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CRS Report: 'Introduction to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)' (Updated: 23 December 2019)

Diane P. Horn, the CRS flood guru, and Baird Webel penned this report: 'Introduction to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)'.

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Download CRS_Report_Intro_NFIP_23Dec2019

Summary
The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) was established by the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968 (NFIA; 42 U.S.C. §4001 et seq.) and was most recently reauthorized to September 30, 2020, through a series of short-term reauthorizations. The general purpose of the NFIP is both to offer primary flood insurance to properties with significant flood risk, and to reduce flood risk through the adoption of floodplain management standards. Communities volunteer to participate in the NFIP in order to have access to federal flood insurance, and in return are required to adopt minimum standards.

The NFIP is managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), through its subcomponent the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration (FIMA). FEMA manages a Risk Mapping, Assessment and Planning (Risk MAP) process to produce Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs). Depicted on FIRMs are Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHAs), which are areas exposed to a 1% or greater risk of annual flooding. FIRMs vary in age across the country, and are updated on a prioritized basis. The Risk MAP process provides extensive outreach and appeal opportunities for communities. Updating a community’s FIRMs can take three to five years or more. Participating communities must adopt a flood map and enact minimum floodplain standards to regulate development in the SFHA. FEMA encourages communities to enhance their floodplain standards by offering reduced premium rates through the Community Rating System (CRS). FEMA also manages a Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA) grant program using NFIP revenues to further reduce comprehensive flood risk. Participating communities that fail to adopt FIRMs or maintain minimum floodplain standards can be put on probation or suspended from the NFIP. In communities that do not participate in the NFIP, or have been suspended, individuals cannot purchase NFIP insurance. Individuals in these communities also face challenges receiving federal disaster assistance in flood hazard areas, and have difficulties receiving federally backed mortgages.

NFIP insurance uses one of three types of Standard Flood Insurance Policies (SFIPs). SFIPs have maximum coverage limits set by law. Any federal entity that makes, guarantees, or purchases mortgages must, by law, require property owners in the SFHA to purchase flood insurance, generally through the NFIP. In moderate risk areas, community members may purchase Preferred Risk Policies (PRPs) that offer less costly insurance. The day-to-day sale, servicing, and claims processing of NFIP policies are conducted by private industry partners. Most policies are serviced by companies that are reimbursed through the Write Your Own (WYO) Program.

The premium rate for most NFIP policies is intended to reflect the true flood risk. However, Congress has directed FEMA to subsidize flood insurance for properties built before the community’s first FIRM (i.e., the pre-FIRM subsidy). In addition, FEMA “grandfathers” properties at their rate from past FIRMs to updated FIRMs through a cross-subsidy.

Congress has provided appropriations to the NFIP for some of the cost of Risk MAP. Congress also authorizes the use of premium revenues for other NFIP costs, including administration, salaries, and other expenses. NFIP premiums also include other charges, such as a Federal Policy Fee, a Reserve Fund assessment, and a surcharge to help fund the NFIP. In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. The NFIP currently owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. Treasury, leaving $9.9 billion in borrowing authority from a $30.425 billion limit in law. This debt is serviced by the NFIP and interest is paid through premium revenues.

After September 30, 2020, key authorities of the NFIP, such as the authority to issue new insurance contracts, will expire if they are not reauthorized by Congress.

Want to see some more CRS flood-related reports? Go here.

Last post of the year. Have a great New Year's Eve and 2020!

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"Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better person." - Ben Franklin

Paper: 'Toward Improved Predictions in Ungauged Basins: Exploiting the Power of Machine Learning'

Open-access paper in Water Resources Research: 'Toward Improved Predictions in Ungauged Basins: Exploiting the Power of Machine Learning' by Frederik Kratzert, Daniel Klotz, Mathew Herrnegger Alden K. Sampson, Sepp Hochreite and Grey S. Nearing.

Here is the PDF:

Download Towards_Improved Prediction_Ungauged_Basins

There may not be hot links in the PDF. Read the article online to utilize the hot links.

