For the past year, Scioto Analysis has been working with the Center for Climate Integrity on a project estimating the financial costs that local governments will incur as a result of climate change. The study was released last month and has already been getting some coverage in the Pennsylvania media.
The study looked at the costs associated with eight different categories of infrastructure that would be impacted by rising temperatures, increased precipitation, and rising sea levels. An online visual representation of these costs estimated by engineering firm Resilient Analytics can be found here.
We contributed the equity and budget analysis to this project, helping explain who is going to be bearing these costs and providing some context for what these costs might actually feel like in a municipal budget. Here are some of our key findings and what they mean for Pennsylvania.
Rural municipalities have the highest per capita costs
Despite incurring lower total costs, rural communities across Pennsylvania are going to face higher per-capita costs compared to the statewide average.
This is mostly due to the fact that rural municipalities have smaller populations spread out across a large area. This often means that a smaller number of people are responsible for maintaining a large area of roads.
Road related costs ended up being some of the most significant drivers of spending across the state. Increased heat and precipitation will necessitate greater spending on road maintenance and the increased risk of landslides (a problem that is particularly prevalent in rural, Western PA) will lead to significant spending on prevention and road repair.
All of this adds up to people living in rural municipalities needing to spend a greater amount on climate change adaptations.
Communities subject to sea level rise have large racial minority populations
Because the Delaware river is a tidal river, people who live along its banks are going to experience the effects of sea level rise despite not living on the ocean. As a result, those people are going to need to build preventative infrastructure to hold back the rising water in order to keep their homes on dry ground.
In Pennsylvania, the municipalities projected to be affected by sea level rise have much higher poverty rates, are less white, and have larger immigrant populations than the rest of the state.
Compared to Pennsylvania as a whole, there are only a small number of municipalities that are going to feel the effects of sea level rise. However, these costs represent one of the greatest examples of climate inequity in the state. The populations that are going to be exposed to sea level rise have historically been marginalized, and will not have the capacity to adapt that other municipalities might.
Four municipalities will experience severe fiscal stress
Climate change will be costly for everyone in Pennsylvania, but for a select few municipalities the costs will be nearly impossible to bear.
Our measure of severe fiscal stress is based on our research of the Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finance. What we found was that over the past 20 years, local government budgets have increased by roughly $1,000 per person per year.
This means that if a municipality is projected to have per capita annual costs of $1,000 by 2040, then they would essentially need to commit the entirety of their budget growth to climate adaptations.
These municipalities will have no money to offer raises for city employees over the next 17 years, no ability to renovate old buildings. If some other emergency occurs, the city would have no capacity to respond.
Thankfully, only four municipalities across the state have per capita costs this high. Still, policymakers need to be aware of these costs, and understand just how debilitating they could be.