Climate News from Florida and California

Posted on December 2, 2019 by admin

Warning to readers: This is not my usual single-focus essay. It is a collage of news from two coastal states with an assortment of serious natural hazards challenges—Florida and California. In recent years, their politics has tended to diverge widely, but perhaps we are seeing a welcome convergence to some degree around climate issues. It is about time: Both face severe and unrelenting challenges, and there is little time to waste in identifying and implementing effective solutions.

Let’s start with Florida.

For starters, they are getting significant help from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), an organization that has long performed great work in preserving open space and researching the values of green infrastructure. For years, I have heard about the merits of coastal mangroves in mitigating hazards such as storm surge and coastal erosion. Recently, TNC employed an insurance industry catastrophe model to quantity the economic benefits of mangrove forests for reducing coastal storm damages in Collier County, and from Hurricane Irma, which struck parts of Florida in 2017. For those unfamiliar with the area, Collier County is in southwest Florida running from Naples on the Gulf of Mexico coast east into the Big Cypress Nature Preserve, which lies just north of Everglades National Park.

To quote the TNC website, “Many areas in the county received over $1 million in benefits every year in flood damage reduction benefits due to the mangroves in front of them.” Moreover, “Mangroves averted $1.5 billion in storm damages, amounting to a 25% savings in counties that have mangroves. They also protected more than 626,000 people across Florida.” You can access the full report, Valuing the Flood Risk Reduction Benefits of Florida’s Mangroves, here.

While TNC could be expected to take climate change and natural hazards seriously, Florida Republican officials are another matter. It is thus heartwarming to learn in a new Associated Press article that first-term Gov. Ron DeSantis has helped turn the page, along with some Republican lawmakers, on the climate denial that prevailed under his predecessor and now current U.S. Senator, Rick Scott. It also appears that Sen. Marco Rubio has joined a bipartisan Senate Climate Solutions Caucus launched in October. While one should not expect the sort of wholehearted embrace of climate issues that one sees among progressive Democrats, that is not necessary for one to appreciate the value of a return to a bipartisan approach to an issue where Republican support (and connection to reality) has in recent years been woefully lacking, especially under President Trump. Shifting public perceptions have driven political change in both California and Florida, and it is about time. Southern Florida has been awash in nuisance flooding driven by sea level rise, and pollution has threatened the environmental viability of the Everglades. If Republicans are finding a need to appeal to voters through climate action, that is, on balance, a far better thing for the political system than a hyper-partisan battle of acceptance of reality versus denial. It is also not surprising that two highly vulnerable states with major natural hazard threats would be in the forefront.

Of course, California under former Gov. Jerry Brown went all in on confronting climate change, in part because of the motivating impact of increasingly frequent and violent wildfires and lengthening wildfire seasons. If anything, current Gov. Gavin Newsom may be picking up the pace, but it is worth nothing that even former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has long acknowledged climate change and advocated effective state and federal action in response. But let me keep this post short and to the point. I recently taped some introductory material for new additions to the American Planning Association’s Resilience Roundtable podcast series, for which I will soon be moderating several new installments to be released in the coming year. But two new podcasts involve interviews by Prof. William Siembieda of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, with planners from Butte County. The first is already available, in which he discusses the impact and recovery from the Camp Fire, which destroyed much of the city of Paradise, with senior planner Dan Breedon. The second interview will appear on the Resilience Roundtable page soon.

Jim Schwab

Sobering Portrait of a Fiery Future

Posted on November 29, 2018 by admin

Summarizing the major points from a densely factual book like Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future, by Edward Struzik (Island Press, 2018), is about as challenging as understanding precisely what is happening in the midst of a rapidly moving massive wildfire. While California is not the focus of Struzik’s book, I might note that confronting such fires in November, such as we have seen on the news in recent weeks, ought to prod more interest in the recent National Climate Assessment and similar climate change science. The wildfire season most decidedly used to be shorter in California, a point Gov. Jerry Brown has made repeatedly. Put more bluntly, it is time to drop the political knee-jerk reactions and study the findings.

Horse Fire at Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2016. Photo from Wikipedia

In Firestorm, Struzik takes us north, much farther north. He starts his story by focusing on the utterly hellish nightmare of the May 2016 scene surrounding Fort McMurray, Alberta, during what became known as the Horse Fire, or among firefighters simply as “The Beast.” People with moderately long news memories may recall following this fire for several days and nights on television, as the fire swept through an area dominated by oil sands development, the heart of Canada’s energy sector. As Struzik notes, megafires (defined as exceeding 100,000 acres in size) are nothing new or unusual in the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska. Three fires bigger than The Beast had occurred in Canada since 1950.

Not so long ago in human history, however, the consequences would have seemed less catastrophic because of the lack of large human settlements in the area, which is not to say that such fires would not have affected native villages and smaller towns. But energy development has brought urban development, and Fort McMurray in 2016 was a city of 88,000 people. As the wildfire attacked and surged through the area, generating massive confusion, it destroyed an estimated 2,800 homes and buildings, burned nearly 1.5 million acres, and produced nearly $9 billion in total losses, including predicted insurance losses of $3.77 billion. The book does not state whether these are U.S. or Canadian dollars (worth about 10 percent less), but I am assuming U.S. given its publication in the states. Either way, it is a massive impact. It is certainly a staggering economic impact on a province like Alberta, home to such facilities as the Imperial Oil plant, which according to Struzik produces 220,000 barrels per day of the bitumen that helps fuel Canadian energy exports.

Much of Struzik’s book, which often starts chapters with quotes from Dante’s Inferno, tours us through the ground-level experience of the fire in and around Fort McMurray in early May 2016. We follow police who worry about family members evacuating, police who work door to door warning people to evacuate, hospital workers preparing for incoming casualties, and highways filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic including people in SUVs abandoning their vehicles in ditches after running out of gas, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) ensuring that such people found alternative rides to safe destinations. Air tankers fly low over the fire to drop their loads of retardant, and helicopters scoop water from nearby lakes in 180-gallon buckets to disperse as strategically as possible. Wildfire response is no less sophisticated or expensive than in the U.S., although Struzik notes some Canadian pride in protecting firefighter safety and eschewing the “hotshot” approach that can lead to heroic but tragic deaths. He paints a realistic but deeply troubling portrait of the human elements of confronting a massive wildfire.

RCMP responding to wildfire in northern British Columbia. Photo from RCMP website

If such fires in the far north are not new, then what, if anything, is the impact of climate change? As has been pointed out many times, it is folly to link any one event directly to climate change, tempting though it may be for many people. The reality is more profound and concerning. Since the 1970s, in Canada, the area burned has doubled, with the prediction that it may double again by mid-century and possibly triple by 2100. In short, the connection to climate change is not any one fire, a natural phenomenon in a fire-adapted environment, but in increased frequency.

Ashes and devastation after the fire at Fort McMurray. From RCMP website

As California has learned, that frequency can also be abetted by a longer fire season, itself a product of climate change. Struzik explains the fire triangle, a combination of heat, dryness or low humidity, and oxygen. On May 3, 2016, the temperature around Fort McMurray was 91°F. The humidity was only 13 percent. For those unfamiliar with the boreal forest, it may be surprising to learn that such temperatures are not entirely unusual in the summer, even in Alaska, with much longer days than in southern latitudes, just as winter brings deeper freezes and very short days. It is a climate of extremes. But climate change is warming the far north faster than almost anywhere else, producing the loss of polar ice caps and the melting of glaciers. Montana, Struzik says, may see average temperatures rise by 5° F., and Montana has major wildfire issues already. Melting ice caps and glaciers are factors in sea level rise, which in turn affects major cities like New York and Miami much farther south, but Struzik notes that we are all connected in other ways to the fate of the northern forest. In a major wildfire like that in Alberta, air quality has been shown to suffer in places like Chicago because of the upper atmospheric drift of ashes and pollution. Northern Alberta may seem a world away, but it will never be distant enough to have no impact below the border.

