Climate Change in the U.S. 50 States’ Hazard Mitigation Plan

Title: Evaluating Climate Change in the U.S. 50 States’ Hazard Mitigation Plans and various local planning mechanisms of 18 cities selected from Great Plain and Midwest

Abstract: Climate change accelerates and aggravates the magnitude and frequency of natural hazards and climatic extreme events, which threaten the resiliency of critical infrastructure and emergency assets. As planning ahead of disasters has been widely recognized as a necessary step to reduce community vulnerabilities and increase resilience in the disaster management cycle, adapting climate change in multi-level governmental planning mechanisms become the most straightforward and overarching pathway to accomplish the desired mitigation goals. The climate change adaptation is neither a one-size-fits-all process nor a one-person job. State level governments play a pivotal role to climate change adaptation related efforts, as state governments have the legislative rights to establish and initiate policies and regulations that encourage and guide climate change adaptation at lower governance scales which is a top-down adaptation pattern. However, as the impacts climate change are experienced locally depending on its geographic, societal and ecological features, practical actions can take place in any spatial scale but finally be adopted, prioritized, implemented by local jurisdictions and yield tangible benefits in local level (Measham et al., 2011), which is a bottom-up adaptation pattern. Effective adaptation at the local level is hard to be accomplished without explicit and straightforward political signals to initiate adaptation initiatives in national level (Urwin and Jordan, 2008, Van Aalst et al., 2008; Helene et al., 2010). Therefore, the relation between top-down and bottom-up is complement instead independent. In order to assist scholars to better understand how climate change was adopted in various scales of the governmental system, two studies focusing on the climate change adaptation in the different level planning processes were conducted below. The first study concentrates climate change adaptation at the state level, while the second concentrates at the local level.

Research One: Evaluating Climate Change in the U.S. 50 States’ Hazard Mitigation Plans

Introduction

Climate change brings uncertain challenges for natural ecosystem, built environment and human health, and thus may cause significant human and economic losses. The magnitude and frequency of natural hazards, like intense storms, heavy precipitation, heat waves, severe droughts, and extreme flooding, can be further accelerated by changing climate. The resiliency of critical infrastructure and emergency assets will be threatened by changing climate. Planning ahead of disasters has been widely recognized as a necessary step to reduce community vulnerabilities and increase resilience in the disaster management cycle: mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery. Hazard mitigation planning serves as a process to identify and analyze potential hazards, then put proper actions into places to reduce or even eliminate long-term disaster risks (FEMA, 2015). Therefore, incorporating climate change threats into hazard mitigation planning avenues is a feasible option for hazard managers to appropriately address the risks.

The Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 (42 U.S.C. §5165) requires that all states must have an approved statewide hazard mitigation plan to be eligible to receive some federal disaster mitigation funds. The Act was a milestone to handle increasing hazard losses in the United States, enhance the efficiency to arrange hazard mitigation funding, and strengthen states’ ability to reduce natural hazard damages (Godschalk et al., 2009; Berke et al., 2012;). The hazard management agencies have recently paid more attentions to climate change and its impacts. In 2011, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) issued a climate change adaptation policy statement to promote the incorporation of climate change adaptations and all agency activities for long-term climate risk reduction (FEMA, 2012). The policy statement is a critical step to urge climate change adaptation planning and prioritize corresponding mitigation strategies.

State Hazard Mitigation Plans (SHMPs) provide an engagement platform to foster intergovernmental coordination (Burby and May 1997), encourage public participation in hazard reduction, and build broader resiliency capacity. State-level mandates and policies are crucial for climate change mitigation and adaptation often through bridging the federal and local governments. Berke et al. (2012) evaluated the 30 coastal SHMPs and found that they have a medium level of support for the general mitigation principles. Fu et al. (2013) evaluated the drought mitigation plans and concluded that the majority of them focus more on the immediate emergency response, not the risk management. Tang et al. (2013) analyzed 24 U.S. coastal states’ climate action plans and decided that they have a medium planning capacity in managing the risks of extreme climate events and natural disasters. However, no research exists to examine the climate change considerations in the hazard mitigation plans. Particularly, no effort is conducted to evaluate the current working status of the SHMPs after the FEMA’s climate change adaptation policy statement since 2011. Evaluating the quality of SHMPs can provide a strong foundation for proactive climate mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce loss and build resiliency.

