Discussions of climate have long focused on mitigation, but I believe it’s also important to focus on adaptation. Building resilience is the work we focus on at IBHS. We’ve made tremendous inroads with single family homes and commercial businesses in communities prone to high winds, hail, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Yet more than 164 million Americans live in multifamily housing, and it’s time we focus efforts on this housing segment.
No matter what you call it, your home is a place to feel comfortable and secure. ?
Everyone, regardless of where they live or income, deserves a strong home designed and built to withstand the weather it will face, which is why we have expanded our FORTIFIED program to include multifamily communities.
We also dug deep as a team to identify several ways we can go further to help make the availability of resilient homes more equitable throughout the country:
- ?IBHS will offer its FORTIFIED Home? certification courses through FORTIFIED Wise University at no cost to nonprofit organizations building for families with low to moderate incomes. By educating nonprofit builders about the impact key upgrades can have on a home’s ability to withstand severe weather, IBHS seeks to empower those organizations to make homes more resilient for the families who can least afford to be displaced by disasters.??
- IBHS will also eliminate the small administrative fee it collects to review and process FORTIFIED designations for single family homes built by a nonprofit organization for families with low to moderate incomes. Reducing the cost-gap between standard construction and the incremental investment to build to FORTIFIED will help make it easier for nonprofit organizations to implement the program.?
- IBHS will advance research-based affordable resilience solutions, including guidance on ways to make manufactured and modular homes more resilient, through public policy initiatives. Not all homes in America are stick-built on-site. By researching and examining ways to help these products better withstand severe weather, IBHS will make resilience more accessible to millions of Americans, including the more than 20 million who live in manufactured housing.?
- IBHS will continue its commitment to collaborate with partner organizations dedicated to finding solutions for making all housing more resilient, including creating collaborative opportunities between its member insurance companies, federal, state, local, and Tribal entities, nonprofits and others who build or have a shared interest in resilient homes and strengthened communities. These partnerships often result in pilot projects that introduce, incentivize, or fund resilient construction to new markets and act as a catalyst to promoting stronger construction throughout the area.?
More people will benefit from our science-backed research through these commitments. We look forward to continuing to pool our knowledge, share our experiences, discuss the latest scientific analyses, and take the critical steps needed to protect all homes and communities from severe weather.
Find out more about the new FORTIFIED Multifamily? standard and watch the impact of this program by following @Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety on LinkedIn.
Disaster Recovery and Resilience
3 年Glad to see your continued commitment to educating folks about what we can do to prepare for what’s to come. Hope we cross paths again soon.
Thanks Aris Papadopoulos for sharing Roy’s post. Stay safe and healthy!