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The bill improves long-term health, environmental protection, and equity at Superfund sites by requiring climate-informed remedial planning and reviews, but it raises cleanup planning and construction costs and creates a risk of delays and legal disputes as agencies apply new climate-based criteria.
Communities near Superfund sites — including urban, rural, and disadvantaged communities — will receive remedial plans that account for flood, storm, wildfire, and other extreme-weather risks, improving long-term protection of public health and the environment and reducing the risk of future recontamination.
Selected cleanup remedies will be reviewed for continued protectiveness under projected climate change, lowering the chance of future recontamination and costly emergency responses and protecting infrastructure and cleanup investments.
Requiring climate-hazard consideration in remedy selection creates opportunities to prioritize actions that benefit disadvantaged communities disproportionately exposed to pollution and climate risks.
Taxpayers, local governments, and responsible parties may face higher planning, compliance, design, and construction costs and slower remediation timelines because climate-informed analyses and stricter selection criteria add complexity and work.
If agencies or stakeholders dispute climate projections or protectiveness determinations, federal employees, local governments, and project proponents could face contentious disagreements, legal challenges, and additional project delays.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Requires Superfund remedy selection and reviews to account for local natural disasters, extreme weather hazards, and projected climate-change effects.
Requires cleanup decisions and later reviews under the Superfund law to explicitly factor in local natural disasters, extreme weather events, and projected changes from climate change. Federal officials must assess whether selected remedies will remain protective when accounting for current and future climate-related hazards and adjust remedy choice or review conclusions accordingly. This change does not appropriate money or create new programs; it updates the legal standard for remedy selection and for periodic protectiveness reviews to include climate- and extreme-weather-informed consideration.
Introduced April 14, 2026 by Adam Schiff · Last progress April 14, 2026