Personally, I find the science behind all this intriguing, at all levels. Most people, for instance, may not know the origin of the term “firestorm,” which grew out of the cataclysmic 1871 wildfire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which took more than 1,500 lives, the deadliest in American history. The term refers to the behavior of lightning storms in pyrocumulonimbus clouds (aka pyroCBs), which involve an updraft “that sucks smoke, ash, burning materials, and water vapor” high into the sky. As these cool, they perform like classic thunder clouds. But a chemical reaction forestalls any rainfall, allowing the lightning strikes to stoke and expand the fire. The phenomenon remains a mystery and subject of intense study for meteorologists. It is also obviously terrifying and deadly for those beneath it.

Ultimately, in such a book, the question is what we are going to do about the problem. Both the U.S. and Canada have struggled to find appropriate ways to fund wildfire response and suppression, although it is clear also that more money needs to be directed to mitigation and preparation. Firefighting by itself is a completely futile approach. Struzik emphasizes a need in both nations to invest more in scientific research and in developing a “holistic plan” to deal with wildfires when they occur. The price of not developing a better approach, he says, includes the loss of clean water, of birds and animals who will lose their habitat as the problem intensifies, and the loss of jobs afforded by the forest environment. That research must inevitably account for the impacts of humanly generated climate change in coming decades, a task that should never be underestimated because, as one scientist notes in Struzik’s last chapter, keeping up with climate literature is like “drinking from a fire hose,” a curious metaphor in light of the problem. We must also be realistic. Nature has always provided for natural recovery because fire is a natural phenomenon, but it is the pattern of recovery that may change significantly in a changing natural environment.

Jim Schwab

Housing the Needy after Disaster

Posted on November 6, 2018 by admin

This post will be brief. Rather than ask you to read my thoughts, I want you to listen–hard. It has long been known among disaster recovery planners that lower-income citizens are considerably more vulnerable to disasters largely because of the marginal resilience of most low-income housing. The affluent can afford to build fortresses, some of which may still be lost to the elements, but those in second-rate housing, poorly maintained multifamily buildings, and most certainly the homeless, face life-or-death dilemmas when disaster strikes in any form. They live with mold without the resources to make expensive repairs. They face shortages of affordable housing. Federal programs designed to help them often fall short.

Few people have worked harder to remedy these problems than John Henneberger, a 2014 MacArthur Fellow and the executive director of Texas Housers, a nonprofit advocacy organization that has been working with low-income communities in tracking recovery from Hurricane Harvey. This link will take you directly to a podcast page on the American Planning Association website to hear a 46-minute interview with Henneberger about this experience.

The podcast, the first in a series called Resilience Roundtable, is the product of collaboration between the APA technical staff in Chicago and the Professional Development Committee (PDC) of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, of which I am currently chair-elect. In that capacity, I organized and have led the PDC. More such podcasts will be released in coming weeks, but this is the first, and we are very proud to introduce John Henneberger to a new audience. His message is detailed, highly informed, and eloquent. Please check it out.

Before I leave the soapbox, I wish also to provide you to a link to a recent study detailing why minorities are more vulnerable to the impacts of wildfires, a subject that has not been explored widely in the past. “The Unequal Vulnerability of Communities of Color to Wildfire,” available online as linked, was printed in the journal Plos One, and enriches our awareness of equity issues in disaster.

Jim Schwab

Fatal Attraction

Posted on October 13, 2018 by admin

Explaining the frustrations of first responders in searching Mexico Beach, Florida, for survivors after Hurricane Michael, Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told Associated Press, “Very few people live to tell what it’s like to experience storm surge, and unfortunately in this country we seem not to learn the lesson.” Mexico Beach was ground zero for landfall of the hurricane a few days ago.

But then Long was much more direct: “When state and local officials tell you to get out, dang it, do it. Get out.”

The desire or willingness to “ride it out” among people who think the storm will never be as bad as they are told is unquestionably one of the most troubling facets of disaster response, especially when there is adequate warning.

There are disasters, of course, where adequate warning is either extremely difficult or nearly impossible. I still vividly recall one evening in 1979, when, living in Ames, Iowa, I was awakened from a second-story bedroom at about 3 a.m. by the loudest roar I had ever heard. I turned to the window to see total darkness, and aside from the howling winds, no clue of what was unfolding. When it finally passed, I went back to sleep. The next morning, I learned from the newspaper that a small tornado had struck about a mile away, lifting the roofs from seven homes before skipping off into the sky again. On the other hand, we had no cell phones and no reverse 911 in 1979.

Wildfires often give but a few minutes of warning, and earthquakes generally none at all. Hurricanes are different, at least today. In 1900, when more than 6,000 residents of Galveston were swept to sea in the deadliest storm in American history, they had no meaningful warning. In 2018, we have the best satellites the federal government and private money can buy, and we typically know at least 48 hours in advance that a coastal storm is coming, although its strength can change quickly. What we surely know in any case is that, if you live on the Gulf Coast or the Atlantic Coast in the U.S., you can expect hurricanes. Only the frequency and severity vary, and they are not always predictable. But people generally have plenty of time to learn what to do when the time comes. The rest is a matter of cooperation.

There is, of course, the question of why people choose to live in the most vulnerable locations. Early in my quarter-century of involvement in hazards planning, I borrowed

No question about it. The seashore can be a profoundly attractive place in calm weather. The question is both how we build and where we build, and, in the process, what burdens we place on first responders.

the title of a 1987 mystery thriller, The Fatal Attraction, to describe the psychology of our very human attraction to seashores, wooded mountains, and beautiful sunrises. Living on the seashore can be indescribably beautiful under blue skies and balmy breezes. There is nothing wrong with enjoying all that under the right circumstances, but it is critical that we begin to learn our own limitations in adapting to such environments, the need to build appropriately in such locations, and when it is time to simply “get out,” as Long suggested. If we don’t do these things, we are often placing inexcusable burdens on first responders who must dig our dead or injured bodies from the wreckage or save our homes from raging wildfires.

In short, there are times in life when we must be willing to think about more than ourselves. Saving our own skin in the face of oncoming natural disaster is not only not selfish; it is downright thoughtful with regard to the burdens otherwise placed on police, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel.

I am aware that the issue is bigger than I have just described. In another month, I will be speaking about post-disaster recovery to an audience of long-term care health professionals. As a society, we also have obligations to ensure that the elderly live in homes that are removed from floodplains and other hazards, that children attend schools that are as safely located as possible, and that we do not force the poor and disadvantaged into neighborhoods that are at risk and where no one else would wish to live. In New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the system failed thousands of poor people who did not own cars by failing to provide means for carless evacuation. The sheer number of such people was never a secret to officials in Louisiana, but good planning never happened before it was too late. All that said, those who have the means should have the willingness to consider both where they choose to live or build and to evacuate when told to do so.

We can all hope that the body count from Hurricane Michael remains low. As of the moment I am writing this, authorities have counted 17 deaths, but it may rise.

