Climate change and federal aid disbursements after Hurricane Harvey: an extreme event attribution analysis

Journal Article · Mon Sep 01 00:00:00 EDT 2025 · Environmental Research Letters

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adf978· OSTI ID:3005787

Smiley, Kevin T; Noy, Ilan; Wehner, Michael F; Wing, Oliver E J; Larrison, KayLynn

The role climate change plays in increasing the burden placed on governments and insurers to pay for recovery has not been extensively explored and is the focus of this study. This study examines the impacts of climate change attributed flooding on federal disaster aid disbursement in Harris County, Texas following Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Our approach uses flood models to estimate the amount of flood damages attributable and not attributable to climate change under two climate change attribution scenarios from peer reviewed studies: 20% and 38% increases in rainfall associated with the hurricane due to climate change. These estimates are combined with census tract-level disbursement data for FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and the Individual Assistance (IA) part of the Individuals and Households Program. We employ spatial lag regression models with direct and spatial spillover effects to analyze the relationship between a tract’s flood damages—both attributed and not attributed to climate change—and federal disaster aid. We find that both types of flood damage shape federal aid disbursements, but that climate change attributed damages tend to have larger effect sizes (elasticities) especially for IA. Specifically, for a 1% increase in additional climate change attributed damages per household in a census tract (under the 20% scenario), expected NFIP levels in that census tract are 0.26% higher and IA levels are 0.3% higher. Implications center on federal funding in an era of climate change.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: US Department of Energy; USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER) (SC-23), Climate and Environmental Sciences Division (SC-23.1 )
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231
• OSTI ID: 3005787
• Journal Information: Environmental Research Letters, Journal Name: Environmental Research Letters Journal Issue: 9 Vol. 20
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

FEMA
Hurricane Harvey
NFIP
extreme event attribution
federal disaster aid