Risk Reduction
Natural Disasters
Poorly planned development in hazard-prone locations increases the economic and human impacts of disasters. These effects will be compounded in an era of greater climate volatility.
The hurricane season of 2017 (which included Harvey, Irma, Jose, and Maria, among others) was particularly tragic, resulting in over 3000 deaths and more than $280 billion in damage.
As communities recover and rebuild from natural disasters, they have an opportunity to plan in a more coordinated and risk-aware manner, placing hazard mitigation and vulnerability reduction at the fore — and integrating them throughout their networks of plans — using the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™.
Challenges
Resilience and Planning
Resilience is “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events.” A resilient community can “bounce back” from a disaster, learn from past mistakes, and adapt to new conditions.
Planning (specifically, land use planning) plays an important role in reducing vulnerability to hazards. Land use approaches can guide new development to safer areas and fortify existing structures.
When all plans include goals and policies that focus on reducing disaster losses, governments are more likely to adopt ordinances and invest in infrastructure, encourage households to reduce their risk, and take actions that reduce damage from hazards.
Communities are often overwhelmed by their many and varied plan documents, which are often inconsistent and lack the integration needed to effectively advance the cause of hazard resilience. For instance, a community’s hazard mitigation plan may call for land acquisition and buy-outs in a high-hazard area, while its comprehensive plan sets goals to increase investment in the same location. This sort of conflict is distressingly common across communities struggling with how to reduce hazard vulnerability.
Communities working toward resilience continue to face significant challenges
- A ‘plethora of plans problem’ often exists in even small communities. Community plans are typically developed by various stakeholder groups that pursue a variety of goals. Larger cities typically have many more plans, making it that much harder to efficiently work toward resilience.
- The absence of a collaborative process to understand the many policies that exist in different plans results in an uncoordinated approach to risk reduction.
- Little spatial understanding of policies unknowingly influences hazard mitigation decisions and a community’s ability to reduce vulnerabilities.
The Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ is a tool to help communities address these challenges, enabling them to understand and discuss inconsistencies across their networks of plans by spatially evaluating their plan documents and existing vulnerabilities.
Plan Integration for Resilience
Scorecard Goals
A community’s plans are cornerstones because they represent the community’s vision, set goals, and guide community development, actions, and policy decisions.
Identify incongruities within networks of plans.
The scorecard reveals areas of compatibility and harmony between plans, but also uncovers plan and policy conflicts that may exacerbate existing vulnerabilities or create new ones. By identifying such incongruities and overlaying them with hazards and measures of physical and social vulnerability, communities can focus on areas with the greatest risk, prioritize projects with multiple benefits, and adjust plans and policies for greater alignment and increased resilience.
Help integrate and improve local plans in ways that reduce losses from hazard events.
The PIRS™ evaluates not only land use plans, but the entire range of plans that spatially influence a community— encouraging comprehensive preparedness and mitigation.
Provide communities developing new plans or updating existing plans with a framework to reduce future hazard risk through smarter and more consistent policies.
The PIRS™ approach can be used to monitor and assess progress toward the coordination of networks of plans for hazard vulnerabilities. It can also help communities evaluate the performance of resilience investments and ensure continuity of decisions.
Provide a validated tool to address on-the-ground needs and build capacity.
Every community has a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Results from the scorecard evaluation can facilitate meaningful conversations with stakeholders and residents about new policies and investment priorities.
Process
Creating a Resilience Scorecard™
Creating a ‘resilience scorecard™’ is a three-phase process.
Gather Plans & Policies
Gather all community plans and extract applicable policies. Hazard zones and planning districts (such as neighborhoods) are defined and mapped, creating neighborhood-scale units for improved analysis.
Analyze Plans
The network of plans is evaluated and scores are given to districts for each policy that (a) affects vulnerability, (b) influences land use, and (c) can be spatially assigned. Scores are then summed for each hazard zone in each district. Areas in need of prioritization will be revealed.
Understand Vulnerabilities
Physical and social, social, or other types of vulnerability are determined for each of the districts and compared to the policy scores. This analysis provides additional insight regarding how well policies target vulnerable areas of the community.
Guided by your scorecard and vulnerability analyses, adjust policies to improve plan integration, build knowledge, and strengthen resilience in the community.
PIRS™ Results
Outcomes from the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ process include a deeper understanding of the network of plans by community staff and decision-makers, increased awareness of the connection between plans and vulnerability to natural hazards, and adjustments in plans and policy tools to improve integration—all of which can help advance community resilience.
When the scorecard results are overlaid with assessments of physical and social vulnerability, communities are better able to set priorities, implement wise decisions, and focus on smart investments.
The PIRS™ method has been applied in a diverse sample of communities. From this, we have learned that conflicts exist within many community networks of plans, and that strong policy scores do not always align with areas of greatest need. Even communities with high overall plan scores exhibit some inconsistencies within their plan networks and mismatches between policies and vulnerabilities.
The Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ can provide the motivation and information that staff and decision-makers need to better integrate their networks of plans and more effectively build resilience throughout their communities.
“In contrast to a previous planning process, which was really aimless and undisciplined, the Scorecard process produced a more coordinated, spatially specific network of plans for the city. It gathered information to help us with the Nashua 2019 Hazard Mitigation Plan. Seven policies were revised to reduce vulnerability in the city’s districts [that] scored high in physical and social vulnerability.“The City plans to use the Scorecard results in its upcoming Master Plan development as well as [in] an application for the LEED for Cities certification. So, working with the Coastal Resilience Center researchers, Nashua brought in around 40 local leaders to learn about the process and serve as ‘ambassadors of resilience’ for the community.
“Emergency Managers really need to connect with their community planners. I know that during the five-year update of each Hazard Mitigation Plan across jurisdictions around the country, it’s typically one of the major involvement points for community planners… the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard process really helped us to understand the importance of that relationship. I think it’ll be an opportunity for Emergency Managers to better understand ways that they can reduce risk in their communities, rather than just responding and recovering.”
Justin Kates, CEM
Director of Emergency Management
City of Nashua, NH
Aligning with Other Initiatives
The Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ is not meant to be used in isolation, but as a tool to help reveal conflicts and prioritize wise decision-making and investments. It aligns with FEMA’s 2013 Local Mitigation Planning Handbook and FEMA’s 2015 Plan Integration: Linking Local Planning Efforts, as well as with the National Flood Insurance Program’s Community Rating System (NFIP/ CRS) Activity 510: Floodplain Management Funding. The Community Resilience Planning Guide developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) also refers to the need for an assessment of the integration of existing plans prior to developing the resilience plan it describes.
In addition, the PIRS™ complements many other community development activities, such as:
- Plans: Your community may choose to develop a number of required and optional plans. Use the scorecard process as an initial fact basis exercise to understand existing policies across your network of plans to inform new plan development.
- Funding: Opportunities exist to leverage available funding, using the scorecard as a foundational assessment to identify needs.
- Technical assistance: You can leverage technical assistance and data to help complete the scorecard as a foundational step to understanding community needs and challenges.
