“The result is the city has a win-win, no-regrets strategy that will prepare them for their future flood risk no matter what the cause.” |
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| Wendy Carey, Delaware Sea Grant |
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Integrating hazard mitigation planning with its focus on past events with climate change adaptation and its attention to what might happen in the future has been a topic of discussion for many coastal resource managers. A recently completed pilot project in the City of Lewes, Delaware, resulted in the first-ever community action plan that successfully combines the two planning processes.
“We knew the integration needed to happen, but nobody had done it,” says Missy Stults, former climate director for ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability USA. “What this project showed us is that it’s feasible and really wasn’t that challenging to do. But it was a practical and tangible thing that needed to be demonstrated.”
ICLEI and Delaware Sea Grant worked in collaboration with city officials and staff members, citizens, and state, regional, and federal representatives to create the City of Lewes Hazard Mitigation and Climate Adaptation Action Plan. The plan was unanimously adopted by the Lewes City Council on August 15.
“The result is the city has a win-win, no-regrets strategy that will prepare them for their future flood risk no matter what the cause,” says Wendy Carey, coastal processes and coastal hazards specialist with Delaware Sea Grant College Program’s Marine Advisory Service.
Vulnerability
The City of Lewes is a small but thriving bayfront community that features walkable commercial and historic districts bordered by tidal wetlands, tidal creeks and tributaries, sandy beaches, and agricultural lands. It is also transected by a man-made waterway. Being close to so much water makes the city highly vulnerable to many natural hazards, including coastal storms, flooding, and high winds.
In the past, the city has been severely impacted by a number of major coastal storms. The most damaging of these storms was the March 1962 Ash Wednesday storm that produced a record high tide of 9.5 feet. More recently, storms in 2008 and 2009 also caused extensive flooding of low-lying coastal areas, including roads serving as evacuation routes.
Because of its vulnerability, the city was an early adopter of the National Flood Insurance Program and was the first city in Delaware—and one of only 200 cities nationwide—selected to participate in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Project Impact initiative. The city has established an ongoing hazard mitigation program that is managed by the Lewes Mitigation Planning Team.
Making the Climate Connection
After receiving funding as part of NOAA’s National Sea Grant climate change adaptation initiative and the University of Delaware’s Sustainable Coastal Communities initiative, Delaware Sea Grant partnered with ICLEI to facilitate a highly participatory process that would enable Lewes officials and staff members to come up with their own plan.
“From the beginning, it was our intent to integrate hazard mitigation planning with climate change adaptation, but we didn’t know if it would work,” says Stults, who is now a sustainability analyst with Summit Energy in Louisville, Kentucky.
Hazard mitigation planning is a common planning procedure undertaken by thousands of communities across the country. The process is structured so that communities plan for future hazards based on historic hazard information and impacts.
“Climate change adaptation,” explains Daniella Hirschfeld, an ICLEI program officer for climate adaptation, “is a long-term view of the future impacts of climate change to a community and focuses on understanding not only the expected impacts, but a community’s ability to address them.”
Stults notes, “Hazard mitigation is very important and there’s a lot of value in looking at past events, but we know with climate change that we can’t use the past to project what the future will be like. For example, the flood that a community used to experience every 100 years may now be the 20-year flood.”
Integrating Processes
Beginning in July 2010, Delaware Sea Grant, ICLEI, and the city began working together to create an integrated planning approach that pulled from two different processes—ICLEI’s Climate Resilient Communities planning framework and FEMA’s natural hazard mitigation planning framework. “How we did that was to have FEMA at the table,” Stults says.
Sea Grant and ICLEI pulled together regional climate and hazard information, organized and facilitated four public workshops aimed at getting input at each phase of the project, and drafted all the project documents. The city ensured the participation of its elected officials and staff, and informed relevant stakeholders of events, including citizens and regional and state partners.
The biggest challenge, Hirschfeld says, was incorporating the different terminology used in hazard mitigation and climate adaptation. “It isn’t prohibitive, but you have to clearly define which terms you are using.”
Step Forward
“This wasn’t a silver bullet,” Stults says, “but it was a huge step forward in preparing communities for climate change.”
Lewes Mayor Jim Ford says he is “very happy” with the process and report. “In Lewes, we try to be progressive in our thinking and conservative in our actions. But where planning for hazards is concerned, I don’t think we need to be too concerned about moving cautiously. We need to be ready and prepared prior to the bell ringing. I don’t want to be out there figuring this out as we’re going along.”
Stults adds, “Every community faces hazards. Approaching climate change planning this way is a conversation starter. No mayor is going to be upset with protecting their town’s citizens and economic vitality from hazards.”
To view the City of Lewes Hazard Mitigation and Climate Adaptation Action Plan, go to www.icleiusa.org/lewesmeeting/. You may also contact Daniella Hirschfeld at (617) 960-3420, ext. 215, or daniella.hirschfeld@iclei.org, or Wendy Carey at (302) 645-4258 or wcarey@udel.edu.
Results
Six actions were recommended that Lewes could implement to integrate its hazard mitigation and climate adaptation efforts. These actions fall within three primary categories:
- Knowledge building, which includes gaining a better understanding of evacuation route vulnerability and continuing with updated education and outreach programs;
- Incentives, specifically, improvement of the city’s participation in the Community Rating System to reduce citizens’ flood insurance premiums; and
- Planning and regulatory recommendations.
The recommended actions had significant overlap with the Lewes Mitigation Planning Team’s current priorities. An implementation plan will help the city apply the recommendations.