Long-term recovery awaits communities affected by either Florence or Michael. As always, serious questions can be posed about where and how to rebuild, whether we can make communities more resilient against future disasters, and what vision states and communities should have as they move forward. In its Influencers series, the Charlotte Observer asked what leaders thought North Carolina could do for coastal and inland communities affected by flooding from coastal storms. Interestingly, many cited setbacks from the coast, accounting for climate change (something the Republican-dominated legislature has explicitly chosen not to do), and keeping new development out of floodplains. All these efforts would make it easier to plan evacuations in the first place. The issue is whether North Carolina, or any other state in the path of such storms, can muster the political will to do what is right.

And whether people who live in highly vulnerable locations can heed the call when told to evacuate.

Jim Schwab

Taking Stock of Recent Disasters

Posted on September 6, 2018 by admin

Photo by Jeff Clevenger

We learn from disasters as we recover from them, but each disaster teaches slightly different things. Sometimes the lessons are significant and historic; in others, one community is learning what others already know or should have learned from their own past events. Some years are relatively quiescent, as 2018 so far seems to be. And some become relentless slogs, like 2017.

Adam Smith, lead scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information, noted in a plenary panel in July for the 2018 Natural Hazards Workshop, in Broomfield, Colorado, that the tally for 2017 disasters had exceeded $200 billion. This is more than 40 percent of the tally so far of billion-dollar disasters for the entire decade beginning in 2010. Simply put, with three major hurricanes—Harvey, Irma, and Maria—striking parts of the southern U.S., followed in short order by some of the most expensive wildfires in California history, it was a wild, taxing year in the world of emergency management.

But our attention fades quickly. Right now, there are no equivalent disasters seizing our attention, but in time there will be. The people who remain painfully aware that recovery is a long, slow process are those directly affected, and even many of them will not fully grasp the ways in which past location choices and patterns of development have brought them to this pass. Many had no choice anyway. Our communities are frequently full of social inequities that compromise the life choices of the poor and disabled. In other cases, the losses inflicted on neighborhoods are the result of hubris on the part of developers, city officials, and homeowners themselves. It does not hurt, approximately one year after these combined events, to look at what we know so far about the recovery following them.

Apparently, the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO), an arm of Congress, agreed that the time was ripe for review because it has released a study, 2017 Hurricanes and Wildfires: Initial Observations on the Federal Response and Key Recovery Challenges. Because of the severity of challenges in Puerto Rico, one may note from the graph below, reproduced from the report, that Hurricane Maria by far entailed the largest federal expenditures.

In spite of that level of effort, Puerto Rico has engendered the most significant criticism of the performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Maria struck Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) after Harvey had already drenched and flooded coastal Texas, and Irma had swept through much of Florida.

FEMA teams managing the distribution of water, and meals for hundreds of semi-trucks at an incident Support Base in Seguin, Texas. Photo by Dominick Del Vecchio – Aug 29, 2017

The report notes that, as a result, FEMA resources were severely stretched by then, only to have wildfires in California add to the pressure, though the personnel assigned in the last case were small compared to the hurricanes (as is typically the case). Adding to the challenge, Puerto Rico and USVI are offshore and were also poorly prepared for a Category 4 hurricane. Puerto Rico had already suffered years of neglect of crucial infrastructure, was burdened with oppressive debts, and was by far the least prosperous target of the 2017 storms. All this, combined with some incredibly inept public relations from the White House, led to a perfect storm in which nearly 3,000 people have died directly or indirectly as a result of the disaster. To my knowledge, that is a number exceeded in U.S. history only by the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, which killed more than twice as many people. The difference is that, in Puerto Rico, most people died because of blocked transportation, loss of electricity, and similar problems with critical facilities that prevented adequate transportation or medical attention in many isolated communities in the interior of the mountainous island.

Exactly what we learn from Puerto Rico remains to be seen. It is worth noting, in my view, that far more prosperous Hawaii has coped well with admittedly less-challenging disasters in recent years, in large part because state government has practiced response and committed resources to the problem. I say this despite being aware of gaps in Hawaii recovery planning that merit further attention. But if Puerto Rico is a logistical challenge for mainland responders, Hawaii is even more remote but better prepared. The difference in economic circumstances, however, is a dramatic and powerful variable in this comparison, as is Hawaii’s statehood. It is also worth noting that Hawaii is a long chain of islands, and storms (or volcanoes) never affect all at the same time. Effectively, that has always meant that emergency resources in Hawaii have been able to be moved from one or more islands to another that has been hit by a storm. All of Puerto Rico was devastated almost on the same day, with internal transportation, communications, and electric power nearly brought to a standstill, making access to many villages nearly impossible.

If Puerto Rico, followed closely by USVI, is the direst case for long-term recovery, there nonetheless remain serious challenges in Texas, not only in Houston but in dozens of other counties along the Gulf Coast. A recent Washington Post article used the term “Harvey homeless” to describe thousands of Texas families living in whatever parts of their flooded homes they have salvaged while struggling to accumulate the resources to repair the rest. They live with mold, dust, and any other environmental contaminants that endure in essentially unusable parts of their homes. In all, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, at least 175,000 Texas homes were “badly damaged” by Hurricane Harvey, and 80 percent lacked flood insurance, thus relying on much smaller federal disaster payments (averaging $4,203) than flood insurance would have afforded. If there is one powerful lesson in Texas, it concerns public education on the value of flood insurance, particularly in the many areas outside the 100-year floodplain. Unfortunately, much of the public retains the illusion that flood insurance is either unnecessary or unavailable outside the legally defined floodplain. Yet Harvey’s 60 inches of rain in some parts of metropolitan Houston left vast areas beyond the regulatory flood boundaries under water because water does not care about such artificial boundaries. It goes where gravity compels it to go. Moreover, years of loose land-use regulation over the past half-century of rapid growth have expanded the floodplain and put numerous neighborhoods in greater danger than they faced in the past.

Moreover, as John Henneberger, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Texas Housers, noted in his keynote at the Natural Hazards Workshop, Texas does not have a noteworthy history of attention to social equity in disaster recovery. Henneberger called for a new model of disaster recovery in which we seek to use recovery planning to overcome racial and economic inequities, stating that “the legal framework already exists” in federal programs like Community Development Block Grant—Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) to “overcome inequalities,” but the rules are not always followed. Thus, his top recommendation for reform was simply to “obey the law” regarding the conditions that apply to state and local use of CDBG-DR funds.

Finally, Bloomberg Business Week chose recently to examine the questions surrounding rebuilding after the California wildfires. With a population already approaching 40 million, the state is under intense pressure to build adequate housing amid rising housing costs. California has repeatedly toughened its building codes in response to wildfire threats but faces a legacy problem of homes built under earlier standards. Not often known outside wildfire research circles is the fact that the average home contains seven to eight times the density of combustible materials as the surrounding forest in the wildland-urban interface. That means that every home that catches fire or explodes is a huge matchstick endangering every other home in its immediate vicinity. When one considers that California is unquestionably the most progressive state in tackling wildfire problems, one understands that the problem of retrofitting older homes built to lower building code standards—or none at all in some other western states—is a lingering and potentially very expensive problem. The dilemma serves to illuminate the value of pre-planning for recovery, learning how to seize the “teachable moment” for reform, to reduce the scope of the problem. The article also notes that, if California is to reduce pressure to build in the forest, its cities must be prepared to allow greater density to relieve the housing crisis in a state where a shortage of affordable housing has yielded a concomitant problem of growing homelessness. And so, we see why urban planning needs both to be holistic in its approach to social problems and guided by wise state policy with supporting resources. We all still have a long way to go.

