Remaining selections have been announced for $1.16 billion in climate resilience funding through two competitive grant programs to help communities across the nation enhance climate and disaster resiliency.
The selections include large resilience projects like those from the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) national competition and Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA) community-wide flood mitigation projects. Selections are from Fiscal Year 2021 funding round with $1 billion made available through BRIC and $160 million made available for Flood Mitigation Assistance.
Selected projects will help improve community resiliency to a multitude of hazards including floods, droughts and wildfires.
For BRIC, FEMA selected projects across all 10 FEMA regions with 53 states and territories, the District of Columbia, 271 different communities, including 33 tribes.
For the Flood Mitigation Assistance grant programs, FEMA made selections in 19 states and 72 different communities.
To align with the Justice40 Initiative, FEMA evaluated equity impacts to both programs as using the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index tool. In total, approximately $510 million in selections are going to communities that meet Justice40 criteria for being underserved or disadvantaged.
State, local, tribal and territorial governments submitted record-breaking requests for funding totaling a combined estimate of $4.7 billion for the BRIC and FMA grant programs. The oversubscription for communities looking to receive grant funding demonstrates the growing needs for mitigation investments nationwide.
FEMA anticipates additional funding made available through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will help to minimize the gap for future funding cycles.
In May, FEMA announced the first selections of FY 21 funding, allowing for quicker funding for mitigation planning, adoption and enforcement of building codes and standards, project scoping and small-scale mitigation projects.
Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities
During President Biden’s first year in office, he increased BRIC funding from $500 million to $1 billion, allowing FEMA to select more projects across a more diverse geographic scope. FEMA more than doubled the project selections and increased the number of states with BRIC project selections.
The top five project types selected for the BRIC program by total project costs are listed below.
- Flood Control: = $1.39 billion
- Utility/Infrastructure Protection = $1.26 billion
- Stabilization and Restoration = $219 million
- Mitigation Reconstruction = $101 million
- Retrofits = $100 million
Flood Mitigation Assistance
Of the $160 million made available, FEMA selected 61 subapplications totaling $134.4 million across 53 different communities in 14 states. Most of this funding— $93 million—will go towards elevating, acquisitions, and mitigation reconstruction of repetitively flood-damaged buildings insured by the National Flood Insurance Program.
From the final round of selections, the top five project types selected for the FMA program by total project costs are listed below:
- Elevation = $64.5 million
- Flood Control = $47.4 million
- Acquisitions = $27 million
- Project Scoping (Engineering, Environmental, Feasibility, and/or Benefit-Cost Analysis) = $5.6 million
- Mitigation Reconstruction = $1.6 million
For more information, visit the Hazard Mitigation Assistance webpage.
