We track hurricanes and wildfires - why not record what we spend to reduce their impacts?
By Anne Stauffer
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But there’s a problem: No one keeps track of how much the federal government and states spend on mitigation. This knowledge gap, which makes it difficult to identify appropriate levels of funding or to design incentives for states, could lead to policies that simply shift spending from one level of government to another while missing opportunities to reduce costs across all levels. Federal and state policymakers should therefore make collecting comprehensive, comparable data on mitigation spending a priority.
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State and federal governments closely track hurricane paths and the spread of wildfires to help officials decide where to deploy first responders and set up recovery operations. But they don’t fully track their investments in disaster mitigation, which are critical to informing current federal efforts to increase funding for pre-disaster mitigation or reallocate funding to such cost-saving activities. And as disaster and budget experts know, you can’t manage what you don’t track.
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