From Policy to Action: Partnerships in Planning for Coastal Resilience

- [Jessica] Welcome to today's webinar, "Partnerships in Planning for Coastal Resilience". Thank you all for joining. This webinar is part of the "From Policy to Action" series hosted by FEMA's National Mitigation Planning Program. Today's webinar is focused on coastal resilience. Coastal areas across the country are highly vulnerable to natural disasters, which have become more frequent and severe. Through partnerships, communities can leverage new resources to help address their unique coastal hazard risks. As we get started, please remember to put your name, your location, and how coastal hazards impact your area in the chat. My name is Jessica Bodnar. I am a hazard mitigation planner supporting FEMA through its Community Engagement and Risk Communications contract, and I will be leading us through the webinar today. I am joined by our three presenters. Brianna Jordan is a 2023 Sea Grant Knauss Fellow and Hazard Mitigation Specialist with FEMA. Brianna will provide an overview of coastal hazards and risks across the country and discuss how FEMA's updated Mitigation Planning Policy supports the need to plan for coastal hazards. Joe Galarraga is a Coastal Resilience Project Manager with The Nature Conservancy. Joe will share his experience working with a diverse team of community partners to identify mitigation projects in the coastal community of Crisfield, Maryland. Kevin Zerbe is a State Mitigation Strategist with the Washington Emergency Management Division. Kevin will discuss how the state works across departments to support coastal communities in moving from planning to projects. But before we get started, let's go over a few quick webinar housekeeping items. All webinar attendees are currently on mute. This will help reduce any background noise. Please use the Q&A feature shown here on this slide to ask questions throughout the webinar. We will type answers to the questions that come in through the Q and A feature throughout the webinar, but we've also saved time at the end of our presentations to answer your questions live. Please be advised that you can choose to self-identify or not in that Q&A feature. Should we not get the chance to respond to your question, you should feel free to reach out to any of our presenters via email. We will provide their contact information at the end of the webinar. Please be advised that FEMA through its contractor will record this webinar. The recording will be posted on FEMA's website and by attending this webinar you consent to these conditions. Again, please note that you can choose whether or not to self-identify during the Q&A for this recording. Our first speaker today is Brianna Jordan. Brianna is a postgraduate Knauss Fellow with FEMA's National Hazard Mitigation Planning Program. Ms. Jordan holds a dual JD and master's in historic preservation from Roger Williams University. Her work focuses on the intersection of hazard preparedness, coastal policy and heritage preservation. Brianna, I am passing it off to you. - [Brianna] Thank you. Just to set the context, so coastal areas are dynamic and so are their risks. For context, the US has over 95,000 miles of shoreline, including the Great Lakes and island territories. Between 1970 and 2010, there was a 40% increase of population in coastal counties. Now, almost half of the US population lives on the coast. Population density in coastal counties, excluding Alaska, is more than five times the national average. That means more infrastructure and higher risks. Coastal communities are different from inland communities. They face unique risks like storm surge, land subsidence and coastal erosion. They're also vulnerable to other costly disasters like extreme heat, storms and flooding. So the question is not if disasters will happen, but when and how often. Next slide, please. So why plan for coastal resilience? Disasters impact all facets of community life. Those with resources bounce back the fastest and those with less access to resources are often slower to rebuild after a disaster. Along with reducing risks, mitigation can bring immediate benefits. These can include economic growth, community cohesion and social resilience, and health benefits. Resilience efforts change the quality of life before, during and after storms. Thus, investing in resilience is a chance to protect coastal communities. Next slide. This infographic comes from The Economic Case for Coastal Resilience. It shows some of the costliest coastal disasters of the past few years. Coastal disasters are expensive in terms of impact on human life and economic loss. In 2020, a winter storm on the Great Lakes caused major flooding to the Port of Milwaukee, freezing railroad tracks, disrupting community activities and resulting in a $10 million loss. In California in 2021, flood waters on areas previously affected by wildfires caused severe erosion. This erosion damaged roadways and other community assets resulting in a $1.2 billion loss. Coastal disasters like these are becoming more frequent and more severe due to climate change. Partnerships in planning for coastal resilience can help mitigate risks and help make communities more resilient. Next slide, please. Solving complex coastal problems requires meaningful collaboration by the whole community, and solutions need to consider both human and natural systems. Examples of potential partners are listed on the screen. This is not an exhaustive list, but it could help your community get thinking about who to include in the planning process. Partners like coastal state zone managers, watershed organizations, Sea Grant programs and other university extensions and regional climate groups. Inviting representatives of your community's blue economy, this could include tourism and recreation, shipping and transportation, commercial and recreational fishing, power generation and aquaculture. Next slide, please. Resilience to current and future