Susquehanna basin falling short on climate prep, study says

Pennsylvania communities in the Susquehanna River watershed aren’t adequately accounting for climate change in their disaster planning, leaving them vulnerable to floods from increasingly frequent heavy rains, according to a new report.

None of the 40 counties in the Penn State University study achieved what the authors described as the “best practice standard” for addressing climate impacts. To meet that standard, a county needs a plan that incorporates place-specific climate change information and includes documentation of chronic flooding hot spots, as well as data on past and future impacts from climate-driven flooding, they said.

That information is crucial for communities to prepare for disasters, said Virginia Silvis, a postdoctoral scholar specializing in climate adaptation.

“A lot of communities and counties are mentioning climate change, but that mention isn’t crossing over into usable information,” she said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency requires state, local and tribal governments to have approved “hazard mitigation plans” to be eligible for many types of non-emergency disaster funding, such as flood-control projects. And they must be updated every five years.

As a result, nearly 85% of the U.S. population lives in a jurisdiction covered by an active hazard mitigation plan, FEMA reports.

The plans can be dozens or even hundreds of pages long, identifying high-risk areas and outlining strategies for coping with them.

Amid mounting evidence that climate change has been causing wildfires, hurricanes and other catastrophes to worsen, the Biden administration began mandating plans to address climate in 2023. But the requirement was short-lived. The second Trump administration deleted climate-change contingencies from FEMA’s list of plan requirements shortly after taking office.

Silvis said she was disappointed by the reversal, arguing that communities ignore climate change at their own peril. “Climate change is occurring,” she said. “We are stabbing ourselves in the foot a bit by trying not to mitigate for it. Maybe if [a disaster] happens once, a community can be OK, but … this is happening over and over again.”

A FEMA official, asking not to be identified, said that changes in the 2025 update “include removal of requirements related to climate change and equity. These actions ensure that FEMA guidance aligns with the president’s executive orders and Secretary Noem’s direction on how to best support states and local communities in disaster planning, response and recovery.”

The Penn State study was published in January in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. The analysis looked at plans published between 2017 and 2022 — before the Biden-era climate directive took effect.

Silvis and Penn State colleague Robert Nicholas discovered that 30% of the plans made no reference at all to climate change or, if they did, not in relation to flooding — the region’s top hazard.

A handful of plans mentioned climate-driven flooding but only devoted a sentence or two to the issue. Lycoming County’s 2020 plan, for example, offered a single sentence on the subject: “As climate change brings more frequent heavy rains to the region, the probability of future levee failures is expected to increase.”

“It was more like a statement that, ‘Yes climate change is happening,’” Silvis said, adding that such plan shortcomings demonstrate that FEMA should provide more guidance to communities on what climate information they should include.

Kelsey Green, hazard mitigation planner for Lycoming County, in north-central Pennsylvania, doesn’t dispute the study’s criticism.

“I absolutely agree that we didn’t really mention climate change, and I feel like that was due absolutely to political pressure,” she said. “We’re in a rather rural county, and things like that can be rather difficult to explain to our elected officials as well as to our public.”

For its part, the study didn’t find a link between mentioning climate and whether a county is urban or rural. Political affiliation didn’t appear to have any bearing either.

Green started her job with the county just as it was wrapping up its 2020 plan. She said one of the biggest considerations in hiring a consultant to update the plan this year was a goal to look into climate impacts.

That was when FEMA still required climate language. But Green said she still hopes to include it — just less directly.

“The majority of my population here is rural,” she explained. “The media has made certain words like ‘climate change’ and ‘vulnerable populations’ cause a reaction in people. Rewording it in a different way goes a long way.”

Consultant-authored plans were more likely to discuss climate than their county-authored counterparts, according to the Penn State researchers.

FEMA’s new guidance for hazard mitigation plans, released in April, includes no mentions of the “climate” and entirely deleted a section from the previous version titled “Planning for Climate Change and Equitable Outcomes.”

It appears, though, to leave the door open for jurisdictions to continue incorporating climate-linked risks in their planning. An analysis of the document conducted for the Association of State Floodplain Managers found that it remains laden with terms such as “future risks” and “resilience.”

“This allows for jurisdictions to choose to continue to consider climate-related risks,” wrote Patrick Marchman, a senior advisor for the planning firm Jacob Green & Associates.

Some of the county plans came close to meeting all the best standards for climate planning, the Penn State study found. The plans of four counties — Chester, Dauphin, Lancaster and Luzerne — were only missing figures for future flooding projections, Silvis and Nicholas wrote.

Several counties have updated their mitigation plans since the study’s analysis took place and include much more detailed climate information. York County, for example, mentioned “climate” 16 times in the 2018 plan analyzed by the Penn State study; the 2024 version upped that total to 88.

That wasn’t an accident, said Roy Livergood, a senior planner for the county. “For the 2024 plan, FEMA placed a greater emphasis on further calling out climate change in each section of the plan, where applicable, as part of their guidance and requirements for plan approval,” he wrote in an email.

When asked whether the county would back off from considering climate in future updates because of the Trump administration’s rollback, Livergood said no. Climate has always factored into the county’s planning, even before the Biden requirement went into effect, he noted.

But hazard mitigation efforts could be hindered by the administration’s recent decision to abruptly cancel billions of dollars in nationwide spending on local planning and resilience projects, he added.