Abstract
This chapter introduces the legal concept of fault attribution as a framework for assessing the effectiveness of current national policies in relation to coastal climate change adaptation. The UnitedStates has expressed a stated goal of increasing resilience and adaptiveness to the effects and impacts of climate change along its coastlines. One way to measure whether the United States is increasing its coastal resiliency is to determine if it is incorporating the increasing risks of climate change into its major federal policies. The legal concept of fault attribution offers an intriguing way to both incorporate changing risks and measure the extent to which risks are being updated into existing policy instruments. This is shown by incorporating a fault attribution framework into current national disaster assistance policy in the United States. Through such an exercise, one can see how the legal concept of fault attribution can offer an assessment of whether climate change risk is being incorporated into existing policy instruments. In addition, one can also see how fault attribution may be used to update existing public policies to better reflect the risks of climate change and, consequently, help drive more climate-resilient policy proposals.