This blog post can never be long enough to explore all these issues in depth. But in coming weeks and months, I hope to delve into specific issues more deeply, share interviews with individual experts, and explore what needs to be done. I am also watching intently for new books that will shed light on new solutions. One just arrived today. Stay tuned.

Jim Schwab

Why the Nation Should Invest in Mitigation

Posted on August 20, 2018 by admin

Cover of NIBS Interim Study from Marathon, Florida. “These modern, mitigated homes withstood Hurricane Irma. They are elevated to withstand high water and their roofs are constructed to withstand up to 220 mph winds. Good mitigation learns from mistakes to build more resilient communities.” Photo by Howard Greenblatt, FEMA,, November 22, 2017.

I should have written this blog post six months ago, but better late than never. Last December, the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS), Multihazard Mitigation Council, issued Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves: 2017 Interim Report, a welcome update of its highly regarded, widely quoted, 2004 report, Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves: An Independent Study to Assess the Future Savings from Mitigation Activities. Why is this new report still relevant for blog discussion eight months after its release? Because it is having a significant, if not yet profound, effect on public and congressional thinking about the investment of federal dollars in hazard mitigation. That shift is long overdue.

The original report was a landmark in hazard mitigation research in its own right, finding that the nation eventually saved $4 in costs from disaster losses for every dollar of federal money invested in hazard mitigation, a remarkable return on investment by any standard. That report also differentiated specific savings related to specific disaster types ranging from $1.50 per dollar for earthquake mitigation efforts to $9 for flood-related mitigation investments. In short, presuming that specific projects merited investment based on cost-benefit comparisons, the U.S. could prevent a world of pain with timely and effective investments in mitigation projects to reduce such losses.

Still, over the years, the federal government has provided far more money after disasters to support mitigation against future disasters by more generously funding post-disaster programs, primarily the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), than pre-disaster programs such as the Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) program, authorized under the Disaster Mitigation Act (DMA) of 2000 (Sec. 203 of the Stafford Act, 42 U.S.C. 5133). Pilot funding actually began in 1997 under the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Project Impact, which was terminated by the George W. Bush administration, but by then the DMA was law, and so was PDM. However, secure funding is another matter, and over the years, PDM has been subjected to a roller coaster ride of erratic congressional appropriations. Disregarding the Project Impact years through FY2002, appropriations have ranged from a peak of $150 million when the fund was established in FY2003, to $35.5 million in FY2012, to $25 million in FY2014 following an attempt by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to zero out the fund and merge it into a single mitigation account, a ploy that did not succeed in Congress. Now the trend is in the opposite direction, with $90 million allocated in FY2017, and dramatically more under consideration for FY2019. In June, the Senate was looking at a proposed allocation of $246 million (House version), according to Meredith Inderfurth, Washington liaison of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. That is the same amount allocated the previous year, so one can hope PDM is stabilizing at a higher level. One must realize, also, that what is proposed from the administration of the moment is not necessarily what is disposed by Congress, where appropriations committees may act under significantly different influences from those affecting the White House.

What is the difference between PDM and HMGP? Most simply, PDM provides funding under a competitive grant system to communities for proposed projects to implement hazard mitigation before disaster strikes, under what some call “blue skies.” By contrast, HMGP funding is a percentage of overall disaster assistance following a presidentially declared disaster. That percentage has varied over time and among states; those with enhanced state hazard mitigation plans, which must meet higher standards and show a deeper state commitment to mitigation, receive a higher percentage of overall disaster assistance in HMGP funds. Currently, for states with enhanced plans, that amounts to 20 percent of overall assistance, in other words, $200 million in HMGP for every billion dollars of disaster aid. The amounts are smaller, beginning with 15 percent for the first $2 billion of aid, and shrinking as percentages of higher levels, for states without enhanced plans. The states then distribute this money to local jurisdictions for specific projects. But no HMGP money exists without a declared disaster.

However, at least the recent revived congressional interest in funding PDM suggests that the emphasis is changing, and it is no accident that this is happening after the release of the NIBS interim report. The $4 savings calculation from the 2004 report has been widely disseminated and quoted in disaster management circles. The new report accentuates that good news with increased savings estimates based on complex studies that have dug much more deeply into the logic of how those savings should be calculated. To be honest, I will not confess to following all the detail in 344 pages of text and appendices in the new report. Economics is not my field. My trust in the numbers, however, grows out of both admiration for the stellar collection of scholars involved in the study and an ability to at least follow the logic of their arguments, if not the details of every calculation. I can at least follow the logic of the methodology, which appears very sound.

What did they find? The report established a new, higher overall savings ratio of $6 for every federal dollar invested in hazard mitigation by “select federal agencies.” It did this by establishing methodology for including new but relevant factors into the cost-benefit calculations the study used. The new study goes farther by also examining investments “to exceed select provisions of the 2015 model building codes,” for which it found a 4-1 benefit-cost ratio. In the latter case, this meant that the analysis focused on those mitigation efforts that used stricter standards for building resilience than those in the model codes. It should be noted here that neither model codes, propagated by nonprofit code development organizations that research the effectiveness of various building standards and promulgate such codes for use by local governments, nor federal mitigation requirements, such as those in the National Flood Insurance Program, prohibit local governments from “going the extra mile” to strengthen protection against various potential disasters.

Like the 2004 study, this one also sought to establish more specific benefit-cost ratios for particular disaster types, for which the efficacy of mitigation investments can vary. Nevertheless, all proved positive to differing degrees. Flood mitigation led the pack, as it did in the earlier study, with a 7-1 ratio for federal investments and 5-1 for exceeding 2015 model code requirements. Investments for exceeding codes for hurricane storm surge bore a 5-1 benefit, but an inadequate sample for federal investments prevented the study from producing a ratio for federal investments. Wind mitigation was 5-1 for both analyses; earthquake and wildland-urban interface yielded 3-1 advantages for federal investments and 4-1 for code exceedance. Overall, however, the dominant area of U.S. losses in disasters has always come from flooding, generally by a very wide margin.

As I noted, a good deal of the refinement materialized from the study’s ability to quantify some aspects of future cost savings that were often left out of the equation in past analyses and in traditional benefit-cost analyses. Rather than paraphrase, I will simply offer the study’s own summary from page 9:

The Interim Study quantified a number of benefits from mitigation, including reductions in:

Future deaths, nonfatal injuries, and PTSD
Repair costs for damaged buildings and contents
Sheltering costs for displaced households
Loss of revenue and other business-interruption costs to businesses whose property is damaged
Loss of economic activity in the broader community
Loss of service to the community when fire stations, hospitals, and other public buildings are damaged
Insurance costs other than insurance claims
Costs for urban search and rescue

All these are important facets of the overall costs of disasters, many of which have been hard to quantify in the past. That is what makes this update so significant. What will make it more valuable is for advocates of effective hazard mitigation, whether experts or ordinary citizens, to learn the basic facts of these findings and share them with policy makers at local, state, and federal levels of government, so that it becomes clear that simply rebuilding the same structures in the same hazardous locations after each disaster constitutes a massive lost opportunity. The staggering losses last year from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, combined with the wildfires in California, should be a wake-up call. We can avoid a great deal of tragedy with smart investments in mitigation at all levels of government. Download or scan this study, at least read the summary, and be prepared to make the basic case. It is the fiscally conservative thing to do, in view of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been poured into disaster recovery.

Jim Schwab

Climbing the Mountain amid a Landslide

Posted on February 5, 2018 by admin

Where will we find badly needed leadership for climate adaptation?

