that the money will go to bringing houses and buildings up to recommended codes.
Where once seen as retrofitting or hardening structures, the money may also be used for simply environmentally-friendly projects, like high-speed rail. Titus is eyeing a link between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
(Transportation is seen as accounting for at least a fifth of carbon dioxide emissions, and as this table shows taking the train is far healthier than flying or driving).
“We certainly need to keep it from getting worse,” Titus said. “And we've got a 10 year window, according to all the scientists — that if we don't get a handle during that time, the planet is lost.”
But buckets of money don’t necessarily translate into quick action. In fact, if the money targeted after Sandy is an indication, resiliency projects can blow past deadlines — seeding cynicism not to mention delaying protection against catastrophes.
While the Staten Island project is moving along, the “Big U” ring around Manhattan has been scrapped as impractical. A revised plan is to rebuild and raise a major park on Manhattan’s east side, but because of lawsuits, plenty of bureaucracy and revisions to the original plans, construction has barely started.
And while super storms keep brewing, actual flood protection isn’t expected for another two years, at least.
There are also hold ups at the Houston-area Buffalo Bayou project. A glance at a federal permitting online dashboard shows one word repeatedly when it comes to the timetable: “paused.”
States from coast to coast could use money from the proposed $105 billion for resilience in the Build Back Better act to address the billions of dollars in damage caused by major weather events, many of which are attributed to the rapidly changing climate.
Between 2010 and 2020, New York recorded at least 31 extreme weather events, costing the state up to $100 billion in damages; Florida has experienced 23 extreme weather events in the same time frame, costing the state up to $100 billion in damages and California experienced around 16 such events, costing the state up to $100 billion.
But the future of the bill remains uncertain in an evenly-divided Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris acts as tie-breaking vote for the Democrats.
The U.S. House of Representatives narrowly approved the bill early Friday, but no Senate Republicans are expected to vote it — and Senate Democrats have so far been unable to reach a compromise among themselves.