coastal hazards is a major part of hazard mitigation planning for coastal regions. The state and local mitigation planning policies include several ways to incorporate coastal resilience. First, in the planning process, communities must bring the right people to the table. This could include local, state or federal climate experts or coastal scientists. The planning process should have equitable engagement as there may be high levels of inequality in who owns shoreline properties and who uses coastal resources. Second, in the risk assessment, the plan must discuss the impacts of future conditions like climate change, population patterns, as well as land use and development trends. These factors will heavily impact most, if not all, coastal hazards and communities. And third, in the mitigation strategy, state and local plans must address the risks identified in the risk assessment. In coastal communities, plans must include actions to reduce risk to identified coastal hazards like storm surge, coastal erosion and tsunamis. These actions should aim to achieve equitable outcomes that benefit underserved communities and vulnerable populations living in coastal communities. Local plans must look at a wide variety of actions, like nature-based solutions in addition to structural projects. Local plans must also describe how the community has integrated the strategy into other planning mechanisms. In coastal communities, this could include climate adaptation plans or coastal zone management plans among others. In 2024, FEMA will develop a new resource to guide integration with the Coastal Zone Management Act. Next slide, please. There are lots of tools coastal communities can use to assess and plan for hazard risks. Some of these are NOAA's Digital Coast, which includes data, tools and training for managing coastal resources like the Sea Level Rise Viewer and the Coastal Flood Exposure Mapper. Another resource is the US Climate Resilience Toolkit, which provides guidance, tools and resources for planners to help understand the impacts of climate change on their communities. The recently-released Fifth Climate Assessment by the US Global Change Research Program is a helpful resource for understanding climate impacts. And finally, FEMA flood risk data could be helpful, or local data from universities or other organizations can provide a more targeted look at your community. Thank you. - [Jessica] All right, thank you, Brianna. And please note that we will be following up with these slides and the list of resources after the webinar. So now we'll be hearing from our next presenter, Joe Galarraga. Joe is the Coastal Resilience Project Manager for the Maryland, D.C. chapter of The Nature Conservancy. His academic background is in environmental public health and health equity, having earned his MPH in health equity from the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Joe's approach to climate adaptation work is informed by a background in environmental justice and community-based participatory research. Using qualitative methods, Joe hopes to incorporate a breadth of community perspectives into climate adaptation decision making. Joe, I'm passing it off to you. - [Joe] Great, thanks so much and thanks, Brianna, for the presentation before. I think that this project links really well with what you were talking about. So good afternoon, everybody. I'm here to talk about how The Nature Conservancy has partnered with several different organizations, government entities and importantly, community members, to scope flood mitigation and adaptation projects in Crisfield, Maryland. This project has intersected with a number of different efforts in the area, including Somerset County, Maryland's Multi-Hazard Mitigation Plan update, FEMA BRIC's Direct Technical Assistance, and the EPA ORD suite of research interests in Crisfield, Maryland as well. So The Nature Conservancy came to this work initially through a grant-funded project that I'll be discussing in more detail today. But through relationship building, we've expanded our efforts to plan and continue working with the city beyond the life of this project. And as I mentioned, it ended up working on other projects and efforts as well, so gonna talk more about that here. Next slide, please. So, looking at our project goals and objectives, the goal of this project was to scope affordable, flood-resilient adaptation options that supported Crisfield's socioeconomic health. Specifically, we were looking at what strategies can best support Crisfield's community resilience goals now and in the future as well. So to do this, we ran an assessment on some locally selected adaptation strategies to evaluate their efficacy, cost, benefits over time and feasibility. We identified innovative funding and policy options for the strategies that get prioritized, as well as some of the strategies that we think would be better suited for future work for the city of Crisfield. Also, some recommended implementation plans to support Crisfield's development goals in the face of ongoing and future flooding. And then also, there's an adaptation decision-making framework that we are using to help to guide the planning and also sort of mirrored throughout this project. So I wanna start off to discuss how The Nature Conservancy as a nonprofit organization was uniquely positioned to conduct this type of hazard mitigation and adaptation planning through our ability to do a deep dive at the onset of this project to really understand the conditions on the ground in Crisfield from the mouths of the people who are most impacted. So our initial research methodology was conducted by our environmental anthropologist, Liz Van Dolah. And I think taking this approach allowed us to better understand the community's resilience goals and really frame the approach for the work going forward, making sure that what we were doing was grounded in these goals. So you can sort of see here what Liz did was identified individuals