To make up the current research gap, the researchers in this study concern two questions.

1. How well do the 50 SHMPs be aware, analyze and manage the potential risks of climate-related hazards?
2. What are the relative strengths or weaknesses between different states’ hazard mitigation plans?

Framework

The awareness component measures the degree to which states understand climate change concepts and relevance to climate-related hazards. Climate change recognition is a fundamental step to be aware of the linkage between climate change and natural hazards. The uncertainty and scenarios of climate change is an important aspect of climate change adaptation planning. Reference to the national or international climate assessment reports or evidence to document the possible impacts on the planning area is a rational step to justify the climate change impacts. Incorporating hazard mitigation team with climate change leadership teams at the state level is a measurement of the awareness level of climate change.

The assessment component measures the impacts of climate change induced hazards, vulnerability, risks and costs of disasters from uncertain climate change. Analysis of historical events and climatic hazards provide fundamental information to evaluate climate change risks. The impacts of climate change include environment, social, and economic perspectives. The most vulnerable populations and the most vulnerable communities/infrastructures are the major concerns for climate mitigation and adaptation (Bierbaum et al. 2013).

The action component evaluates the strategies for building adaptive capacity to reduce climate risks (Adger et al. 2005). Once climate-related risks and vulnerabilities are recognized, the next stage typically involves taking actions for response to existing and future changes in climate (Bierbaum et al. 2013). The adaptation strategies include the adoption of resilience standards in the siting and design of buildings, smart growth and development practices, green and natural infrastructure, clean energy program, restoration and conservation of ecosystems, promotion of integrated watershed-based water resources management, building a stronger culture of partnership/collaboration (Doria et al. 2009; Renn et al. 2011; Tang et al. 2013), strengthening the National Flood Insurance Program, providing climate-related data, tool, and guidance for policy makers (Kareiva 2008), and improving climate literacy and public awareness.

Methods

Study Samples and data sources

The samples in this study are comprised of the hazard mitigation plans of all 50 states in the United States. An internet-based search was performed to collect those SHMPs from the state-level emergency management agency websites. Every subject is assumed to be the latest version available on the internet. Finally, 46 out of 50 states’ hazard mitigation plans were collected through the internet except for Montana, Tennessee, Iowa and Delaware which are either unavailable online or having outdated versions online. Those four states’ plans were eventually obtained by e-mail applications or written applications. The details of those subjects are exhibited in Table 1. Their dates are ranged from 2010 to 2015. Only 1 of them, Oregon, was issued in 2015; 41 of them were published from 2013 to 2014; 8 of them were published from 2010 to 2011. All of those plans represent the latest versions in those states.

[Insert Table 1: List of the state hazard mitigation plans]

Coding Protocol

A three-point coding protocol was exploited to evaluate the quality of those plans in this study. This coding protocol is on the basis of several indicators which represent several specific parts of the content in those state hazard mitigation plans. 18 indicators were chosen to achieve the evaluation purpose. All of those indicators and the coding criteria for each indicator are listed in an index which is illustrated in Appendix A.

Three categories were developed based on the 18 indicators to match the FEMA’s guidelines (FEMA, 2012) that aid states to develop hazard mitigation plans. Table 2 displays how those categories relate to the FEMA guidelines.