Abstract

Long short‐term memory (LSTM) networks offer unprecedented accuracy for prediction in ungauged basins. We trained and tested several LSTMs on 531 basins from the CAMELS data set using k‐fold validation, so that predictions were made in basins that supplied no training data. The training and test data set included ∼30 years of daily rainfall‐runoff data from catchments in the United States ranging in size from 4 to 2,000 km² with aridity index from 0.22 to 5.20, and including 12 of the 13 IGPB vegetated land cover classifications. This effectively “ungauged” model was benchmarked over a 15‐year validation period against the Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting (SAC‐SMA) model and also against the NOAA National Water Model reanalysis. SAC‐SMA was calibrated separately for each basin using 15 years of daily data. The out‐of‐sample LSTM had higher median Nash‐Sutcliffe Efficiencies across the 531 basins (0.69) than either the calibrated SAC‐SMA (0.64) or the National Water Model (0.58). This indicates that there is (typically) sufficient information in available catchment attributes data about similarities and differences between catchment‐level rainfall‐runoff behaviors to provide out‐of‐sample simulations that are generally more accurate than current models under ideal (i.e., calibrated) conditions. We found evidence that adding physical constraints to the LSTM models might improve simulations, which we suggest motivates future research related to physics‐guided machine learning.

Key Points:

• Overall accuracy of LSTMs in ungauged basins is comparable to
standard hydrology models in gauged basins

• There is sufficient information in catchment characteristics data to differentiate between catchment-specific rainfall-runoff behaviors 

Skipping to the discussion....

        Discussion

The results illustrated in the previous section tell us three things:

1. The process‐driven hydrology models that we used here as benchmarks could be improved. The LSTM often finds a better functional representation of rainfall‐runoff behavior in most catchments than either SAC‐SMA or the NWM.
2. The argument that process‐driven models may be preferable in out‐of‐sample conditions may not hold water. Modern ML methods are quite powerful at extracting information from large, diverse data sets under a variety of hydrological conditions.
3. The comparison between models with and without static catchment attributes as inputs demonstrates that there is sufficient information contained in catchment attribute data to distinguish between different rainfall‐runoff relationships in at least most of the U.S. catchments that we tested.

Related to the third conclusion, the challenge going forward is about how to extract the useful information from catchment attributes data for regional modeling. One of the historical reasons why this has been a hard problem is because the usual strategy is to use observable catchment attributes or characteristics to identify or “regionalize” parameters of conceptual or process‐based simulation models (e.g., Prieto et al., 2019; Razavi & Coulibaly, 2012). This is hard because of strong interactions in high‐dimensional parameter spaces. There are many methods for this—notably a family of regionalization methods that Razavi and Coulibaly (2012) called “model independent”; however, we are unaware of any approach that is as effective as LSTMs at extracting this information for streamflow simulation. This is also in line with the recent results by Kratzert et al. (2019), where similar LSTMs were compared against models calibrated with a parameter regionalization strategy (Samaniego et al., 2010). That paper additionally showed that the response of LSTM‐type models were relatively smooth with respect to perturbing catchment attributes, indicating a robust fit (i.e., that the models were not overfit or simply remembering different catchments). The results presented here show that the LSTM is able to extrapolate on catchment attributes to new catchments. Taken together, these results indicate that the catchment attribute data set (Addor et al., 2017) contains a significant amount of useful information about the differences between rainfall‐runoff behaviors across (eco)hydrological regimes, and that machine learning is effective at extracting and using these patterns.

Related to the first conclusion, this is yet another example where traditional hydrological models do not take full advantage of the information available from the Earth‐observation data record. In this case, neither SAC‐SMA nor the NWM are able to directly use the catchment attribute data that we use here, but even if those models could leverage this information, they still could not compete with the LSTM, since the LSTM outperforms even when the conceptual model is calibrated in‐basin. This means that not only is there useful information in catchment attributes data, but also that there is more information in meteorological forcing data than is used by the traditional models. Several recent experiments have shown the same thing for a number of operational terrestrial hydrology models (e.g., Nearing et al., 2018, 2016). Hrachowitz et al. (2013) and others suggest that better process‐based understanding of catchment behaviors should result in better out‐of sample predictions. In reality, it is data‐driven models that have consistently given increasingly better predictions. From a more optimistic perspective, ML benchmarking experiments like the one in this paper show that there are probably organizing theories about watersheds yet to be discovered, since machine learning models are able to find informative patterns in multibasin data sets that our current models do not reproduce.

The power of big data and machine learning for problems like this is that such techniques can synthesize information from multiple sites and situations into a single model. As an example, if we were to want to simulate catchment behavior under nonstationary conditions (e.g., evolving climate), then a single LSTM trained to recognize and distinguish different types of hydrological behavior (as shown here) will have a larger range of conditions where it can be expected to remain realistic than a model calibrated to a past conditions in only a single basin.