representing a wide range of the Crisfield community to really understand their perspectives on flooding and resilience and adaptation and what Crisfield as a place meant to them, and conducted a number of different interviews with these folks and then analyzed it using qualitative methods. You can see here in this blue box the types of community groups that Liz reached out to. So, next slide. So I would note that through this work, Liz was able to compile a Community Advisory Committee that we worked with throughout the life of the project. You can see these are the names of some of the folks that served on that committee and were involved in the research process here. In addition to working with this committee, our team worked really closely with the City of Crisfield local government in order to coordinate not only this effort but some of the other projects that were happening in parallel in Crisfield in terms of resilience work. Next slide, please. So as I noted, there is an Adaptation Decision Framework that was an output of this project that we developed so that the City of Crisfield can use this to better make adaptation decisions going forward. And we saw that this same framework was sort of how we conducted the project. So the first part of the project, we thought in order to, as I mentioned before, really ground the work that we were doing in the wants and needs of the community that we're aiming to serve here through the work, is to really do that initial understanding beyond sort of that deep dive that was done at the beginning, but really to frame it in the actual research that we're conducting. So we needed to get a few pieces of information from the Crisfield community in order to continue with the assessment that we were conducting. So you can see everything that's kind of circled here in red is, are sort of the questions that we asked through a number of workshops with our Community Advisory Committee that I mentioned before. So what are the resilience goals for Crisfield? What does Crisfield see itself needing to continue to be resilient and adaptive? What are the key assets that support these goals? What flood hazards are of most concern? And what types of strategies are they interested in testing as we do the assessment that included flood modeling, cost-benefit analysis, as I mentioned on my second slide. So, next slide please. So to answer two of these questions, the what are the community's flooding concerns and its resilience goals, we held two different workshops where we tried to answer those questions. We did some participatory mapping with the community members on our advisory committee, as you can see in the picture above. You can see one of the, those maps here and through these exercises and showing sort of flood levels on the landscape and talking about what was important for the community going forward, we were able to better understand what they saw as being their, what we're calling the Community Resilience Goals. And you can see them bulleted here. And once again, that sort of was the guiding framework for how we continued our work going forward. And so we really tried to center those goals in, when coming up with solutions. So what are solutions that can focus on resilient infrastructure, can support safe, affordable housing and economic development, et cetera? Those were what we used to really center what we were doing. And when it came to the types of flooding that they were concerned about, it wasn't really these larger storm events, but actually the nuisance tide flooding that happens on a regular basis and really makes the city hard to navigate and leads to school closures and things like that. So that's the type of hazard that they were concerned about protecting against. So, next slide. And you can see here that the, on this ruler that we have on the side here, the one and a half and two and a half feet of flooding really represents that the level of nuisance flooding that Crisfield experiences. You can see here on this map with the water depths, how that level of water affects the landscape. And I think it's important to note here that Crisfield experiences this level of flooding really frequently. So, one and a half feet of water, 88 times in 2021 and two and a half feet of water six different times in 2021. So you can see here that that's, you know, a little less probably than like around a third of the days of the year. So, next slide. Sort of see that that's where those water levels are there on that ruler. So, to answer another one of those questions, so what are the assets in the community that helps to support those Community Resilience Goals? And this once again was sort of thinking about, all right, so what strategies can we put on the ground to protect these types of assets and to allow the community to still pursue those goals? It was really looking at things that were central to the community here, so we prioritized a number of different assets through once again using participatory mapping exercises. Here you can see folks looking at maps, looking at the type of flooding that is gonna be affecting these listed assets that are really important for the community. So, next slide. And you can see here sort of like in terms of our process, this is what we looked at is one of these flood maps, and looking at which assets were gonna be flooded with a foot and a half to two and a half feet of water and how to best protect those. Next slide. And then another important part of the calculations about, well, what should we be prioritizing in terms of adaptation strategies was to look at the costs and benefits. So you can see here that at a foot and a half of water, there's $383,000 worth of damage that occurs for those types of events. And at two and a half feet of water, you have $2.7 million that occurs. And you can see the number of properties that are impacted by these levels of flooding too. So once again, showing that these levels of flooding, while maybe aren't