The United States, under President Trump, has withdrawn from the Paris climate accords. That does not, of course, eliminate the problem of climate change, but it does create a gaping leadership void regarding federal policy support for either mitigating climate change (by reducing greenhouse gas emissions) or adapting communities and businesses to better withstand its impacts. Many cities and some states have claimed the mantle of leadership by pledging continued efforts, and a few foundations have undertaken initiatives such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities. Newly emerging professional associations have emerged, notably the Urban Sustainability Directors Network and, perhaps most on point, the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. Other long-standing professional associations, such as the American Planning Association and the American Society of Civil Engineers, have weighed in on the subject, and even offered professional training, while maintaining their traditional focus.

But is all this activity a concerted push in the right direction? Or is it a growing babble of voices without strategic direction? Amid it all, is there an emerging field of practice for climate adaptation professionals, and if so, how well defined is that field? What credentials should it develop or require? These are no small questions because a great deal depends on the credibility of the scientific assessments made of the problem we must confront.

Kresge Foundation’s Climate Adaptation Influencers meeting in Washington, DC, January 22. Jim Schwab was a participant. Kresge Foundation photo.

In that context, a new report from the Kresge Foundation, Rising to the Challenge, Together, is a welcome addition to the conversation, even as it stresses the urgency of both the conversation and our response to the problem. Given the steadily increasing toll of natural disasters and the increasing threat of sea level rise for coastal communities, high-precipitation storms for others, and prolonged drought and increased wildfire for many western and heartland regions, one can understand when the report, authored by Susanne C. Moser, Joyce Coffee, and Aleka Seville, states bluntly:

“The accelerating pace, all-encompassing scope, and global scale of climate change converging with other societal and environmental challenges—juxtaposed with the sheer difficulty of challenging and changing thinking, politics, and institutions to close the resilience gap—leave the field rather worried about the state of adaptation efforts in the US at this time. Some fields of practice have the luxury of evolving at their own pace; in the field of climate adaptation, failure or slow adaptation could mean death and destruction. Incremental progress in climate change simply does not match the rapidly accelerating pace of climate change.”

It is difficult for anyone well grounded in the science to argue with this sense of urgency. One is tempted to fall back on the nearly cliched image of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland running to stay in place. But I’m not sure that image reflects the real urgency the Kresge report implies. A more appropriate image might be that of attempting to scale a mountain amid a landslide. That does not mean that I think the situation is hopeless. It does mean that the only solution may be to buckle our safety belts and rapidly grow our tenacity in confronting the perils that lie ahead. Tenacity is very different from panic. Later, the report states, “Crisis-driven adaptation has its limits.” Responding to crisis is reactive; tenacity requires vision. The problem, the authors note, is that the adaptation community has not yet defined a “vision for a desirable future.” What brave new world sits at the top of that mountain?

How Kresge survey respondents responded when asked to rate the status of selected sub-components of the adaptation field. All graphics provided by and reproduced with permission from Kresge Foundation.

Attendance at climate-and disaster-related sessions at the APA National Planning Conference has risen dramatically over 20 years. Credit: Jim Schwab

There is an aspect of the emerging climate adaptation field that calls to mind the origins of both the urban planning and public health fields, which most people would describe as having the maturity that this new field seeks to achieve. Both responded to urgent health crises in rapidly growing modern cities in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Because of uncontrolled industrial pollution and poor sewage management, cities like Chicago, New York, and Baltimore were virtual petri dishes for disease. In time, both professions established positive visions for desired community outcomes, but those visions must now contend with the new threats climate adaptation aims to address. Thus, APA national and state conferences over the past two decades have seen dramatic shifts in content, with a greater emphasis on preserving those positive visions by addressing climate change and mitigating natural hazards. The Kresge report in its final chapter attempts to assess what the vision of a mature field of climate adaptation would be.

It is important, however, to understand the framework the report offers for the essential components of the climate adaptation (or any other) field of professional endeavor. Derived from lengthy interviews and surveys with study participants, including attendees at the 2017 National Adaptation Forum in St. Paul, Minnesota, Kresge offers what it calls “the 4 P’s.” These are:

Purpose (why does this field need to exist?)
People (who should be involved with what credentials?)
Practice (how are best practices in this field identified?)
Pillars (the public policy and funding support for the field)

This framing device may be one of the report’s most important contributions to thinking about the future leadership of the climate adaptation field. I would add that it is particularly important to see climate adaptation, much like its planning and public health forebears, as a field that is less about theory, although theory remains important, than about applied knowledge, which is almost inherent in the definition of adaptation. Unless adaptation is a matter of practice, the urgency the report discusses makes no sense. That said, one crucial skill planners may be able to contribute is synthesis. Planners may have their own unique set of skills and analytic methods, but they rely overwhelmingly on borrowing technical knowledge from the sciences, engineering, and economics to make sense of the urban organism and to help shape its future. Likewise, climate adaptation practitioners, while needing a solid knowledge base in climate science, will need to rely heavily on a bevy of other skills to succeed. Notable among these will be communication and people skills. Our communities will become hotbeds of climate progress only when the public is sold on both the nature of the problem and the feasibility of the solutions offered. The ability to facilitate that dialogue will be critical. Climbing that mountain will require pervasive public support.

The question of initiating effective dialogue with a public that is sometimes skeptical (location and timing matter here) feeds into another question raised in the Kresge report—whether it is more important to mainstream the concepts of climate adaptation or seek societal transformation with climate adaptation as a driving influence. Mainstreaming refers to the incorporation of climate adaptation concerns and practices into existing institutions and procedures. One major example would be hazard mitigation plans; another would be infusing such ideas into various elements of comprehensive plans, as well as regulatory tools such as zoning ordinances and building codes. Transformation, on the other hand, involves the pursuit of systemic changes in social and political structures. If there is to be a debate on this point, it seems to me the debate must be more one of emphasis than absolutes and should be context-sensitive. Transformation depends on situational opportunities tempered by foresight and the tenacious pursuit of a longer-term vision, but it does not rule out mainstreaming. Both approaches help to build more resilient communities for the future, but each may miss the mark if it is seen as the only valid perspective.

This is not an “either/or” choice but “both/and.” Because Kresge strives to maintain a social equity focus in climate adaptation discussions, I will point out that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was both a visionary and an effective tactician. One must know which matters most at a given moment. The report also mentions the tension between urban and rural perspectives and the potential for smaller communities being left behind in the quest for resources. Here lies a huge opportunity for transformational change, given the recent political divide. God bless the politician who can construct a connecting narrative that brings these forces together behind a progressive, scientifically informed agenda.

That leads to my final point before simply recommending that anyone with a serious interest in this field download and read the report. In its final chapter, the report takes note of the pressing need to build relationships across silos, to develop a common language and shared understanding of the problem, and to use a “whole community” approach to address problems. There is much more detail, but this is enough to suggest the drift. Climbing this mountain amid a landslide is no easy task. The details can be grinding and even discouraging when things do not go well. It is important to know how to measure progress and to keep the obstacles in perspective.

Rose diagram shows a way to visualize progress toward adaptation.

Planners, particularly, should know this. We are a profession of visionaries who know that details matter.

