Report: Ohio municipalities face billions in annual climate costs by 2050

Rising temperatures and extreme weather events are driving up costs for Ohio’s cash-strapped local governments. One solution? Make polluters pay.

The cost to protect residents and infrastructure from the worsening effects of the climate crisis could soar to as high as $5.9 billion a year for municipalities across Ohio, according to a new report. 

The findings from the Ohio Environmental Council, Power A Clean Future Ohio, and Scioto Analytics are the latest evidence showing how taxpayers are left holding the bill for the climate crisis, while the major oil and gas corporations that knowingly caused and continue to fuel the problem rake in record profits. 

The report, “The Bill is Coming Due: Calculating the Financial Cost of Climate Change to Ohio’s Local Governments,” provides a conservative estimate of 10 specific costs that Ohio municipalities are expected to incur because of climate change. They range from $2.2 billion to address toxic algal blooms and protect drinking water, to more than a billion each to elevate roads to avoid flooding and to repair roads damaged by extreme weather events. 

The groups also cite research from the Center for Climate Integrity and Resilient Analytics that found Ohio public schools face $1.4 to $6.8 million in costs to keep classrooms at a safe temperature for students in response to increasing heat waves. 

At a hearing before the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs last week, Power a Clean Future Ohio’s executive director, Joe Flarida, said “not one” of the 34 Ohio municipalities his group works with knows how they will pay for these increased climate costs.  

“Municipal officials are already grappling with difficult budget decisions and now they have an additional challenge to add to their strained financial resources,” Flarida told the committee. 

The report identifies three possible paths for Ohio municipalities to cover these rising climate costs: raise local taxes, seek federal funding, or, as the authors explain: 

Instead of relying on taxpayers to bear these costs, policymakers could consider alternative funding sources, such as holding accountable the corporations most responsible for causing and exacerbating climate change, and ensuring they pay their fair share of the costs of adaptation and resilience, just as many Ohio communities have held opioid manufacturers accountable for the costs of the opioid crisis.

In other words: make polluters pay. 

As U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, noted at last week’s hearing, the oil and gas corporations that fuel the climate crisis are raking in record profits while “taxpayers are always left to pick up the pieces.”  

These same polluters knew decades ago that their products would wreak havoc on local communities, but they lied to protect their profits. It’s time to hold them accountable.