thought of as catastrophic, really have a big impact on the community in terms of costs and benefits. So, next slide please. And so to continue on with our assessment and to come up with solutions, we used this gradient here to sort of discuss a number of different types of solutions that could be put on the ground to help with the nuisance flooding. The things that really were pursuant to the goals of the community that we were working with were not some of these nature-based solutions you see on the far side, the far right side of this gradient, but more sort of the ones that are in the middle. So, some harder infrastructure improvements, including drainage improvements, levees and sea walls, shoreline stabilizations, elevated roadways. And so those are the strategies that we saw as affecting the level of flooding that was, or the flood hazards that they said was important to look at. So, that's that two and a half and one and a half foot level of flooding. Next slide, please. All right, and so the next step of the assessment that we were conducting was to show what would happen if we put some of these strategies on the ground, what types of protection would they provide? So we came up with a number of different adaptation strategy scenarios that we would put into the flood model. And we'd shared these models with the community to show the impacts that were, or the reductions in flooding that would be produced due to these adaptation strategies. And we came up with a number of different scenarios to sort of show what they could get for varying amounts of money, what types of protection they could get, what types of adaptation strategies they could use. So there were some where we were just replacing the tide gates in the city, many of which are not functional currently, and showing what that would look like on the ground in terms of flooding. And then on the other end of the spectrum in terms of scenarios was to look at what if we not only fixed all of the tide gates, but added what we called these three structures. And you can see here in this map this would be elevated roadways, sea walls, berms, et cetera, that could provide more and more protection. So, next slide. And so returning to the Adaptation Decision Framework, you can see that these pieces here that are in green are what we discussed with the community in order to once again make this work pursuant to their goals and to make sure that what is being proposed is really going to help to achieve the results that they're looking for. So this was built into the assessment process, as you can see in a number of different steps. And the, some of the steps that I just described were, we had conversations that talked about what types of accessibility were improved when these various strategies were put on the ground, what did it do to the damage costs? What type of capacity was necessary to help to maintain some of these solutions? What is better protected, what is still left exposed? And then from there we had discussions about what we saw after implementing these strategies using this model. So, next slide please. And so here, what we see on this map is sort of the result of that final modeling step. So this is the tide gate and three structures map, as I mentioned previously, at two and a half feet of water, so on the higher end of that nuisance flooding. And what you see in green highlighted, those are the areas that are protected. So before these structures and these tide gates were replaced in our model, the areas that are highlighted in that bright green color are areas that would have been flooded. And so as a part of this assessment that we did with the community and kind of qualitative, qualitatively evaluating what this means for the community, you can sort of see on the left-hand side here the flood reduction benefits. So this is, these are things that we heard in conversations with the community, what they liked about these strategies that we have listed here. So they saw that because this downtown area of Crisfield is no longer flooded with these types of solutions, it could lead to new investment opportunities in the downtown area. It could reduce school closures and delays and allow for that accessibility across the city to be increased, as I mentioned. There's improved access to the hospital, a lot of the churches in the communities are now protected here. And then there's improved access to housing. So going back to those Community Resilience Goals that I shared with you all many slides back, this is really pursuant to those goals that they had with, you know, safe and affordable housing, having resilient infrastructure, economic development, youth development. So I think a lot of folks on our advisory committee saw these solutions as would be being really helpful towards their community resilience and also reduce the amounts of damages that might be seen due to flooding in the city limits. However, there was concern that there still are areas, particularly this area that you see on the south part of the map that still are flooded. So the community members on our advisory committee were really concerned about how can we still provide solutions for those folks that live in that part of the city as well? Next slide. And so I just wanna wrap up here and discuss how this project is gonna connect with other types of efforts or how it has connected with other efforts. So these are a number of different partners that we've worked with. The City of Crisfield local government, as mentioned, FEMA BRIC, EPA Office of Research Development, the University of Maryland Environmental Finance Center has future projects going on in Crisfield as well. But I really wanna connect to the Somerset County Hazard Mitigation Plan, which I'll discuss on the next slide. So as you can see here, this is text that's taken directly from the 2022 Somerset County Hazard Mitigation Plan. So while this assessment wasn't completed in time for the Hazard Mitigation Plan update, we