Integrating climate change into hazard mitigation planning: Opportunities and examples in practice

Over the last several decades, natural disasters in the United States have become more numerous and costly. Climate change threatens to further exacerbate this trend by increasing both the severity and duration of many natural hazards, ultimately leading to even greater costs in both human life and monetary resources. To prepare for these changes, a handful of local communities have integrated climate change into their Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) approved hazard mitigation plans. This paper analyzes 30 U.S. local hazard mitigation plans against a conceptual framework for how climate change could be integrated into the requirements specified in the FEMA Plan Review Crosswalk, a checklist used by FEMA to evaluate and approve local hazard mitigation plans. Results show that the majority (23/35) of communities are openly discussing how climate change could affect or already is affecting the occurrence of natural hazards. Additionally, over half also include hazard mitigation actions that are designed to be viable in a climate-altered future. These actions, however, represent only a small portion of the total actions proposed in the plans and are generally focused on researching, planning, and capacity building. In addition, few communities include a formal commitment to adapting to climate change or include clear mechanisms for integrating new climate information as it become available into plan revisions. In general, results from this analysis show that there is little consistency in how communities are integrating climate change into hazard planning. These findings point to both the nascence of this practice and the opportunity to develop more formalized guidance that can steer communities towards holistic integration of climate change into hazards planning.