In our opinion, the most effective strategy moving forward will probably be theory‐guided data‐science Karpatne et al. (2017). There are now numerous strategies across scientific disciplines that allow for meaningful fusions of domain knowledge with machine learning and other algorithms for learning and predicting directly from data. Adopting approaches like this will be critical moving forward.

Fascinating...

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"Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields." - Peter Borden

USGAO Report: 'Climate Change - Potential Economic Costs and Opportunities to Reduce Federal Fiscal Exposure'

Another USGAO report on climate change (see the one from last week - click here): 'Climate Change - Potential Economic Costs and Opportunities to Reduce Federal Fiscal Exposure' (19 December 2019). This is an update of one published on 28 September 2017.

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Download GAO_Report_C,imate_Change Economic_19Dec2019_Highlights

Download GAO_Report_Climate_Change_Economic_19Dec2019_Full

Fast Facts
Disaster costs will likely increase as extreme weather events become more frequent and intense due to climate change, scientists report. In 2018 alone, weather and climate disasters in the United States cost at least $91 billion.

We testified about our work on reducing the federal government’s fiscal exposure from climate change, a topic on our High Risk List since 2013. Among other things, the government faces bigger bills for providing disaster aid and property and crop insurance.

Our recommendations have included improved planning and other actions that could reduce the need for far more costly steps in the decades to come.

Infrastructure projects, like this system of levees and other barriers in New Orleans, could reduce risk from coastal storms and flooding—events that could be exacerbated by climate change.

What GAO Found
The estimated economic effects of climate change, while imprecise, can convey useful insight about potential damages in the United States. In September 2017, GAO reported that the potential economic effects of climate change could be significant and unevenly distributed across sectors and regions (see figure). This is consistent with the 2018 findings of the U.S. Global Change Research Program's Fourth National Climate Assessment, which concluded, among other things, that the continued increase in the frequency and extent of high-tide flooding due to sea level rise threatens America's trillion-dollar coastal infrastructure.

Information about the potential economic effects of climate change could inform decision makers about significant potential damages in different U.S. sectors or regions. According to prior GAO work, this information could help decision makers identify significant climate risks as an initial step toward managing them.

The federal government faces fiscal exposure from climate change risks in several areas, including:

• Disaster aid: due to the rising number of natural disasters and increasing reliance on federal assistance. GAO has previously reported that the federal government's fragmented and reactive approach to funding disaster resilience presented challenges to effective reduction of climate-related risks. GAO has also reported that, due to an artificially low indicator for determining a jurisdiction's ability to respond to disasters that was set in 1986, the Federal Emergency Management Agency risks recommending federal assistance for jurisdictions that could recover on their own.
• Federal insurance for property and crops: due, in part, to the vulnerability of insured property and crops to climate change impacts. Federal flood and crop insurance programs were not designed to generate sufficient funds to fully cover all losses and expenses. The flood insurance program, for example, was about $21 billion in debt to the Treasury as of April 2019. Further, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in May 2019 that federal crop insurance would cost the federal government an average of about $8 billion annually from 2019 through 2029.
• Operation and management of federal property and lands: due to the hundreds of thousands of federal facilities and millions of acres of land that could be affected by a changing climate and more frequent extreme events. For example, in 2018, Hurricane Michael devastated Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, with a preliminary repair estimate of $3 billion.

As we reported in October 2019, our past work shows an absence of government-wide strategic planning for climate change. Specifically, our past work has identified limitations related to strategic planning for climate change that includes a lack of coordination, prioritization, and consolidation of strategic priorities. In our March 2019 High-Risk Update, we assessed the federal government's progress since 2017 related to climate change strategic planning against five criteria and found that the federal government had not met any of the criteria for removal from the high-risk list.

Federal investments in resilience to reduce fiscal exposures have been limited. As GAO has reported, enhancing resilience can reduce fiscal exposure by reducing or eliminating long-term risk to people and property from natural hazards. For example, a 2018 interim report by the National Institute of Building Sciences estimated approximate benefits to society in excess of costs for several types of resilience projects. While precise benefits are uncertain, the report estimated that for every dollar invested in designing new buildings to particular design standards, society could accrue benefits amounting to about $11 on average.

