Florida’s flagship climate-resilience program has been spared from deep cuts by state lawmakers after a leading business group embraced it as “one of the state’s greatest long-term economic opportunities.”
Resilient Florida has distributed $1.8 billion since its inception in 2021 for local projects that protect some of the most flood-prone parts of the U.S.
But its national prominence was threatened by efforts this year to slash state funding even as hundreds of billions of dollars of property is exposed to flooding.
The Florida Council of 100, a group of state business leaders, estimated that coastal property in the state worth up to $1.75 trillion could be at risk from flooding in the next 50 years and urged an increase in Resilient Florida funding to at least $500 million a year.
