{"id":1250,"date":"2019-01-28T17:55:06","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T23:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/staging\/1734\/?p=1250"},"modified":"2019-01-28T17:55:53","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T23:55:53","slug":"reducing-risk-from-natural-hazards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/reducing-risk-from-natural-hazards\/","title":{"rendered":"Reducing Risk from Natural Hazards"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Eroded hillsides have helped push New Zealand to adopt its own approach to risk reduction. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Late in 2017, I received an inquiry from Oxford University Press<\/a>. Professor\nAnn-Margaret Esnard<\/a> at the Urban\nStudies Institute<\/a> at Georgia State University<\/a>\nhad recommended me for an assignment they had in mind to add an article to\ntheir growing specialty encyclopedia on natural hazards, the Oxford\nResearch Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science<\/a>. <\/em>They needed someone to\nwrite a peer-reviewed article about \u201cPlanning\nSystems for Natural Hazard Risk Reduction<\/a>,\u201d using roughly 10,000 words plus\nappropriate graphics and illustrations. We discussed why they saw me as an\nappropriate candidate for the job, and I accepted the assignment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the following few months early last year, I spent many\nhours over several weeks fashioning the article. Although I started out with a\nclear vision of my subject matter, I also explored and sought more\ninternational material than I had ever previously examined. By the spring of\n2018, I submitted my draft. Over subsequent months, it underwent editing, peer\nreview, revision, and proofreading, and then final preparation for online publication.\nToday, I received the announcement. It is online and available to the public. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the question for most readers, even those already\nimmersed in the subject matter of natural hazards, is, \u201cWhat do you mean by planning systems\u201d<\/em>? Oxford did not\nventure a specific definition of what they had in mind; they left that to me. I\ndecided that the answer was \u201cessentially a layer of guidance or\nlegal requirements that sit atop plans of any type at any governmental level at\nor below the source of that guidance.\u201d In other words, the system describes\nwhat a plan should look like, or what is expected of a plan that complies with the\nframework that is established. A planning system is a statutory or programmatic\nframework for a specific type of plan, in this case, one that aims to reduce\nlosses from natural hazard events. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This had long been important to me. As far back as 2002, while I\nwas at the American Planning Association<\/a>\n(APA), I had arranged a contract between APA and the Institute for Business and Home Safety<\/a>\n(IBHS) under which APA researched and described state laws that related to planning\nfor natural hazards, updated annually until 2010, when IBHS decided to discontinue\nthe contract. An elaborate matrix detailed which states prescribed planning to\naddress hazards and what they required, suggested, or allowed, supplemented by explanations\nof specific items in a key code and by color-coded maps. In 2007, I convinced\nthe Federal Emergency Management Agency<\/a> (FEMA)\nto underwrite an APA project that examined how communities could better\nintegrate hazard mitigation priorities into local planning processes. The\nresult was a 2010 Planning\nAdvisory Service Report<\/a>, Hazard Mitigation:\nIntegrating Best Practices into Planning<\/a><\/em>. That has led to elaboration of\nFEMA guidance on this point, as well as playing a role in more recent guidance to\ncommunities from the State of Colorado on resilience, spurred by the September 2013\n\u201cmountain monsoon\u201d flooding that afflicted the state. The point is that I have\nbeen pursuing this subject for nearly 20 years. I understood why Oxford had\napproached me for this task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The encyclopedia article allowed me to expand the subject in new ways,\nand for those readers curious to explore the topic, I hope it proves useful. Just\nfollow the links in the first paragraph of this post to my article or the\nencyclopedia more generally, which provides a wealth of knowledge on the larger\nsubject of natural hazards. I hope it provides planners and others in the\nprofessional community engaged with natural hazard issues an analytical\nframework for thinking about how we can tackle these issues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that is not all. The concept behind the APA\/IBHS work has been\nrevived. Immediately after leaving APA, under a short-term consulting contract,\nI helped APA prepare a new grant proposal for FEMA\u2019s Cooperating Technical\nPartners<\/a> program to revive the state statutory summary in an updated and\nexpanded framework. Although that is not yet complete, PDF summaries of the\nstate-level planning framework for all 50 states are available. Click here<\/a>\nfor the landing page with an introduction to the overall project. Then stay\ntuned for the findings and overall summary of the project, which are yet to\ncome. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jim Schwab<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Late in 2017, I received an inquiry from Oxford University Press. Professor Ann-Margaret Esnard at the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University had recommended me for an assignment they had in mind to add an article to their growing specialty encyclopedia on natural hazards, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science. They needed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1251,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[179,81,14,376,178,609,358,222,50],"tags":[364,977,74,1247,324,1244,1246,1243,1245],"class_list":["post-1250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-2","category-disaster-2","category-disasters","category-floodplain-management","category-government","category-natural-hazards","category-public-policy","category-resilience-2","category-urban-planning","tag-apa","tag-disaster-mitigation-act","tag-fema","tag-ibhs","tag-natural-hazards","tag-oxford-research-encyclopeda","tag-oxford-university-press","tag-planning-system","tag-risk-reduction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1252,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250\/revisions\/1252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimschwab.com\/Hablarbooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}