Building a disaster-resilient state with the Climate Commitment Act

Building a disaster-resilient state with the Climate Commitment Act

By Kevin Zerbe
Hazard Analysis & Resilience Planning Program Supervisor

At a time when federal investment in climate change mitigation and resilience is reduced, Washington state continues to push and do what it can to address climate impacts and their causes. The $1.5 billion in investments funded by the Climate Commitment Act (CCA), most of it deployed in just one fiscal year, shows that our state has created a durable, predictable financial foundation for clean energy infrastructure, local adaptation and resilience projects and long-term greenhouse gas emissions reduction.

There have been more than 3,000 CCA-funded projects and programs launched around Washington to support families, schools, businesses, Tribes and local governments. These projects include reducing the impacts of wildfire smoke across Central Washington, wildfire fuels reduction efforts in Spokane County, energy resilience and redundancy for public schools in Chelan County and community centers in Tacoma, air quality improvements in Seattle and so much more. These projects, collectively, are reducing the emissions that drive climate change impacts and help us adapt to these impacts at the same time. Explore the CCA dashboard to learn more about specific projects around the state as well as funding amounts per agency. The dashboard shows project locations on an interactive map and provides descriptions and funding amounts for each one.

From a disaster risk perspective, every ton of emissions avoided is a reduction in future hazard severity and every resilience effort implemented is a disaster avoided or softened before it arrives. Here's how CCA revenue is reducing disaster risk for our state:

• Wildfire mitigation through fuel reduction, defensible space, and fire-resilient community planning
• Flood risk reduction through riparian restoration, levee setbacks, and stormwater capacity improvements
• Heat risk mitigation via green infrastructure, cooling access, shade canopy expansion, and resilient building upgrades
• Drought and water-scarcity planning tied to watershed restoration and snowpack resilience
• Renewable energy and grid resilience, reducing system vulnerability during extreme events

From an emergency response perspective, a more resilient state is one where responses are safer, faster, and less resource strained. While CCA dollars are not primarily targeting response operations, the infrastructure and community assets built through it reduce response burdens and increase survivability during events. On the recovery side, CCA funding supports the kind of strategic investments that make post-disaster recovery more sustainable and less repetitive. Instead of rebuilding back into risk, our state is funding long-term adaptation that informs future recovery planning and restoring natural systems that promote self-healing landscapes while supporting Tribal and frontline communities who often face the hardest recoveries.

In essence, the CCA makes Washington one of the few states actively linking climate policy to hazard mitigation and adaptation at scale, and it's a great example of how disaster resilience is truly an integrated and statewide effort here. In an era of higher disaster frequency, reduced federal mitigation funding, and unpredictable federal support for disaster recovery, Washington is not waiting.

This funding is helping us accomplish our disaster resilience goals by saving lives and protecting our critical assets.