(emphasis added)
Yes, I'd like to second and emphasize this: as a general default (certainly with exceptions!), I'd really like government policies to focus on outcomes over methods, which often vary wildly by specific location. In some cases there really is nothing to be done, a place is toast because it's built (literally in some cases) on sand and kinda disposable. But other places facing increased flooding (this includes tons of stuff around where I live) or other natural disasters are built on solid bedrock, are in areas hard up for housing and expensive, and are perfectly fine 99% of the time, and thus solid candidates to just adapt. I worked with a neighbor on a project to lift his entire 2 story building 9ft or so and move it a little, something I hadn't considered at all as a possibility before but turns out to have a number of companies around that do it. As well as being really cool to witness, really interesting folks with very neat equipment and expertise, it was surprisingly "affordable", as-in yeah it was expensive but at ~$44k for the lift including new support pillars/foundation and electrical it was a fraction of what building a new home would be let alone all the other things that come with a property. It was extra (mostly us working for beer/friendship on the labor side) to build new stairs and other arbitrary finishing work, but I think the result is actually pretty nice, the space underneath is now a patio and nice outdoor eating area, if water gets bad just have to move chairs and little table, then it's fine (and easy to clean) even if it's under 4ft of water.
Basically if the desired outcome is "floods can happen here without any rebuilding/building repair required or externalities on others like major pollution) then I'd prefer governments stay laser focused on that and be very cautious about dictating how exact people accomplish that vs incentives and support that work towards the best balance of outcomes as cheaply as possible. Adaption is more feasible then I see commonly acknowledged in the media, we can build houses/properties that will shrug off cat 5 hurricanes or are far more resilient to fires or floods or earthquakes or the like. Often surprisingly cheap efforts upfront can make a big difference long term. And politically telling people to abandon homes/properties is always going to be a challenge, particularly when a location is highly desirable most of the time. Whereas saying "you can stay but you can't do so on the backs of others without investing reasonable effort in prevention" is a lot harder to argue with as well as being much more optimistic.