[Insert Table 2: Relation between plan quality categories and FEMA guidelines]

Coding for Indicators

Generally, each indicator is scaled with an ordinal scale, in other words, 0-2 scale.The point “0” indicates that the indicator is not identified or mentioned totally in a particular plan; the point “1” indicates that the indicator is minimally mentioned without specific details; the point “2” indicates that the indicator is thoroughly discussed with detailed descriptions. As for indicators related to visualized features, such as maps and tables, “0” indicates that the indicator is not visualized in any format; “1” indicates that the indicator is visualized with table-related features; “2” indicates that the indicator is visualized with map-related features. As for indicators relating to a state’s awareness and willing to put some acknowledged beneficial policies and strategies into hazard mitigations, “0” indicates that the indicator can’t be identified; “1” indicates that the indicator is described with an uncertain tone, such as “should”, “may”, “need”, “would”; “2” indicates that the indicator is described with a certain tone, such as “must”, “shall”, “has been implemented”.

Plan quality measurement

A statistical analysis is applied and further developed in this study to explain the results. Within a specific plan, first, the study sums all indicators’ scores together in each category individually; secondly, divides the sum of each category by the theoretically the full point of their corresponding categories, respectively; finally, multiplies them by 100 to make them fit a 0-100 scale. By doing this, every category is scaled into a 0-100 scale so that the study can compare the performance between different categories directly.By summing all of the three categories’ quality scores, the study divides their sum by the theoretically full point of all categories; finally, multiplies the results by 100 to make them fit a 0-100 scale.

Indicator quality measurement

A methodological measurement developed by Tang et al. (2010) is applied in this study to judge every indicator’s performance: indicator breadth and indicator depth. The “breadth” indicates how extensive an indicator is expressed across all plans. It is calculated by using the number of how many state hazard mitigation plans address a specific indicator and then dividing the result by the theoretically full number of the subjects (N=50). In this case, an indicator is qualified to be taken into account with either “1” point, or “2” point. The “depth” indicates how profound an indicator is expressed across all plans. It is calculated by using the average of an indicator’s point across all states and then dividing the result by an indicator’s theoretically full score (Full Score=2). The “breadth index” represents an indicator’s coverage in the plans. The “depth index” represents the important degree of an indicator in the plans. With the involvement of “breadth” and “depth”, the study is able to compare the advantages and disadvantages among distinctive indicators and explore more profound messages from the existing variations across different indicators.

Coding Procedures and Statistical reliability

In this research, every state’s hazard mitigation plan was evaluated by a coding team consisting of two research assistants at the same time independently. In order to guarantee the reliability of the coding results, a uniform coding criteria index was developed to regulate every individual’s coding procedure into a same standard consistently. The details for the coding criteria index are listed in the Appendix A. Then an intercoder reliability test was employed to examine the acceptability of the final coding result. The intercoder reliability represents the percentage of the indicators which received same coding points from both coders. Finally, reconciliations against indicators’ coding points will be engaged in when there are coding disaccords. After three round of intercoder assessment, the interceder reliability was achieved above the acceptable level of 70-97% (Berke and Godschalk, 2009). This process eliminates the potential coding dynamics between different plan coders.

Research Two: Adaptation planning for extreme events at the local level in the context of climate change: a study of 18 selected cities in Midwest and Great Plain of United States

Introduction

Climate change has already affected the American people in far-reaching ways. The term of extreme events is defined as “the occurrence of a value of a weather or climate variable above (or below) a threshold value near the upper (or lower) ends of the range of observed values of the variable” (IPCC, 2012). Generally, both extreme weather events and extreme climate events are referred to as ‘climate extremes (IPCC, 2012). A gradually changing and warming climate can lead to fluctuation and uncertainty in the frequency, magnitude, spatial scale, time duration of extreme weather and climate events, which will result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events, including prolonged periods of heat, heavy precipitations, floods and droughts (IPCC, 2012; NAC, 2015). Even through some extreme weather and climate events are not extreme at a statistical level, disaster will be lead when communities are exposed to those events and when exposure to potentially damaging extreme events is accompanied by a high level of vulnerability (Mileti, 1999; Wisner et al., 2004; IPCC, 2012). Climate change adaptation planning represents systematic attention to extreme weather events and extreme climate events (Woodruff et al., 2016), and research shows that intelligent adaptations should be taken now, although it is full of uncertainty about future climatic conditions (NAC, 2015).

