Scioto climate change cost study comes before U.S. Senate

On Thursday, August 4, Power a Clean Future Ohio Executive Director Joe Flarida delivered expert testimony to the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs during its hearing, “Borrowed Time: The Economic Costs of Climate Change.”

US Senator and Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown invited Flarida to present the findings from a first-of-its-kind report released by the Ohio Environmental Council, Power A Clean Future Ohio, and Scioto Analysis. The Bill is Coming Due: Calculating the Financial Cost of Climate Change to Ohio’s Local Governments provides a conservative estimate of the additional costs that municipalities can expect to incur due to climate change. According to the analysis, local governments across Ohio will need to increase municipal spending by as much as $5.9 billion annually by midcentury to adapt to the challenges of a worsening climate crisis.

“Local governments are burdened with the most challenging public problems we face. They are the eyes that see these problems first, the voices that raise the alarm when we reach a tipping point, and the hands that are asked to implement the solutions we identify,” testified Flarida. “Today, I am here to lift up those Ohio elected leaders and the tireless staff in cities and counties across Ohio that are raising the alarm on the financial costs of climate change that they see coming.”

The climate damages considered in the report are projected to only intensify in approaching decades, generating new costs associated with climate-driven disaster recovery and adaptation, and creating a major strain on already overstretched taxpayers and cash-strapped local governments.

“Climate change is here. The country knows it,” said Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Committee Chairman, as he called the hearing to order. “Ask mayors, ask school superintendents, ask county commissioners about the increasing costs they deal with already because of climate change — costs we know will only get worse — and we know who will be forced to pay for these costs. It’s not the oil companies making record profits… it’s the local taxpayers. The likely impact of climate change could cost people in my state $6 billion a year.”

For more information on the report, click here.

To watch the hearing, click here.