In what will become only one of many government reports about the cost of climate change, the Government Accountability Office looked at public insurance programs and found they were not adequately assessing the risks of more severe weather. As studies such as this accumulate, a responsible calculation for the public will be how many more tax dollars they are willing to pay while Congress declines to demand tougher climate-change rules.

The GAO study, requested by Sens. Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman, the ranking member and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, respectively, investigated whether federal insurance was taking the same climate-change precautions that private insurers have been taking for several years. Federal insurance includes the National Flood Insurance Program and the Federal Crop Insurance Corp. According to the GAO, “Many large private insurers are incorporating climate change into their annual risk management practices … . In contrast, federal insurers have not developed and disseminated comparable information on long-term financial impacts.”

That is a problem because their exposure has increased substantially since 1980, says the GAO, with the flood program’s risk quadrupling to $1 trillion and the farm insurance rising 26-fold to $44 billion. It is important to note that flood exposure has increased as coastal development and housing values have risen, but the risk of climate change, as the preparedness by the private market demonstrates, is real and growing.

Long term, the answer to this situation is to press for bolder federal action to address climate change, as Sen. Collins has done through, for instance, the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act, of which she is a co-sponsor.

Short term, the responsible action for federal insurers is to better account for the increased severity and frequency of weather as a result of climate change. That means being prepared to spend more money.

Insurance is one federal cost of climate change, but it is hardly the only one. Maintaining roads, rails, and airports will certainly affect the federal bottom line, as will the maintenance of public lands and buildings. Private citizens will have their own added costs. Yet when Congress debates the cost of environmental regulations to slow climate change, these costs are almost never mentioned.

One of the GAO’s recommendations is to make Congress more aware of federal insurers’ long-term exposure to risk as it relates to climate change. That’s a fine idea, but Congress shouldn’t need yet another study to show that it should be looking at a governmentwide assessment of the costs of climate change if it is to have a true picture of the cost of its current puny action. It wouldn’t hurt if the public had a look at those costs, too.