Increasing lines of independent evidence demonstrate that adaptation is supposed and more appropriately to be applied at local(Naess et al., 2005; Smith et al., 2009; Laukkonen et al., 2009; Tang et al., 2010; Isabelle et al., 2011; Measham et al., 2011; Helene et al., 2010; Picketts et al., 2014), although multi-level of government attention, cooperation and engagement are believed to be the linchpin for valid and efficient adaptations (Laukkonen et al., 2009; Barsugli et al., 2012; Romsdahl et al., 2013; IPCC, 2014). First, the impacts of climate change are defined as a place-based, as its influences are experienced locally depending on its physical, geographic, societal and ecological features (Adger et al., 1999; Cutter et al., 2000; Turner et al., 2003; Measham et al. 2011). Therefore, no one-size-fits-all adaptation solution is not realistic and feasible, as solutions will differ based on the unique local context, circumstance, and scale as well as on culture and internal capacity (NCA, 2015). Secondly, adaptation are place-based strategies, actions that can take place in any spatial scale (Walker et al., 2002; Turner et al., 2003; Measham et al., 2011) but finally be adopted, prioritized, implemented by local jurisdictions and yield tangible benefits in local level (Picketts et al., 2014). Therefore, climate change adaptation should be unfolded in municipalities depending on their varying sizes and diverse geographical locations.

Despite the potential benefit of local adaptations, existing climate change adaptation planning policy and initiatives mainly focus on national scale and concentrate on large urban areas (Agrawal, 2008; Tompkins, 2005; Measham et al., 2011), and adaptations toward to climate change are barely altered to specific actions (Hunt and Watkiss, 2011; Rosenzweig et al., 2011; Picketts et al., 2014). This kind of top-down dominated adaptation result from the traditional and prevailing opinion classifying climate change as a global issue instead local (Van Aalst et al., 2008; Helene et al., 2010), which limits the adaptive ability in local level (Urwin and Jordan, 2008). The defects of the top-down adaptation strategies drive people to search adaptation methods at the local level, which is a bottom-up adaptation pattern.

Though numerous climate change resources and adaptation tools are available, and plenty of studies have already taken to explore climate change adaptation in the local level planning process, unfortunately, inadequate efforts has been fulfilled to analyze, project and interpret the past, present, and future climate condition of each municipality in a manner that involves climate-related experts and organizations. The disconnection existing in the planning mechanism largely jeopardize and weaken the ability of a local municipality to properly interpret and adequately take advantage of climate data to make effective, comprehensive and proactive plans for resource management, pre- and post-disaster emergency responses. Meanwhile, studies about how different local planning mechanisms cooperate with and integrate into each other to consider climate change adaptation are barely taken. More detailed analysis and insight about climate change adaptation in various local planning mechanisms are needed.

To fill this void, researchers in this study establishes 32 indicators to examine and evaluate local climate change adaptation in the three lynchpins of hazard mitigation: hazard mitigation plan, comprehensive plan, local emergency operations plan. Preliminary research showed that climate change ignited unique issues to Midwest and Great Plain ranging from heat and cold waves, and heavy precipitation event and flooding, all of which exert server pressure to local human health, energy needs and water management, especially, local agriculture system. This study selects 18 cities from four states in the Midwest and Great Plain, they are, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri, to address three questions:

1) How well do the 18 selected cities consider climate change adaptation in local hazard mitigation plan, local comprehensive plan, and local emergency operations plan

2) What are the relative strengths or weaknesses between different planning mechanisms to climate change adaptation?

3) Is there an established cooperative mechanism previously existing among those various local planning process to adapt and prioritize climate change strategies?

