After Hurricane Harvey, there probably isn’t a single Houstonian who hasn’t heard warnings about preparing for hurricane season. That means keeping around water and non-perishable foods, flashlights and a battery-powered radio. It means buying flood insurance even if you don’t live in a floodplain. It means taking personal responsibility for your own safety and doing everything possible to mitigate the risk of a natural disaster.

It’s the sort of planning that we’re not seeing in government. A pair of recent reports, one released by FEMA and the other by Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research and the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, reveals a startling lack of resources and responsibility dedicated to disaster response and preparedness at local, state and federal levels.

To put it bluntly: FEMA doesn’t have the money or manpower to respond to the current rate of natural disasters, there’s little incentive for local authorities to use those limited resources in a way that mitigates future disasters, and there’s no real effort being made to change any of this.

There’s also a bigger issue at hand: Climate change means the number of natural disasters, and the damage they inflict, will only get worse. Failure to cap greenhouse gas emissions and slow the warming of our planet will only add to the floods and storms that ravage our coast. The study by the Kinder and Harte institutes addresses this fact; FEMA ignores it.

So what should happen next?

FEMA requires more money and workers to adequately respond to the growing number of natural disasters. In 2017 alone, more people registered for FEMA assistance than during Hurricanes Rita, Wilma, Katrina and Sandy combined. First responders need to be better qualified and logistics must be streamlined to ensure that resources get where they need to be. Warehouses that were supposed to store key supplies sat empty as Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico.

The National Flood Insurance Program must be restructured to discourage rebuilding in unnecessarily risky, flood-prone areas. As we’ve written before, Houston has suffered — and taxpayers everywhere have, too — because homeowners have been allowed to rebuild time and again without adding any new resilience to the structures. We all need to face the harsh reality that some homes shouldn’t be rebuilt at all.

Whether from flood insurance or congressional spending, recovery dollars must be distributed in ways that encourage new infrastructure, better design standards and effective retrofitting. Cash has to come with strings attached to pull people in the right direction.

Flood planning, meanwhile, has to be a coordinated, regional effort — supported by state leadership. After all, watersheds don’t recognize political boundaries.

That said, county and city governments often lack the authority — such as land-use rules — to effectively prevent flooding. But part of the problem is self-inflicted. Houston’s City Council members failed to prevent development in the 100-year floodplain following Harvey, and they barely passed even a basic regulation adding new requirements when building in the 500-year floodplain .

While the recent reports have brought ongoing policy failures after Harvey into sharper focus, none of this information is particularly new. The problems have been apparent for years, and the only possible up-side of a once-in-a-lifetime disaster like Harvey is that it made the consequences palpable to everyday Houstonians.

The real risk is that major floods won’t end up being once-in-a-lifetime disasters. Because of our changing climate, the odds of a 20-inch rainfall striking Texas in any given year should be expected to grow from a one percent chance to an 18 percent chance, according to the Kinder and Harte institutes study. Households can stock up on all the batteries and peanut butter they can afford, but only systemic change will ensure that our city will survive.