AS BOSTON PENS its gameplan to move faster to cut emissions to meet 2030 climate targets, it is also buying itself more time in an already-delayed process to offer flood-prone residents discounts on their insurance premiums.

Boston’s newly-released climate action plan sets a new goal to apply to join the Community Rating System program by 2030 after missing an original target to join by 2021, though the city’s top climate official said he still intends to apply this year. The CRS initiative is run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and rewards municipalities that take certain proactive steps to reduce flood risk by offering discounts on flood insurance premiums for policyholders.

That delay has already cost nearly 6,000 Boston residents and businesses at least $785,000 in total unnecessary flood insurance costs since the city missed its 2021 self-imposed deadline, according to state data analyzed by CommonWealth Beacon.

Shortly after that story was published, the city council unanimously supported a resolution that urged Boston to make this a “top priority.”

Once Boston missed its 2021 goal, which was set in 2016 under then-Mayor Marty Walsh, the city set out to join CRS by 2026.

Brian Swett, Boston’s chief climate officer, said in an interview that the city still hopes to apply to the program this year — but the extra wiggle room is necessary to “manage expectations.”

“We wanted to be appropriately conservative with the expectation of CRS coming into fruition for Boston residents and property owners to take advantage of,” he said. “When you submit information into FEMA, then the ball is in their court, and it’s about how quickly they want to respond, what types of follow up information that they want to ask for. And we just wanted to be what we think is appropriately conservative with our expectation of how smooth and short that process will be in terms of back and forth, even if we are working really hard to get all the information we believe is necessary in this calendar year.”

Still, tensions with the Trump administration and a stalemate in Washington over funding FEMA’s umbrella organization, the Department of Homeland Security, only came to the fore over the last year and don’t account for the failure to join CRS since 2021. Chris Osgood, director of Boston’s office of climate resilience, previously told CommonWealth Beacon that it’s taken time to build up the “internal capacity” needed to meet FEMA’s requirements, which include a review of all floodplain development along the city’s aging 47-mile coastline.

Ed Flynn, who represents the vulnerable Seaport district along with other coastal parts of South Boston on city council, said in a statement that it is “beyond disappointing” that the city is now pushing back its deadline for applying to join CRS “nine years after it was first promised” to 2030.

“With the ever increasing cost of living, it is critical that we take immediate action on certification to help avoid millions of dollars in premiums for residents and businesses within the flood map,” Flynn said.

The large volume of documentation that is required by FEMA can make it difficult for municipalities to join the program, floodplain experts and local officials have told CommonWealth Beacon. For flood insurance policyholders to receive a 5 percent discount on their premiums, for instance, communities need to maintain construction certificates for all buildings in the floodplain and disclose and address “repetitive loss” properties.

Nationwide, only 1,700 communities have joined the program out of 22,600 municipalities that could participate. Coastal cities like Miami, San Diego, and Houston participate in CRS, along with others in New England like Portland, Maine, and New Haven, Connecticut.

Increasingly severe floods are threatening to put more financial strain on Massachusetts residents’ pockets. A recent report from Massachusetts insurance commissioner Michael Caljouw found that there was a 6.2 percent year-over-year increase in the number of flood insurance policyholders in the state between 2022 and 2023. And more than half of all such policyholders in Massachusetts are seeing an increase in their insurance costs after FEMA updated its pricing approach.

Bay Staters in 22 communities outside of Boston ranging from Quincy to Worcester to Provincetown are receiving flood insurance discounts because of their municipalities’ participation in CRS.

The new CRS deadline was nestled in Boston’s larger 2030 climate action plan released earlier this week, which aims to cut emissions in half by the end of the decade compared with 2005 levels.

That plan calls for fossil fuel-free public housing by 2030, requiring the city to purchase only electric vehicles going forward, studying congestion pricing to reduce the number of cars driving into Boston, and pursuing a maximum indoor air temperature standard.

Even amid federal climate rollbacks and fiscal and political challenges in the state — in addition to the need for collaboration with the utilities to achieve energy-related goals and Mayor Michelle Wu’s own reported pausing of transit projects — Swett said it was important to raise the bar for what the city should strive to achieve.

“I would argue it is no harder than where we were at in the late 1970s, early 1980s, looking at the dirtiest harbor in the world off our shorelines, and saying, ‘Can we even picture this being clean and fishable?’ And we set some big audacious goals then, and now we have one of the cleanest urban harbors and cleanest beaches in any city around the world,” Swett said. “This is not meant to be framed as easy. This is actually meant to be framed as highly motivational and to light a fire under folks.”