President Obama on Friday demanded “new strategies” to boost the nation’s resilience to powerful storms, drought, heat waves and other dangerous weather linked to climate change.
Obama issued a wide-ranging executive order designed to support “climate resilient” infrastructure investment in states and communities.
It also calls on federal agencies to change their policies and rules “to make the Nation’s watersheds, natural resources, and ecosystems, and the communities and economies that depend on them, more resilient in the face of a changing climate.”
The executive order, echoing Obama’s second-term climate agenda released in June, recognizes that climate change is inevitable even as the U.S. takes steps to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
It sets up a new “interagency Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience,” and, to inform federal efforts, a “State, Local, and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience.”