The Role of Hazard Mitigation Plan

Hazard Mitigation Plan outlines a jurisdiction’s long-term efforts and strategies for mitigating the hazards it faces, and hazard mitigation planning is believed as one of the most significant and efficient ways to incorporate climate change adaptations. Hazard Mitigation planning process is a mechanism used by multiple levels of governments to engage stakeholders, identify hazard vulnerabilities, develop long-term strategy to reduce risk at pre-disaster, utilize a broad range of resources to construct long-term firm post-disaster resilience at different administrative levels (FEMA, 2012; Berke et al., 2012; Babcock, 2013). By integrating climate change into hazard mitigation plan, it demonstrates the commitment of the community to reduce risks from climate change-related hazards and serves as a guide for decision makers for reducing the effects of climate change as resources are committed. Existing plans for mitigating hazards are relevant to an emergency operation plan since both of them share similar hazard-based analysis and component requirements.

The Role of Comprehensive Plan

The land use planning in comprehensive planning is the central toolkit to drive the strategy-implementing process. Integrating natural hazard mitigation consideration into the comprehensive planning process is a formal and effective mechanism to promote, improve and implement hazard mitigation strategy. Natural hazard mitigation plan is a stand-alone planning mechanism that does not have legal status to direct and engage local land use or capital construction expenditures, so it is always situated in a legal dilemma to implement the hazard mitigation strategy. Meanwhile, climate-related natural hazards often have boundaries which can be digitized on maps geographically with different rank and possibility, so the involvement of land use controls and incentives are usually functioning as an ideal pathway and platform to drive and finalize the implementation of hazard mitigation strategy. It is understandable that local political leaders are unwilling to take steps to initiate climate change adaptation, as some of those strategies are unfriendly to built urban environment economic development. However, proactively minimizing risk by addressing natural hazards during initial land use decision making and development is much easier and more cost effective than to withstand potential risks by retrofitting, modifying, or improving existing development. Therefore, by combining the climate change adaptation into this planning process, a local jurisdiction is capable of enhancing its opportunity and ability to establish and implement strategies for reducing risks from climate extreme weather and climate events.

The Role of Local Emergency Operations Plan

The emergency operation plan is often the centerpiece of emergency planning. It is a plan that addresses post-disaster response and recovery functions, functions that concentrate on early warning, public notification, evacuation and actions that must be taken during the initial phase of response operations. It facilitates prevention, protection, response, and short-term recovery, which sets the foundation and stage for effective long-term resilience and recovery. The hazard mitigation plans are relevant to an emergency operation plan since both of those two plan mechanisms are initiated from similar hazard-based analysis and share analogous content requirements. Also, since emergency operations plan and hazard mitigation plan respectively functioning as a short-term and a long-term hazard mitigation efforts and strategies, they can work as an entire circle to establish, refine, and deploy strategies and approaches that enhance flexibility and robustness of climate change responses for both pre- and post-disaster periods. By integrating climate change adaptation into this planning process, it will direct local emergency department how to execute its mission by organizing and utilizing limited existing resources to fulfill unmet demands and what the local jurisdictions need to do when performing operations for climate change-related emergency.

Framework

A good planning evaluation is defined as a process to bridge plan content analysis statistic to what components that a better plan is supposed to include, a theoretical argument to explore specific weaknesses and strengths by comparing those plan content analysis statistic (Sierra C, 2016; Ward Lyles, 2014). A good plan content analysis is defined as a thorough and systematic methodology to document plan content, a process to produce reliable and dependable statistic about the plan content by examining and measuring plans with well-established criteria (Sierra C, 2016; Ward Lyles, 2014). Originated 1990s, plan quality evaluation has been employed in at least forty-five planning research which gets involved in a wide variety of planning domains, including hazard mitigation, climate change, sustainable development, environmental protection, affordable housing (Berke, 2009; Ward Lyles, 2014; Sierra C, 2016). Behind the popularity of the plan evaluation, it is the planners’ and legislators’ desire to better inform planning practices and develop high-quality plans (Berke et al., 2002; Wheeler, 2008; Berke and Godschalk, 2009; Kang et al., 2010).