Jim Schwab

Think Globally, Adapt Locally

Posted on February 4, 2017 by admin

In times of political hostility to scientific truth, knowledgeable people sometimes wonder how we can progress without federal support for important initiatives such as adaptation to climate change. The answer, in a vibrant democracy, is that the truth often bubbles up from the bottom instead of being disseminated from the top. When the top is dysfunctional, as it currently seems to be, it is the creativity of local officials and their communities that often saves America from itself. For me, part of the joy of a career in urban planning has been watching and sometimes abetting the great local experiments that pave the way for an eventual federal and international response to pressing urban and environmental problems. The struggle to adapt successfully to climate change is one of those urgent problems. We may indeed confront a wave of scientific ignorance among some leaders in the Trump administration for a few years, but they should be aware that they cannot halt the wave of innovation as communities work to solve real problems.

Denying that humans have contributed significantly to climate change through the Industrial Revolution and transportation driven by fossil fuel consumption will do nothing to stop sea level rise, nor will it prevent the bifurcation of extreme weather events that flattens the bell curve with fewer normal events and more high-precipitation storms and prolonged drought, which sometimes also feeds a longer and more intense wildfire season. Disasters happen, and the numbers don’t lie.

As a result, I was very happy a couple of years ago to be invited to join a Project Advisory Committee for the Kresge Foundation, which had hired Abt Associates to produce a report on climate adaptation at the community level. The foundation has supported a good deal of work related to community resilience and social equity in addition to making serious investments in the resuscitation of Detroit as a functioning urban community. Kresge wants to know what makes communities tick in responding to resilience challenges like climate change, and the study by Abt was intended to establish a sort of baseline for understanding the best practices in local planning related to climate adaptation.

I was thus involved in a series of all-day or multiday meetings of 16 project advisors from around the United States who reviewed and commented on the progress of the study for the consultants. Our meetings involved some serious debates about what constituted climate adaptation and resilience, and the degree to which communities needed to use such labels for what they were doing, or conversely, the degree to which we needed to recognize what they were doing as climate adaptation. Sometimes, we learned, adaptation may quack like a duck without being called a duck by local citizens and officials. What matters is what is accomplished.

Climate Adaptation: The State of Practice in U.S. Communities was officially released by Kresge Foundation in December; I will confess to being a little late in sharing the news, but at the time I was trying to recover from pneumonia. It took me a while longer to find time to read the report in its 260-page entirety, but I thought it important to do so to report intelligently on the final product. There is a difference between reviewing case studies in bits and pieces before committee meetings and seeing the full report between two covers.

I am happy to tell you that I think the nine authors who contributed to the report hit a home run. The bulk of its wisdom lies in 17 case studies spread across the nation, including some surprising places like Cleveland, Ohio, and the Southwestern Crown of Montana. I applaud Abt Associates for its work in even identifying many places that may not have been on the standard maps of leadership in climate resilience. Some of that can be attributed to maintaining an open mind about what they were looking for and what constituted innovation and success in adaptation. One thing that is utterly clear is that no two communities are the same, nor do they face the same problems. Ours is a very diverse country in spite of all that binds us together. Ours is also a nation of creative citizens who confront local problems based on local circumstances rather than “one size fits all” solutions. Perhaps that is why support from Washington does not always matter as much as we think, except in the international arena, where it is critical.

The example of Cleveland may be enlightening in this regard. While issues of social equity may not always seem like a logical starting point for engagement on climate adaptation, Cleveland is a city that was utterly battered by economic change from the 1970s into the early 21^st century. The result is a community that is noticeably less prosperous than its surrounding metropolitan area, and has some of the lowest socioeconomic rankings among major cities nationwide. It is also a city that has lost more than half of its 1950s population, which peaked around 900,000. It is a city that may well say, in evaluating its place on the prosperity scale, “Thank God for Detroit.” That also means that no discussion of climate adaptation will move forward without a solid anchor in efforts to confront these inequities because it is hard to imagine how a community can become resilient in the face of climate challenges without also rebuilding economic opportunity for a badly battered working class. I know. I may have decamped for Iowa in 1979, but I grew up in the Cleveland area and worked my way through college in a chemical plant. Rebuilding prosperity in Cleveland has been tough sledding.

By the same token, climate change has had a direct impact on Montana, and the Southwestern Crown, a rural area of mountains and forests, has suffered the loss of timber industry jobs, which has in much of the Pacific Northwest resulted in some bitterness toward environmentalists. At the same time, nature takes a serious toll in increased wildfire damage, and at some point, if people of different perspectives can sit down for some serious discussions of reality, they can also imagine new futures for a region at risk. That has been the job of the Southwestern Crown Collaborative.

Mentioning every case study here would not make sense. But it is worth noting that communities generally seen as not only prosperous but on the cutting edge of the new high-tech economy, such as Seattle, face other challenges that nonetheless tax local resources and resourcefulness. Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) became another Kresge case study, in large part, it seems, because its management needed to find ways to bring its staff and customers into the difficult realm of defining the threat and deciding how it could best be handled. SPU is responsible for managing Seattle’s water supply. When one confronts a future that portends potential water shortages as a result of decreased winter snow pack, leading to reduced snow melt that combined with drought can leave a huge metropolitan area high and dry, the need to recalibrate the system can be daunting. This case study is not important for providing precise answers to such questions, for there are none. Instead, it emphasizes the challenge of accustoming utility engineers and managers to an uncertain future, and helping them find comfort levels with uncertainty. What needs to change to make Seattle’s water supply resilient in the face of natural hazards? How does a city on Puget Sound cope with sea level rise? What plans will be adequate for protecting water supplies two or three decades into the future? In the end, the answers revolve around changing the culture of decision making within the organization as well as communicating those challenges clearly to the public. One product of SPU’s efforts, however, is a path forward for other communities facing similar long-term challenges.

Bottom line: This report is a great resource for those who want to descend from the heights of overarching theory on climate change to the realities of confronting the problem on the ground. Use this link, download it, and read it. Few resources in recent years have been so thorough in documenting the state of practice in climate adaptation at the local level. I am proud to have been involved even in an advisory capacity. I have learned a great deal from the process.

Jim Schwab

Regional Green Infrastructure

Posted on May 30, 2016 by admin

The subtitle to this headline for many people might be: Who Cares? As a term of art, green infrastructure may be popular with landscape architects, civil engineers, and urban planners, among a few other allied professions, but it does not often mean much to the average person. Many people may struggle to define infrastructure even without the word green in front of it.

Infrastructure generally refers to those modern systems, such as roads, bridges, and utility grids that allow our cities and regions to function effectively. Recognizing that the value of infrastructure lies in the services it provides, green infrastructure has been distinguished from traditional gray infrastructure by focusing on the use of natural systems, such as wetlands and urban forests, to protect or enhance environmental quality by filtering air pollution, mitigating stormwater runoff, and reducing flooding. It stands to reason that such natural systems are most likely to provide such “ecosystem services” well when we respect and preserve their natural integrity. It also stands to reason that, to the degree that such systems face threats from urban sprawl and urbanization, their ability to perform those services for human populations is diminished. To say that development has often helped to kill the goose that laid the environmental golden egg is to state the obvious, no matter how many people want to avoid that truth. That does not mean that our cities cannot or should not grow and develop. It does mean that, using the best available natural science, we need to get much smarter about how it happens if we want to live in healthy communities.

Fiscalini Ranch Preserve in Cambria, California.

I mention this because, as part of the American Planning Association staff pursuing such issues, I spent three days in Washington, D.C., last week at a symposium we hosted with U.S. Forest Service sponsorship on “Regional Green Infrastructure at the Landscape Scale.” We were joined by about two dozen seasoned experts not only from the Forest Service and APA, but from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, several national nonprofits, and others to sort through the issues impeding better planning for green infrastructure. We explored major hazard-related issues such as wildfires, flooding, and coastal storms and how green infrastructure can or should function in relation to them.