GAO's March 2019 High-Risk report identified a number of recommendations GAO has made related to fiscal exposure to climate change. The federal government could reduce its fiscal exposure by implementing these recommendations. Among GAO's key government-wide recommendations are:

• Entities within the Executive Office of the President (EOP) should work with partners to establish federal strategic climate change priorities that reflect the full range of climate-related federal activities;
• Entities within EOP should use information on potential economic effects from climate change to help identify significant climate risks and craft appropriate federal responses;
• Entities within EOP should designate a federal entity to develop and update a set of authoritative climate observations and projections for use in federal decision making, and create a national climate information system with defined roles for federal agencies and certain nonfederal entities; and
• The Department of Commerce should convene federal agencies to provide the best-available forward-looking climate information to organizations that develop standards and building codes to enhance infrastructure resilience.

Further, in October 2019, GAO reported that Congress could consider establishing a federal organizational arrangement to periodically identify and prioritize climate resilience projects for federal investment. GAO also issued the Disaster Resilience Framework to serve as a guide for analysis of federal action to facilitate and promote resilience to natural disasters, including resilience to climate change.

Why GAO Did This Study
Since 2005, federal funding for disaster assistance is at least $450 billion, including approximately $19.1 billion in supplemental appropriations signed into law on June 6, 2019. In 2018 alone, there were 14 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disaster events across the United States, with a total cost of at least $91 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The U.S. Global Change Research Program projects that disaster costs will likely increase as certain extreme weather events become more frequent and intense due to climate change.

The costs of recent weather disasters have illustrated the need for planning for climate change risks and investing in resilience. Resilience is the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events, according to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Investing in resilience can reduce the need for far more costly steps in the decades to come.

Since February 2013, GAO has included Limiting the Federal Government's Fiscal Exposure by Better Managing Climate Change Risks on its list of federal program areas at high risk of vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement or most in need of transformation. GAO updates this list every 2 years. In March 2019, GAO reported that the federal government had not made measurable progress since 2017 to reduce fiscal exposure to climate change.

This testimony—based on reports GAO issued from October 2009 to October 2019—discusses 1) what is known about the potential economic effects of climate change in the United States and the extent to which this information could help federal decision makers manage climate risks across the federal government, (2) the fiscal exposure facing the federal government due to climate risks and current efforts to address that exposure, (3) the extent to which the federal government has invested in resilience to climate change impacts, and (4) how the federal government could reduce fiscal exposure to the effects of climate change.

GAO had made 62 recommendations related to the Limiting the Federal Government’s Fiscal Exposure by Better Managing Climate Change Risks high-risk area. As of December 2018, 25 of those recommendations remained open.

For more information, contact J. Alfredo Gómez at (202) 512-3841 or gomezj@gao.gov.

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"It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error." - Robert Jackson (former Suprememe Court Justice)

CRS Report: 'Flood-Risk Reduction and Resilience - Federal Assistance and Programs' Updated: 17 December 2019

This CRS report was released 13 November 2017 and updated 17 December 2019: Flood-Risk Reduction and Resilience: Federal Assistance and Programs, by Nicole T. Carter, Diane P. Horn, Jared T. Brown, Eugene Boyd, Megan Stubbs, Jonathan L. Ramseur and Harold F. Upton.

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Download CRS_Report_Flood_Resilience__Risk_Reduction_17Dec2019

Summary
Recent flood disasters have raised congressional and public interest in reducing flood risks and improving flood resilience, which is the ability to adapt to, withstand, and rapidly recover from floods. Federal programs that assist communities in reducing their flood risk and improving their flood resilience include programs funding infrastructure projects (e.g., levees, shore protection) and other flood mitigation activities (e.g., nature-based flood risk reduction) and mitigation incentives for communities that participate in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

Assistance Programs
Congress has established various federal programs to assist state, local, and territorial entities and tribes in reducing community flood risk. Each federal program has its own focus, statutory limitations, and way of operating. For example, the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) is triggered by a major disaster declaration pursuant to the Stafford Act, and the Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) grant program becomes available as the result of a 6% set-aside from the Disaster Relief Fund after every major disaster declaration. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administers the HMGP and PDM. In contrast to how the HMGP and PDM are triggered, Congress uses annual appropriations and supplemental appropriations to fund other assistance programs. Eligibility for assistance through some of these programs also may be tied to disaster declarations. These assistance programs include:

•   FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA) grant program;

•   U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) flood risk reduction projects;

•   U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) acquisition of floodplain easements and grants for flood risk reduction projects;

•   National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) grants for coastal resilience, restoration, and management (including the Great Lakes);

•   U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) support for state-administered loan programs and direct credit assistance for stormwater management; and

  Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grants through the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) and Community Development BlockGrant−Disaster Recovery (CDBG−DR) programs.

