Climate Adaptation and EPA’s Role

The impacts of climate change affect people in every region of the country, threatening lives and livelihoods and damaging infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems. 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; and 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. Overburdened and underserved communities and individuals are particularly vulnerable to these impacts, including low-income communities and communities of color, children, the elderly, Tribes, and Indigenous people.

Climate change poses 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 overburdened and underserved communities.

Climate change adaptation or climate adaptation means taking action to prepare for and adjust to both the current and projected impacts of climate change.