FEMA Renames “Climate Resilience” Website “Future Conditions”

By EDGI CommsBlog, Highlights From the Change Log

Welcome! This post is part of the EDGI Website Monitoring Team’s “Highlights from the Change Log” blog series. The purpose of this series is to highlight interesting changes we have observed in the language used on, or access to, federal websites. We want to share these changes to encourage public engagement with and discussion of their significance, as well as understanding of the ephemeral nature of website information. This website change happened on January 21, 2025 and features the remake of FEMA’s “Climate Resilience” webpage to its “Future Conditions” landing page. 

What Happened? 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has renamed its “Climate Resilience” website to “Future Conditions,” and has removed much of the climate-specific language from the site’s landing page. For example, FEMA replaced the introductory sentence from “Climate change is the defining crisis of our time” to “Disaster incidents are rising due to increased human vulnerability, exposure and a changing climate.” It has also replaced references to “climate change” with “future conditions” or “effects of extreme weather” throughout the page. 

The website landing page indicates it was updated on January 21, 2025, the day after President Trump’s inauguration. The other pages in this website have not changed appreciably since the last week of the Biden administration. 

Why We Think it’s Interesting: 

FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security and is tasked with the straightforward mission of “helping people before, during, and after disasters.” In the weeks before the 2024 election, then-candidate Trump told people in flood-ravaged western North Carolina that FEMA was fumbling disaster relief and falsely claimed that funds were being diverted to migrant services. Within one week of taking office, as foreshadowed by Project 2025’s call to severely shrink the agency and privatize its core functions, President Trump signed an executive order to review FEMA. 

We do not know the intention of the team who renamed this website. Perhaps it was to fly under the radar of the new administration; perhaps it was to align with the priorities of the new administration. It is notable, however, that this agency immediately altered its website upon the presidential transition, but that it only changed its landing page.

More Details: 

FEMA’s “Climate Resilience” website, renamed to “Future Conditions,” with the old URL redirecting to the new URL. References to “climate change” were removed.

Other pages in the website, last updated in the final days of the Biden Administration