In this study, a widely applied coding protocol of planning content analysis, created by Kaiser, Godschalk and Chapin (1995), and strengthened by Brody (2003), is employed to help the researchers to evaluate how those three different kinds of plans consider climate change. Five components divided into two planning quality dimensions (Berke, 2012) are included in this coding protocol. The two planning quality dimensions are internal plan quality dimension and external plan quality dimension. The internal plan quality dimension demonstrates the core and critical components of a plan which include 4 components: fact base, goals and objectives, policies, implementation; the external plan quality dimension demonstrates how well the plan optimize its function fullness in consistent with its local situation and it include only 1 component: coordination and communication (Berke, 2012). These internal principles are frequently referred to as direction-setting principles because, while every plan should include these principles, they will look different across planning domains. In contrast, the external principles – public participation, coordination, do not differ significantly between planning domains. Since every plan should provide a description of how the public, organizations and government agencies were engaged and how the plan will be implemented and monitored in the future.

Fact base specifies and prioritizes key climate-related extreme issues and corresponding mitigation needs that are existing in communities, aiming to assist the projection for future conditions by providing the evidence-based foundation in which mitigation policies and planning goals are rooted (Tang, 2013; Berke, 2014; Sierra C, 2016;). Goals and objectives are defined as a statement that establishes an overarching vision of the desired future condition which communities aspire with the adaptation of climatic extreme issues and the implementation of the plan. Policies, tools and strategies provide theoretical and ideal policy foundation to direct decision making and to accomplish plan goals. Coordination and Communication are defined as a process that mobilizes and optimize available resources, key stakeholders, different dimensions of institutions and organizations to adaptively reduce hazard vulnerability to climatic extreme events through fitting various post-disaster needs and seizing chances that available but elapsing quickly. Implementation functions as a process to measure local jurisdictions’ adaptive ability to translate established climate-related policies, tools and strategies into practical actions.

Research Methods

Study Sample and Data Resources

The sampling unit in this study is local hazard mitigation plan, local comprehensive plan, and local emergency operations plan. The sample is 18 selected municipalities with an at least 5000 people across the states of Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Those municipalities are diverse in size, population, geographic location, and development rate. However, they have the common potential that they may be receptive to integrate climate change data, information, and models into their local plan mechanisms. A web-based search was conducted to collect the target plans from the official websites of the local emergency management sectors and planning sectors. A corresponding county plan will be used as an alternative when a municipality’s plans are not available. Finally, 16 local comprehensive plans were collected which includes 15 city plans and one county plan; 16 local hazard mitigation plans were collected which includes 15 multi-jurisdiction plan and one city plan; 12 local emergency operations plan were collected which includes nine county plans and three city plans. Every collected plan indicates the latest and available version in the local jurisdiction. Table 1 displays the details of selected subjects.

[Insert Table 1: List of the target local plans]

Coding Protocol and Data Processing

A two-point binary scale coding protocol was established to measure each item included in the criteria. By this coding instrument, every item was standardized on a 0-1 scale, where 0 denoted that the information described in the item is not present in the plan and 1 denoted that the presence of the related information. Climate adaptation is an established domain that has emerged for decades, and it has been included in every hazard mitigation plans at the state level. However, the political debates around its necessity never stop, and its adaptation in local level is still a preliminary, immature and ongoing process (Fu et al., 2013). Therefore, a general but straightforward approach is considered as acceptable and reasonable in their initial phase. The equations in Table two illustrate how total score of each plan, the total score of each plan components, as well as breath and depth of each indicator within each plan components were calculated in this study.

[Insert Table 2: Equation for data processing]

Coding Procedures and Statistical reliability

The credibility of plan evaluation studies is always jeopardized by scholars’ queries due to its subjective process. To maximally reduce the subjectivity, a two teammates’ coding team are established, and each coder is required to review every plan with a well-established uniform coding standard separately. Finally, a reconciliation process between the two teammates will be employed to uniform the score against each indicator when a disagreement is identified. Cronbach’s alpha, a statistical model to test the reliability of the results of plan evaluation, and percentage agreement, a statistical methodology to test the agreement level against the score of each indicator between the two different coders before the reconciliation process. The results show that both of these fall within the acceptable range and level, based on previous studies.