This matters because there are huge costs associated with the way we choose to develop. There can also be huge benefits. Whether the ultimate ledger in any particular region is positive or negative is largely dependent on the approach we choose, and that is heavily dependent on how broadly or narrowly we view our responsibilities. Historically, in America, we have been rather myopic about the damage we have done to our environment, but our perspective has become more comprehensive over time, starting with the conservation movement in the late 1800s. But today, as always, there are undercurrents of more myopic attitudes and impatience with the more deliberate and thoughtful calculations a more long-term view requires. There is also the simple fact that understanding issues like climate change requires some degree of scientific literacy, something that is missing too often even in some presidential candidates.

But it helps to drill down to specific situations to get a firm sense of consequences. For instance, the Forest Service budget is literally (and figuratively) being burned away by the steadily and rapidly increasing costs of fighting wildfires. That is in large part because the average annual number of acres burned has essentially tripled since 1990, from under 2 million then to about 6 million now. As recently as 1995, 16 percent of the agency’s budget went to suppressing wildfires. Every dollar spent on wildfires is a dollar removed from more long-term programs like conservation and forest management. By 2015, this figure has risen to 52 percent, and is projected to consume two-thirds of the agency’s budget by 2025. Clearly, something has to give in this situation, and in the present political situation, it is unlikely to be an expansion of the Forest Service budget. At some point, a reckoning with the causes of this problem will have to occur.

What are those causes? Quite simply, one is a huge expansion in the number of homes built in what is known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI), defined as those areas where development is either mixed into, interfaces with, or surrounds forest areas that are vulnerable to wildfire. The problem with this is that every new home in the WUI complicates the firefighters’ task, putting growing numbers of these brave professionals at risk. Every year, a number of them lose their lives trying to protect people and property. In an area without such development, wildfires can do what they have done for millennia prior to human settlement—burn themselves out. Instead, a century of aggressive fire suppression has allowed western forests, in particular, to become denser and thus prone to more intense fires than used to occur. The homes themselves actually represent far greater densities of combustible material than the forest itself; thus fires burning homes are exacerbated by increased fuel loads. In addition, prescribed fire, a technique used to reduce underbrush in order to reduce fire intensity, becomes more difficult in proximity to extensive residential development. A prescribed fire that spun out of control was the cause of the infamous Los Alamos, New Mexico, wildfire in 2000. The entire situation becomes highly problematic without strong political leadership toward solutions.

At the same time, denial of climate change or even reluctance to broach the subject does not help, either. It compounds the difficulty of conducting an informed dialogue at a time when increased heat and drought are likely to fuel even more wildfires of greater intensity. The recent major wildfire around Fort McMurray, Alberta, displacing thousands of people, may be a harbinger of things to come.

That is just one sample of the issues we need to confront through a larger lens on the value of large-scale green infrastructure and regional cooperation to achieve positive environmental results that also affect issues like water quality and downstream flooding. Because we could produce an entire book on this issue—and the suggestion has in fact been made that we do so—I will not even attempt here to lay out the entire thesis. Rather, it may be useful to point readers to some resources that I have found useful in recent weeks in the context of writing for another project on green infrastructure strategies. Most of these are relatively brief reports rather than full-length books, enough to give most readers access to the basics, as well as references to longer works for those so inclined.

On the subject of water and development in private forests, a Forests on the Edge report, Private Forests, Housing Growth, and Water Supply is a good starting point for discussion. Because planning to achieve effective conservation at a landscape scale requires collaboration among numerous partners, an older (2006) Forest Service report, Cooperating Across Boundaries: Partnerships to Conserve Open Space in Rural America, may also be useful. With regard to wildfires, a recent presentation at a White House event by Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics, a firm that has specialized in this area, may also be useful for its laser focus on trends and solutions with regard to development in the wildland-urban interface and the need for effective, knowledgeable local planning in areas affected by the problem. But I would be remiss if I did not bring readers’ attention back to a 2005 APA product of which I was co-author with Stuart Meck: Planning for Wildfires. It could probably use some updating by now, but every one of our central points, I believe, remains valid.

Happy reading to all!

Jim Schwab

Symbolic Journey

Posted on April 18, 2016 by admin

Sylvia Vargas and Ben Carlisle present FAICP medallion and certificate in Phoenix. Photo by Joe Szurszewski; copyright by American Planning Association.

Sometimes we find ourselves on a journey whose significance is bigger than the meaning for our own lives alone. In fact, if we are lucky, we come to realize that we can make at least some part of our lives much bigger than ourselves. Two weeks ago, while in Phoenix, being inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), one of the highest honors in the profession of urban planning, it became very apparent to me that I was not accepting this honor just for myself. I was also doing it for hundreds of other planners, if not thousands, who have incorporated disaster recovery and hazard mitigation priorities into their careers as essential parts of the ethical duty of planners to help promote public safety. Collectively, our work saves lives, reduces property damage, and reduces many of the negative impacts of human activities on the planetary environment.

Before I go farther in discussing those impacts, let me provide some context for the majority of readers who are not professional planners. AICP is a designation currently held by at least 15,000 professionals who have taken a certification exam, eligibility for which is based on a combination of education and experience. Most common these days as a starting point is a Master’s degree in urban planning, but there are other entry points, and there are undergraduate degrees in planning as well. AICP members, who are also members of the American Planning Association (APA), which has about 38,000 members, must maintain their status through a minimum of 32 hours of continuing education every two years, including 1.5 hours each of legal and ethical training. Only after a minimum of 15 years in AICP are planners eligible for consideration, through a rigorous review of their accomplishments and biography, for acceptance as fellows (FAICP). Only about 500 people have ever been inducted as fellows, including 61 in this year’s biennial ceremony, the largest group to date. I had the honor of being included in the class of 2016.

The very formal ceremony introduces each new fellow individually in alphabetical order while a member of the AICP review committee reads a 100-word summary of his or her achievements, during which the fellow receives a pin, a bemedaled ribbon, and certificate. Mine described my work as “pivotal” in incorporating natural hazards into the routine work of urban planners. That pivotal work is the point of my discussion that follows.

I did not start my work in urban planning with any focus on disasters, except perhaps the industrial variety. I did have an intense focus 30 years ago on environmental planning and wrote about issues like farmland preservation, Superfund, waste disposal, and other aspects of environmental protection. My first two books focused, in order, on the farm credit crisis of the 1980s and the environmental justice movement, the latter published by Sierra Club Books. I have joked in recent years, sometimes in public presentations, that even with that environmental focus in my academic training at the University of Iowa in urban and regional planning, I don’t recall ever hearing the words “flood,” “hazard,” or “disaster” once in all my classes. But I did hear about wetlands, air quality, water quality, and similar concerns. Frankly, in the early 1980s, natural hazards were simply not on the radar screen as a primary professional concern for any but a mere handful of planners. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) came into being only in 1979, and these issues were seen largely as the purview of emergency managers. There certainly was no significant subdiscipline within planning devoted to hazards.

