By Jeanne Shaheen and Sheldon Whitehouse Climate change has taken hold here in New England. From the White Mountains to Narragansett Bay, there have been more frequent heat waves; native wildlife and plants are shifting north; and there have been troubling upticks in climate-related ailments like tick-borne diseases and asthma. But nowhere is climate change more apparent than along the coast, where warming and acidifying waters and rising sea levels are taking a toll, disrupting fisheries and eroding coastal marshes and beaches. These changes, in turn, erode the value of coastal homes and businesses. The warnings are clear: the region faces a crash in coastal property values and a devastating economic fallout. According to First Street Foundation and Columbia University, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have lost $403 million in coastal property value. Every year, we are just one bad storm away from calamity. That is because our coastline is populous, valuable, low-lying, and exposed to dangers like storm surge. CoreLogic reckons Boston is third in the country for most multifamily properties threatened by storm surge -- over 24,000 properties, worth $9 billion in replacement costs. Providence ranks 14th, with over 2,000 multifamilies worth over $1 billion to replace. The small town of Hampton, N.H., has lost nearly $8 million in home value due to tidal flooding. According to Climate Central, $32 billion worth of New England property sits on land less than four feet above the current high tide line -- value that could be wiped out if sea levels rise as predicted. These numbers, alarming as they are, foreshadow a much bigger economic threat. Plummeting coastal property values are what financial experts call a systemic risk -- a threat to the entire economic system. In 2016, the top economist for Freddie Mac, America's mortgage giant, warned that climate-driven flooding along US coasts -- and even inland, as climate change spurs flooding there -- will lead to economic losses "greater . . . than those experienced in the housing crisis and the Great Recession." As a result, consumers are finding coastal properties harder to finance and insure. Lenders are requiring larger and larger down payments, sometimes as much as 40 percent of a home's value. Federally backed flood insurance premiums continue to rise. And flood insurance doesn't cover the full worth of a home, leaving sea-side property owners exposed. If coastal property values are uninsurable, they're unmortgageable; and if they're unmortgageable, they are all but worthless. Rating agencies are now evaluating coastal communities' bonds for this risk. New questions are cropping up about whether the 30-year mortgage on coastal property is headed for extinction, and banks are already shedding the risk. New Harvard research suggests that in recent years banks have offloaded 30-year mortgages on coastal properties, off their own books and on to large taxpayer-backed lenders like Fannie Mac and Freddie Mac. The study points to climate change as the root cause. The researchers note that smaller banks, close to the risks facing their communities, are offloading coastal mortgages more rapidly than larger national banks. Those local banks "have their ears to the ground," as one of the Harvard researchers said. We are keenly attuned to our region's economic pain as we weather the COVID-19 economic recession. We remember the last recession, when mortgage markets collapsed, the stock market dived, housing values plunged, retirement savings vanished, and Americans lost nearly $10 trillion in wealth. A property value crash at "systemic" levels is a loss coastal communities cannot afford. So we must fight climate change much more aggressively and begin serious work to defend our coasts. Step one is Congress passing comprehensive climate legislation that reduces carbon pollution by at least 50 percent by 2030 and gets us to net zero emissions at the latest by 2050. That is what the science tells us we must do to avoid the worst effects of climate change, including incalculable damage to the coasts and economy. A good place for Congress to start is our legislation, the International Climate Accountability Act, to help achieve emissions reduction obligations under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and lay the groundwork for a more ambitious emissions reduction strategy. Our bill would slam the brakes on the Trump administration's anti-climate agenda and help develop a strategic plan for meeting our commitments and standards under Paris. Federal support for adapting to climate change along the coast must also be strengthened. That will mean a steady source of funding for coastal states to help address sea level rise, flooding, erosion, and stronger storms. We have introduced bipartisan legislation to help share the revenue generated from offshore wind development with coastal states for coastal restoration and resiliency projects, hurricane protection, and infrastructure improvements. With over 20 gigawatts of offshore wind projects scheduled for future development in the United States, our proposal would help set an important baseline of funding to protect coastal property. Finally, coastal mortgage risk among lenders must be addressed. That means government sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mac and Freddie Mac need to assess and prepare for the effects of climate change on their business and on American communities, homeowners, and renters. We've called on Fannie and Freddie to treat climate risk with the utmost seriousness -- beginning with an in-depth audit of the steps they are taking to assess climate risks to mortgage assets -- and to help us prepare our entire financial system for the effect of those risks on our economy. Jeanne Shaheen is a US senator from New Hampshire. Sheldon Whitehouse is a US senator from Rhode Island.

By Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Dr. Robert Cook-Deegan, professor, Arizona State University With an administration in power that mocks and disparages science -- at the bidding of big special interests and for its own perceived political gain -- it falls to Congress to ensure that our government is listening to science. But right now, Congress itself often doesn't act on the best available scientific knowledge -- in no small part because of a fateful decision by Congress two and a half decades ago that cut off the flow of high quality, nonpartisan science to inform its decisions. Until the mid-1990s, Congress employed its own scientists and experts at a nonpartisan "think tank" called the Office of Technology Assessment. It was an agency similar to the Congressional Budget Office, which provides budget and economic analysis; the Government Accountability Office, which audits and investigates problems throughout government; and the Congressional Research Service, which provides legal and policy analysis for legislation as it's written. OTA's mission was to anticipate the implications of emerging technologies; to help Congress understand the scientific, technological and medical challenges and opportunities facing the nation; and to generate options for Congress. Then came Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." In 1995, the then-new speaker of the House wanted to cut as much spending as he could, and a politically expedient thing to cut was Congress' spending in particular. An entire congressional support agency was a tempting target; better still, why not the science one, the work of which annoyed powerful interests and for which the strongest support came from a weak constituency: scientists and policy wonks. So congressional Republicans completely defunded -- eliminated -- OTA, and slashed scientific staff at the other support agencies. Our experience with infectious disease in the intervening decades, even before the coronavirus pandemic, has shown how much we've missed the OTA. After the anthrax attacks in 2001 and global outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS and Zika, there would certainly have been an OTA report (if not multiple reports) on pandemics and how best to respond to them. Such reports would likely have assembled the best, most cutting-edge findings available, and presented that best science in a form ready for Congress. But much more important, behind the reports would have stood a network of scientists trusted by both parties to serve as in-house experts to advise any office or committee. Instead, we've seen painful examples of what happens when science is sidelined. Without the OTA, unreliable and even deliberately false information fills the void. There is a pervasive problem in Congress now of information channeled through lobbyists, anonymously funded front groups and special interests. Administrative agencies -- if not outright captured by special interests -- are barraged with the same lobbyist-driven information and disinformation. Or, perhaps worst of all, scientific information never makes it to Congress at all. One example is the debacle of COVID-19 testing. A lack of adequate testing is a major reason for the United States' catastrophically slow response to the current crisis. Among the loud and self-interested voices in the debate, Congress could have used an OTA to help separate wheat from chaff, ignorance from fact, and lies from truth in a highly technical field, and ultimately to help put in place federal programs that ensure adequate testing. Mitigating a pandemic is vastly more costly -- in lives and dollars -- than being ready for it. The United States is a science powerhouse with no excuse for being so ill-prepared for the coronavirus. We have the highest concentration of infectious disease experts in the world at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health. We are the birthplace of biotechnology, and home to some of the world's most advanced biomedical research and pharmaceutical companies. Our research universities are the best in the world. Good science is not the problem. It's our leaders' willingness to find and listen to it, and then translate that into good policy decisions. Congress still faces challenges that demand the headlights of science, from climate change to artificial intelligence to genome editing to cybersecurity -- not to mention this and future pandemics. Taking on those challenges will demand more and more of the best scientific expertise and data, something no single member of Congress can marshal without help. We will need the OTA more than ever in decades to come. Thankfully, Congress has begun to recognize the void left without a nonpartisan scientific agency supporting its work. There are now bipartisan bills in both the House and Senate to revive and modernize the OTA, and members are calling for funding to both restart the agency and to rebuild scientific capacity in Congress's other support agencies. Science provides society its headlights -- showing us where we are going and warning us of dangers ahead. The steadily climbing death totals and dire economic fallout from COVID-19 are a price of driving without headlights. As Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts. By restoring Congress's own scientific ability, we will help to ensure that it understands the facts. We must switch on our headlights. Then, together, we will see the challenges ahead more clearly and rise to meet them. By Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Dr. Robert Cook-Deegan