Professor Hammond will present his paper entitled, On Fires, Floods, and Federalism: Adapting Welfare Programs for the Climate Crisis. Professor Hammond’s research contextualizes the climate crisis in our scholarly understanding of the American welfare state. Professor Hammond will explain how, amid the recent spate of fires and floods, federal law has fared. His work attends to the role of Congress, weakened as it is by increased polarization and diminished capacity, and how the resulting delays and distortions in emergency relief have hampered the government response. His research draws lessons from the pandemic response for climate adaptation and concludes with an agenda for how to adapt American welfare programs to meet the climate crisis. That agenda starts and ends with the federal government, but it includes possible adaptations states, territories, and tribes could implement if Congress and federal agencies do nothing or not enough.

Co-sponsored with the UC Davis School of Law