It was 1992 when Bill Klein, then the research director for APA, asked me to take over project management for an upcoming cooperative agreement with FEMA to examine planning for post-disaster recovery. As a preliminary step to this work, he sent me on a trip to south Florida for the APA Florida Chapter conference in October 1992 in Miami following Hurricane Andrew. Two aspects of that trip made a lasting impression. First was the keynote delivered by Bob Sheets, then the director of the National Hurricane Center. At one point, he showed a slide on the huge screen at the front end of the ballroom. It was an aerial photo of damage on two sides of a highway, with one side showing only modest damage and the other massive damage with roofs torn off and homes destroyed. There was no differential in wind patterns, he said, that could explain such differences at such small distances. The only plausible explanation, he insisted, lay in differences in the quality of enforcement of building codes. Florida then had stricter building codes than the rest of the nation for wind resistance, but they only mattered if code enforcement was consistent. Here, it was clear to me, was a problem directly related to development regulations. The second involved a field trip aboard several buses for interested planners to south Dade County. At one point I saw that the roof of a shopping center had been peeled off by the winds. It nearly took my breath away. Then our buses got caught in a traffic jam at the end of the afternoon. The cause was a long line of trucks hauling storm debris to landfills. This was already two months after Andrew.

Under the agreement, we didn’t start work on the project until October 1, 1993. In the meantime, floods had swept the Upper Midwest, making parts or all of nine states presidential disaster declaration zones. I decided to jump the gun on our start date and visit Iowa while it still was under water. Local planning departments in Iowa City and Des Moines cooperated in showing me their cities and sharing what had happened. It turned out that I was undertaking this project, in which I engaged several veteran planners to help write case studies and other material, at the beginning of America’s first big decade of disasters. (The next was even bigger.) In 1994, the Northridge earthquake struck the Los Angeles area. In 1996, Hurricane Fran struck North Carolina, followed by Hurricane Floyd in 1999. In the meantime, not only had our report, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, been published in 1998, but so was another report of which I was the sole author: Planning and Zoning for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Floyd left much of eastern North Carolina, liberally sprinkled with poultry and hog feedlots as a result of regulatory exemptions, devastated, with hundreds of thousands of animal carcasses floating downstream. Eventually, they were burned in mobile incinerators introduced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Suddenly, it became apparent to me that the environmental concerns aroused by such operations and the impacts of natural disasters were thoroughly intermingled. Bad public policy was exacerbating the impact of disasters like hurricanes and floods.

At this point, I need to make clear how low the level of engagement was back then between professional planners and disaster issues. In 1995, the APA National Planning Conference, which in recent years has typically attracted about 5,000 registrants, included two sessions related to disasters, at which the total attendance was 73 people. Disasters were anything but the topic du jour. Yet the events of that decade made clear, at least to me, that something had to change in that regard.

What I did not anticipate, based on past experience, was how quickly that would happen. For one thing, the Planning Advisory Service (PAS) Report grew on people and became a classic in the planning field. By 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, APA published a new edition, and FEMA made boxes of them readily available in the Gulf Coast, with planners like Stephen Villavaso, then the president of APA’s Louisiana chapter, voluntarily driving through stricken towns and passing out copies to local officials. In the meantime, I had worked on several other hazard-related projects addressing planning for landslides and wildfires and providing training on local hazard mitigation planning, among other efforts. After the APA conference in New Orleans in 2001, a group formed and continued to meet over dinner at every subsequent conference that billed itself as the “Disaster Planners Dinner,” an event that has become the subject of some legends among its veterans. The growing contingent of planners taking hazards seriously as a focus of their professional responsibilities was growing quickly and steadily.

Hurricane Katrina, more than any other event, added a powerful new element to the public discussion. It made crystal clear to the national news media that planning mattered in relation to disasters, and because of that perception, they called APA. Paul Farmer, then the CEO and executive director, and I shared those calls, and I logged no fewer than 40 major interviews in the two months following the event in late August 2005. I stressed that disasters involve the collision of the built environment with utterly natural events, and the resulting damage is not an “act of God” but the outcome of human decisions on what we build, where we build it, and how we build it. Planners have the responsibility to explain the consequences of those choices to communities and their elected officials during the development process, and those choices sometimes have huge social justice impacts. Katrina cost more than 1,800 lives on the Gulf Coast, most of them involving the poor and the physically disadvantaged. Better planning thus became a moral imperative. Making that perception stick produced a sea change in public understanding of the high stakes involved.

That afforded me considerable leverage to win funding for new projects with FEMA and other entities, most notably including the 2010 publication of Hazard Mitigation: Integrating Best Practices into Planning, a PAS Report that argued strongly for making hazard mitigation an essential element of all aspects of local planning practice, from visioning to comprehensive planning to policy implementation tools like zoning and subdivision regulations. Now the focus of a growing amount of federal and state guidance in this arena, that report was followed in 2014 with a massive update and revision of the post-disaster report, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation, which dissected the whole process of long-term community recovery from disasters and argued fervently for pre-disaster planning to set the stage for effective recovery and resilience after an event. Those efforts came under the umbrella of the Hazards Planning Center (HPC), created by APA in 2008 along with two other centers as part of the National Centers for Planning. I have been the manager since HPC’s inception, and I was happy. We had succeeded in institutionalizing within the profession what had once been treated as a marginal concern of planners.

Along the way, that dinner group grew, attracting dozens of attendees by the end of the decade, and becoming large enough and attracting enough petition signatures to become APA’s newest membership division in 2015, the Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. They now meet as such during the APA conferences. They are no longer an informal group. They are official and at last count had at least 250 paid members. But the interest is far larger. Remember those numbers from the 1995 APA conference? In Seattle at the 2015 APA conference, almost 3,000 people attended 23 different sessions related to climate change and natural hazards. I was the opening speaker for the very first session in the climate track, and the room was full. There was an overflow crowd in the hall outside. Hazards and climate change adaptation had arrived as a primary concern of planners. A growing number of graduate schools of planning, including the University of Iowa, where I have been adjunct faculty since 2008, now include curricula on such topics.

This bar graph and the one below were developed last year for a presentation I did in July 2015 at the opening plenary of the 40th annual Natural Hazards Workshop, in Broomfield, Colorado.

I want to state that, although I often had only one intern working with me at APA, I have never been a one-man show. On most of those projects, I involved colleagues outside the APA staff as expert contributors and invited many more to symposia to help define issues. Those APA sessions attract numerous speakers with all sorts of valuable experience and expertise to share. This is a movement, and I have simply been lucky to have the opportunity to drive the train within the APA framework as the head of the Center.

The night after the FAICP induction, at their division reception, members of the new APA division jokingly award me an “F” to go with my AICP. Alongside me is Barry Hokanson, HMDR chairman.

So let me take this story back to that moment two weeks ago when I walked on stage and accepted induction into FAICP. Before, during, and after that event, I received congratulations from many colleagues intensely interested in hazards planning, and I realized I was not simply accepting this honor for myself. My achievement was theirs too, and was literally impossible without them.

“You’ve gone from fringe to mainstream,” my colleague Jason Jordan told me the opening night of the Phoenix conference. He ought to know. Jason is the experienced governmental affairs director for APA and has a keen sense of the trends in planning and of government policy toward planning. But in order for his statement to be true, one important thing had to happen: Lots of other planners had to climb aboard that train for the journey. My success in winning this honor was symbolic for them, in that it served to validate the value of their commitment. I did not get there alone. A growing army of planners who care about public safety and community resilience helped make it happen, and I shall always be grateful—for them as well as for myself.

Jim Schwab

Home of the Brave

Book Reviews and Discussion with Jim Schwab

Category Archives: Wildfire

Climate News from Florida and California

Sobering Portrait of a Fiery Future

Housing the Needy after Disaster

Fatal Attraction

Taking Stock of Recent Disasters

Why the Nation Should Invest in Mitigation

Climbing the Mountain amid a Landslide

Think Globally, Adapt Locally

Regional Green Infrastructure

Symbolic Journey