The Government Finance Officers Association launched its effort to rethink property taxes a few months ago, highlighting the dislike of these taxes among  many Americans.

But beyond their lack of popularity, there’s a significant reason why property taxes aren’t going to function well into the future, according to a January 17 commentary from the Brookings Institution by Vanessa Williamson and Ellis Chen:  climate change.

Efforts by the new Trump administration to derail initiatives that aim to slow climate change – like its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, which is intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions – make this an even more pressing issue than ever.

As Brookings reports, “because localities rely heavily on property taxes, it will become increasingly difficult to raise regular and adequate revenue for local government where climate change is taking a heavy toll.”

The report goes on to say that “global warming injects increasing uncertainty into home ownership as a basis for local government finance. Property destruction and the outmigration associated with rising climate risk will undercut property tax revenue, making it harder for communities to provide quality schools and other public services. . .As climate change reduces property values these pressures can easily become a downward spiral.”

Of course, there are some parts of the country for which climate change will boost housing prices and thus increase the revenues that can be drawn from property taxes. For example, some analysts believe that the Great Lakes region will be a home for people moving from elsewhere to escape wildfires, heat waves, droughts and hurricanes. To the extent that the existing homeowners don’t fight against new housing development, this will put these communities in a “comparatively rosy fiscal situation,” wrote Brookings.

As the report concludes: “Reforming the property tax is a decades-long project – but of course so is responding to climate change. As communities develop their climate adaptation plans, part of those plans must be fiscal strategy that can weather the coming storms.”

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