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Abstract The United States’ National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has accumulated over $20 billion in debt to the US Treasury since 2005, partly due to discounted premiums on homes in flood‐prone areas. To address this issue, FEMA introduced Risk Rating 2.0 in October 2021, which is able to assess and charge more accurate and equitable rates to homeowners. However, rates must be continually updated to account for increasing flood damage caused by sea level rise and more intense hurricanes due to climate change. This study proposes a strategy to adopt updated premium rates that account for climate change effects and address affordability and risk mitigation issues with a means‐tested voucher program. The strategy is tested in a coastal community, Ortley Beach, NJ, by projecting its future flood risk under sea level rise and storm intensification. Compared with using static rates for all the properties in Ortley Beach, the proposed strategy is shown to reduce the NFIP's potential losses to the community from 2020 to 2050 by half (from $4.6 million to $2.3 million), improve the community's flood resistance, and address affordability concerns. Sensitivity analysis of varying incomes, loan interest rates, and conditions for a voucher indicates that the strategy is feasible and effective under a wide range of scenarios. Thus, the proposed strategy can be applied to various communities along the US coastline as an effective way of updating risk‐based premiums while addressing affordability and resilience concerns. 

Considerable amount of laboratory and survey‐based research finds that people show disproportional compassionate and affective response to the scope of human mortality risk. According to research on “psychic numbing,” it is often the case that the more who die, the less we care. In the present article, we examine the extent of this phenomenon in verbal behavior, using large corpora of natural language to quantify the affective reactions to loss of life. We analyze valence, arousal, and specific emotional content of over 100,000 mentions of death in news articles and social media posts, and find that language shows an increase in valence (i.e., decreased negative affect) and a decrease in arousal when describing mortality of larger numbers of people. These patterns are most clearly reflected in specific emotions of joy and (in a reverse fashion) of fear and anger. Our results showcase a novel methodology for studying affective decision making, and highlight the robustness and real‐world relevance of psychic numbing. They also offer new insights regarding the psychological underpinnings of psychic numbing, as well as possible interventions for reducing psychic numbing and overcoming social and psychological barriers to action in the face of the world's most serious threats.