Extreme Heat and Wildfire Smoke Should Be Considered ‘Major Disasters’ by FEMA Amid Climate Crisis, Advocates Say

As the planet enters its 12th consecutive month of record-breaking heat, nearly three dozen environmental, labor and health groups are urging the United States’ Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to consider extreme high temperatures and wildfire smoke as “major disasters,” on par with events like hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis.

To date, FEMA has traditionally saved that classification for emergencies with obvious physical destruction. But the toll of heat and smoke on Americans’ health continues to worsen. In a petition filed Monday, the coalition shared data that 2,300 Americans died in 2023 of heat-related illness—an estimate that is considered undercounted—while 130 million Americans were put under heat alerts.

“Hurricanes are terrible. Earthquakes are terrible,” Jean Su, the director of the energy justice program at the Center for Biological Diversity and a leader of the petition, tells NPR’s Alejandra Borunda. “But actually, heat is the number one killer now of the climate emergency of any weather-related event.”

The coalition is specifically calling for an amendment to the Stafford Act, which is the legislation that allows FEMA to make a disaster declaration and provide funding to affected communities. Adding extreme heat and wildfire smoke to the act’s regulations would pave the way for local governments to invest in cooling centers, air conditioning, filtration systems and energy-efficient buildings, the group writes.

During a ten-day heat wave in 2022, in which 395 people in California died, FEMA rejected the state’s disaster declaration request, writing that the agency’s “precedent is to evaluate discrete events and impacts, not seasonal or general atmospheric conditions,” according to the petition.

Last year, 645 people died in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes the state capital Phoenix, during the metropolitan area’s unprecedented stretch of extreme summer heat. Under a “heat dome” in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, 650 people in the U.S. and Canada died—and due to climate change, such an event may be 150 times more likely to occur now, compared to the region’s pre-industrial climate.

“Elderly people, homeless people, people who work outside and people who do not have access to air conditioning are especially vulnerable to these impacts,” according to the USDA’s Northwest Climate Hub.

“FEMA has the power to save lives—and we urge them to use that power to meet this emergency with the urgency it deserves,” Liz Shuler, the president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, says in a statement.

More than 1.5 billion people so far this year have been exposed to extreme heat, according to a recent analysis from the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of Americans across the Midwest and Northeast this week are enduring a “heat dome,” which is predicted to bring multiple days of temperatures in the upper 90s and heat indices above 105 degrees Fahrenheit, much higher than seasonal norms.

“It’s time for Congress to sit down with big infrastructure owners and community leaders on how we redesign a system that makes sense,” Brock Long, who served as FEMA’s administrator under the Trump administration, tells the New York Times’ Manuela Andreoni. “We are never going to be able to address the changing climate or threats to the future under the existing system.”

Christian Thorsberg | READ MORE

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.