Climate Change Impacts on Waste, Hazard and Land Management
Climate change could significantly hamper the effectiveness of EPA programs that ensure the proper management of hazardous and non-hazardous wastes, minimize chemical risks and releases, restore contaminated land, and provide timely emergency response. Additionally, climate change poses several challenges for the identification and investigation of contaminated sites, prevention of releases, restoration of land and conservation of resources needed to protect public health and the environment. Increased extreme temperatures and more severe drought conditions, for example, can reduce remedy effectiveness at Superfund and hazardous waste cleanups and pose risks to Underground Storage Tank site and brownfield site investigations and cleanup.
As the climate changes, EPA’s cleanup, prevention and response programs are integrating adaption, mitigation and resiliency strategies to Climate Change impacts such as:
- Rising temperatures and increased drought and wildfires.
- Changing precipitation patterns.
- Flooding and sea level rise.
- More frequent extreme storm events, and
- Permafrost thaw.
Cleanup, Prevention and Response Programs have developed plans to ensure programs, policies, rulemaking processes, enforcement and compliance assurance activities, and operations consider the current and future impacts of climate change.
As the result of this plan and many resources and tools have been developed to assist communities plan for waste, hazard and land management impacts due to climate change. The latest updates of EPA cross-program resources and tools are available at: https://www.epa.gov/arc-x/library-climate-change-adaptation#tab-3 AND https://www.epa.gov/arc-x/tools-climate-change-adaptation#waste
All of the EPA’s major National Program offices, and Regional Offices have each developed a Climate Adaptation Implementation Plan. For more information on EPA’s Climate Adaptation efforts, visit: EPA.gov/Climate-Adaptation.