The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been collecting a lot of information about flood risks across America, including the increased risk of flooding linked to climate change. But the agency has not effectively used that new knowledge to persuade more Americans to buy flood insurance, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

As a result, homeowners are at increasing risk of costly damage from floods, and the government is facing rising costs for disaster relief assistance, the report found. The report called on Congress to consider requiring FEMA to evaluate how the agency can use the “comprehensive and up-to-date flood risk information” it has been collecting to determine which properties should be required to have flood insurance under the National Flood Insurance Program.

Under that program, managed by FEMA, insurance is available to anyone living in one of the 23,000 participating communities. Homes and businesses in areas with a high risk of flooding and mortgages from government-backed lenders are required to have flood insurance.

When people without insurance are flooded, “there are consequences to taxpayers and to the program itself,” said Alicia Puente Cackley, director of financial markets and community investment for GAO. “It is also not as good for the homeowner,” she added. “The assistance you get through a disaster declaration isn’t as much as with insurance.”

In a written response to GAO, Jim H. Crumpacker, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) liaison’s office with GAO, said that the department, which includes FEMA, agreed with the accounting office’s recommendations. Crumpacker said that under FEMA’s 2018 to 2022 strategic plan, it was working to double participation in the flood insurance program through community outreach. But he pointed out the agency does not have the authority to enforce lender compliance, a task that falls on “at least ten other federal agencies.”

In part because of that bureaucracy, the accountability office found it difficult to understand the full extent to which lenders were complying with the insurance mandate.

“We were not able to estimate a compliance rate,” Cackley said. “Nobody has all of the information you’d need to do it, that would be put in a way that would allow us to do it,” she said.

Read the full article about climate flooding risks by James Bruggers at Inside Climate News.