This article was originally published in NJ.com on October 16th, 2024
By Richard Lawton, NJSBC Executive Director
New Jersey is on the front lines of climate change, and we need to plan accordingly across all sectors – not only for the environment, but for our business community and economic development.
Research shows that we live in the fastest-warming state in the entire Northeast. We can see a 21st century clean energy economy coming, and New Jersey needs to be a leader in this space. The Biden-Harris administration is rolling out the most ambitious set of green energy investments in history.
Here in the Garden State, the Murphy administration is rapidly moving forward with offshore wind, and the Legislature is cons idering a bill to codify our plans to move our state to 100% clean electricity by 2035. Even as we take these important steps to head off a climate catastrophe, we know we must also adapt to the changes that are a lready here — including warmer temperatures, sea level rise and more frequent and severe storms.
We are seeing the devastating impacts play out now across the South, where two hurricanes, coming just weeks apart, have wiped out entire communities with massive flooding. We need to be clear-eyed about the impacts that climate change is already having on New Jersey by doing all that we can to make our communities and local economies as resilient as possible. Doing nothing will make the damage and costs from the next hurricane significantly higher.
That’s why the New Jersey Sustainable Business Council is supportive of the Murphy administration’s new, evidence-based standards – known as the NJPACT-REAL rules, which will help our communities plan for more frequent storms and rising sea levels. This comprehensive plan updates the array of environmental and land-use rules to mitigate the risks caused by a changing climate, notably risks from flooding and stormwater. The measures identify areas threatened by severe flooding, improve permitting processes, and encourage nature-based solutions — all while providing updated data on sea level rise so communities can plan and develop in protective ways.
This will also help protect businesses by making local economies more resilient as future storms increase in size and frequency. Businesses across our state – from large real estate developers to mom-and-pop shops on Main Street – have been hit by spikes in insurance costs in flood-prone areas. In several states, flooding risks have gotten so high that insurance companies have decid ed to exit entire geographic markets. These proposed rules will help ensure responsible development for new construction, so the investments we make today will be solvent in the coming decades. At the same time, they will help provide data to small businesses about their flood risk and allow us to become more resilient.
After Superstorm Sandy devastated large swaths of the Jersey Shore, many family businesses that had been serving their towns for generations folded up. They simply didn’t have the money to rebuild and couldn’t navigate the complicated bureaucracy to get recovery aid quickly enough. And with severe weather coming at ever-increasing frequency, businesses simply can’t afford the cost and disruption of having to repeatedly rebuild from extreme flooding.
These rules will help limit the damage caused by future storms and give business owners a sense of security that the state is doing everything it can to mitigate the impact of extreme weather events. No other state has proposed a set of regulations that is this aggressive at protecting residents and businesses from a changing climate.
As the public comment period for these proposed rules draws to a close on Nov. 3, we’re calling on Governor Murphy and his ad ministration to keep up the momentum and to implement these first-in-the-nation resiliency rules as soon as possible. Businesses across our state need to know that Trenton has their backs