Discussion Focuses on Incentivization

The White House Council on Environmental Quality hosted a forum this morning on innovative insurance, mortgage, tax and finance-based strategies to support pre-disaster mitigation and community resilience. The White House Forum on Smart Finance for Disaster Resilience brought together White House and Administration officials; representatives from federal, state and local government; mortgage and insurance representatives; codes and standards developers; and others interested in promoting mitigation. Among those participating were representatives from the National Institute of Building Sciences.

The purpose of the event was to highlight new investment approaches and incentive programs that are currently being deployed in communities, and to explore partnerships and opportunities to leverage additional resources in the future. These new approaches, which reflect many of the concepts covered in the white paper, Developing Pre-Disaster Resilience Based on Public and Private Incentivization, developed by the Institute’s Multihazard Mitigation Council (MMC) and Council on Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (CFIRE), include: tax credits, insurance premium reductions, resilience bonds, mortgage rate incentives and layered incentive approaches.

(Above) Representatives from the breakout discussion groups present their summarized findings to the rest of the participants during the White House Forum on Smart Finance for Disaster Resilience. Among them are Multihazard Mitigation Council (MMC) Chair Kevin Mickey (left) and MMC Immediate Past-Chair Neil Blais (second from left).

Following remarks from key Administration officials and panel discussions focused on investing in disaster resilience and innovations in pre-disaster mitigation finance, the attendees dispersed into breakout groups to confer on the five areas of focus. MMC Program Director Philip Schneider, AIA was asked to give a presentation about the Incentivization paper for the layered incentive approaches discussion. MMC Chair Kevin Mickey, GISP and MMC Immediate Past Chair Neil C. Blais both provided recaps of their groups’ discussions on mortgage rate incentives and tax credits, respectively.

During the breakout sessions, Institute representatives shared a summarized version of the Incentivization white paper. Throughout the discussions, the key message Institute representatives received was this: The success of such an incentivization rollout will require public and private participation, but the recommendations and programs the Incentivization white paper proposes are on target.

MMC and CFIRE will take this and other feedback received since the 2015 release of Developing Pre-Disaster Resilience Based on Public and Private Incentivization to develop an Addendum to the white paper.