To the Editor:

Your editorial about the report from the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force hit the nail on the head: better preparation for increasingly stronger hurricanes and other climate-change-related events must include risk-based flood insurance rates, flood maps that reflect increasing hazards and improved building codes.

For too long, government policies, including ill-advised, state-run insurance schemes, have encouraged development on beachfront property regularly devastated by weather-related incidents, leaving taxpayers on the hook when disaster strikes.

The task force report gives us hope that these reckless policies will finally be revised in favor of a smarter, safer approach: lining the coast with flood barriers and other low-impact structures where necessary and finally accounting for the true risk of hurricanes.

Without these common-sense measures, we will all continue to pay the price when the next hurricane hits.

-The writers are, respectively, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense and legislative director for the National Wildlife Federation.