The US Infrastructure is barely getting a passing grade, and one of the fastest growing problems is climate change. Airports are flooding, bridges are melting with excessive heat, and telecommunications are rapidly banging with extreme weather.
In 2023, at Fort Lauderdel/Hollywood International Airport, historic rain replaced the runway in rivers, closed operations and trapped passengers. In the city of New York in the last summer, excessive heat caused a metal on a bridge over the Harlem River so that the bridge opened.
Each category of American infrastructure is at risk from climate change – a discovery by the American Society of Civil Engineers who train engineers and inform the federal, state and local building code.
The latest infrastructure report card of ASCE gave the nation a holistic “C” grade, saying that climate -related challenges are widespread, which also affects resistant areas to these events earlier.
“We continue to see more extreme weather events, so our infrastructure, many times, was not designed for such activities,” ASCE Executive Director Tom Smith said, saying that it would only get worse.
“Whether it is snow, snow, drought, heat, of course, the storm, the tornado, we have to design for all that, and we have to guess that not only the Pak place, but we think it is going on,” Smith said.
The worst grade areas include airports, electricity and telecom infrastructure. CNBC asked First Street, a Climate Risk Analytics firm, to overlay their risk modeling at these specific locations at the national level. It was found that 19% of all electrical infrastructure, 17% telecommunications infrastructure and 12% airports have a major risk from floods, wind or wildfire.
Most American infrastructure was created decades ago, and therefore designed for an atmosphere that is no longer present. It has a direct impact on investors in the infrastructure location.
Sarah is the former chief scientist and now the global head of the Climate Advisor in Sara Kapanik, National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration JPMorgan Chase, Said that his customers are asking more and more about climate effects for their investment.
“How should I change and invest in my infrastructure? I should think about the difference in the construction of my infrastructure, the construction of my infrastructure? Do I think of insurance, different types of insurance? How should I reach the capital market to do this type of work?” Capnik said.
Both Kapinik and Smith said that the infrastructure comes back to science to do climate-review.
“Climate and science are something that we take very, very seriously, work with science, connecting it to engineering to protect public health, safety and welfare,” Smith said.
But that science is being attacked, given the deep cuts from the Trump administration, who fired hundreds of employees at NOAA, FEMA and National Institute of Standards and Technology – major government agencies that carry forward climate science.
“This adjustment is going to be a period because people find out where they are going to get information, as many market decisions or financial decisions are based on some data sets that people thought would always be there,” Kapnik said.
The infrastructure of the nation also needs money. Asce estimates that there is a difference of spending $ 3.7 trillion over the next 10 years that receives the infrastructure in a good condition.
The cuts involve the cancellation of the flexible infrastructure and community program of about 1 billion dollar building in the cuts to spend so far in the Trump administration, which aims to reduce damage from future natural disasters.
