Climate Adaptation and EPA’s Role

Climate change adaptation or climate adaptation means taking action to prepare for and adjust to both the current and projected impacts of climate change. The impacts of climate change affect people in every region of the country. These impacts threaten lives and livelihoods and damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems.

Bridge destruction in Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene

The last few years have seen:

Climate-related, record-breaking weather extremes.
Increased droughts, flooding, and wildfire.
Increasing surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures.
Melting glaciers.
Diminishing snow cover.
Shrinking sea ice.
Rising sea levels.
Ocean acidification.
Increasing atmospheric water vapor.

Climate change also exacerbates existing pollution problems and environmental stressors impacting the nation’s land, air, and water and the people who depend on them. Low-income communities, children, the elderly, Tribes, Indigenous people, and geographic areas such as coastal regions are at higher risk from hazards and impacts.

Changes to environmental functions pose significant risks to EPA’s ability to fulfill its mission and affects how it designs and implements its programs. EPA is working to ensure that its programs, policies, rulemaking processes, enforcement and compliance assurance activities, and operations consider the current and future impacts of climate change and how those impacts will disproportionately affect some communities.