 

Flood Insurance
Congress established the National Flood Insurance Program in the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968 (NFIA; 42 U.S.C. §§4001 et seq.). For federal flood insurance to be available to homeowners and business owners in a community, the NFIP requires participating communities to develop and adopt flood maps and enact minimum floodplain standards based on those flood maps. The NFIP encourages communities to adopt and enforce floodplain management regulations such as zoning codes, building codes, subdivision ordinances, and rebuilding restrictions. The NFIP also encourages communities to reduce flood risk through three programs: the FMA, Community Rating System, and Increased Cost of Compliance coverage.

Context for Federal Activities and Policy Considerations
In the United States, flood-related responsibilities are shared. States and local governments have significant discretion in land use and development decisions that shape communities’ vulnerability to floods and the consequence of floods. Since the 1960s, the federal role in responding to catastrophic and regional flooding has expanded through the NFIP and federal disaster response and recovery efforts. Recent floods and concerns about a changing climate have brought attention to the nation’s and the federal government’s financial exposure to flood losses and floods’ economic, social, and public healthimpacts. Members of Congress and other decisionmakers are faced with numerous policy questions, including whether federal programs and policies provide incentives or disincentives for states and communities to prepare for floods and manage their flood risks, and whether changes to how federal assistance programs and the NFIP are implemented and funded could improve long-term flood resilience.

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"Never join a department whose chair is a British paleontologist." - advice I once received from an older Canadian colleague

CRS Reports: 1) 'USACE Section 70001 Annual Report on Future Studies and Projects'; 2) 'Dam Safety: Federal Programs and Authorities'

Two brief (a few pages) CRS Reports (both updated 9 December 2019) from Anna E. Normand: 1) 'Army Corps of Engineers: Section 7001 Annual Report on Future Studies and Projects'; and 2) 'Dam Safety: Federal Programs and Authorities'.

1) Download CRS_InSight)_USACE_Section7001_9Dec2019

Introduction

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), through its civil works mission, undertakes water resource development studies and projects and other assistance activities that are specifically authorized by Congress. In Section 7001 of the Water Resources Reform and Development Act (WRRDA) of 2014 (P.L. 113-121; 33 U.S.C. §2282d), Congress established an annual process for identifying proposals for site- specific studies and projects within USACE’s water resource mission and authorities. The process includes a call for nonfederal proposals and concludes with a report by the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works (ASACW) to USACE’s congressional authorizing committees.

Congress authorizes USACE studies and projects prior to appropriating funds and typically considers omnibus USACE water resource authorization bills biennially, typically titled as Water Resources Development Acts (WRDAs). Most project-specific authorizations in WRDAs fall into three categories: feasibility studies, construction projects, or modifications to existing authorizations. (See this CRS reportfor more on the USACE authorization process.)

Inclusion of a proposal in a Section 7001 annual report does not provide congressional authorization or appropriation. Rather, inclusion facilitates congressional consideration of the proposal’s authorization (in a manner consistent with congressional earmark moratorium policies). For example, Congress has used Section 7001 annual reports from 2015 through 2018 in developing WRDA 2016 (Title I of P.L. 114-322) and WRDA 2018 (Title I of P.L. 115-270). USACE accepts nonfederal proposals for consideration in Section 7001 annual reports over a 120-day period. The submission period for nonfederal proposals for the 2020 report was open from April 29, 2019, to August 27, 2019. Transmission of the report to Congress is expected in February 2020.

Note: the online version has some hot links embedded.

This picture is from a GAO report.

2) Download CRS_InFocus_Dam_Safety_9Dec2019

Introduction

In recent years, several incidents have highlighted the public safety risks posed by the failure of dams and related facilities. From 2015 to 2018, over 100 dams breached in North Carolina and South Carolina due to record flooding. In 2017, the near failure of Oroville Dam’s spillway in California resulted in a precautionary evacuation of approximately 200,000 people and cost more than $1.1 billion in emergency response and repair. The 2019 failure of Spencer Dam in Nebraska resulted in the first dam- failure fatality in the nation since 2006. In response to these incidents, Congress may consider additional oversight and legislation that could improve dam safety.

This In Focus summarizes the U.S. dam inventory, rehabilitation and repair estimates, federal dam safety activities, and related issues for Congress. For more detailed information, see CRS Report R45981, Dam Safety Overview and the Federal Role.

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"True heroism serves the common good, or it is not really heroism at all." - Richard Rohr