talked with the folks who have been working on the preparation of the plan and made sure that we've basically added this placeholder text that would allow for any solutions and adaptation strategies that were proposed through this work to be included in the adaptation plan through an amendment and update, things like that. So I think that one of the things that's really important about this project is not only did it bring community voices to the table, but it really tried to connect with a number of different efforts that were already happening in Crisfield towards their resilience, including the update of the County Hazard Mitigation Plan, in addition to a number of different projects such as the FEMA BRIC Direct Technical Assistance that the city was also undergoing. So with that, I think that is the end of my presentation and thank you so much, looking forward to answering some questions. - [Jessica] Thank you, Joe. We will now be moving into our last presentation from Kevin Zerbe. Kevin is an applied geographer working in disaster risk reduction field. His current position is as the State Mitigation Strategist with the Washington Emergency Management Division, where he studies the classification, temporal and spatial patterns, causes and risks of natural hazards in Washington State. His areas of expertise include identification, characterization and prediction of natural hazard occurrences, risk and vulnerability, hazard mitigation and climate adaptation planning and spatial statistics. Kevin, I am passing it off to you. - [Kevin] Great, yeah, thanks Jessica. Thank you for that introduction. As Jessica mentioned, I'm the State Mitigation Strategist with Washington EMD and in addition to the hazard analysis and planning work that I do, I also spend a lot of time working across state agencies on various disaster resilience and hazard mitigation issues. And that of course includes coastal resilience. And for today, I'm going to be going through a few of the coastal specific efforts that we have going on in Washington right now. So next slide, please. So before I talk about some of the coastal resilience programs we have, I did want to take a second and just go over Washington's coastline because it's a little bit unique and its geography plays a role in how coastal hazards impact waterfront communities and how we as a state address them. So we generally refer to Washington's coast as being separated into two big categories, the inner coast and the outer coast or Pacific coast. The inner coast consists primarily of Puget Sound and the Salish Sea, and there are many bays and inlets and canals and much of the inner coast is also heavily populated and developed. It includes the cities of Seattle, Tacoma, Bellingham and Olympia. And then we have the outer coast, which includes all of the Pacific beaches and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which separates the Olympic Peninsula from British Columbia, which you can see here in this map, as well as Vancouver Island. Much of the outer coast is sparsely populated, especially compared to the more densely populated inner coast and Puget Sound region. And a large portion of our outer coast is considered wilderness. Much of it is included within the Olympic National Park and so there's less, much less development. The communities there tend to have fewer resources. They tend to have lower capacity for resilience efforts, but they also face considerable risk from everything from constant erosion, we have areas of pretty significant sea level rise, atmospheric rivers, which seem to be getting worse, and of course the ever-present threat of earthquakes and the tsunamis that result from them both near our coast, for example, along like the Cascadia subduction zone or tsunamis that could come from far away where we had a recent risk with the Japan event, for example. So both coasts include numerous tribal communities as well, which often struggle with limited resources to address coastal hazards. Next slide, please. So Washington has a pretty dynamic hazard scape, which for somebody like me, it makes working in the disaster resilience field really exciting but also challenging. And I think that's especially true for coastal hazards. So a good example of that is with sea level rise, where portions of our coastline, both inner and outer, are seeing rising sea levels, like much of the world, while other parts are actually experiencing sea level drop as a result of plate tectonics that are outpacing global sea level rise. So that kind of dynamism can make statewide approaches to something like sea level rise really difficult because there's no one size fits all solution to the problem and quantifying the differences in relative sea level rise around our coast is needed for accurate risk and vulnerability assessments. And that can also be really difficult to capture. Temporary inundation is becoming a bigger issue as well, with events like king tides causing more damage than they used to. We had an event in December of 2022 that broke records around our coast, including here in Tacoma as well as Seattle, Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands and Port Townsend, which sits at the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Much of our coastline includes cliffs and bluffs and some areas are eroding rapidly and threatening waterfront communities. And of course we are extremely vulnerable to a tsunami, as I mentioned, one generated from a far away earthquake or nearby, as I mentioned earlier. Modeling from the Washington Geological Survey has shown just how catastrophic a Cascadia subduction zone event especially would be for our coastline. And that definitely includes the outer coast, which in some places would see just utter devastation. Next slide, please. So thankfully there are lots of people here who not only understand the hazards and the risks that we face, but are also looking for new and innovative ways to address those hazards and risks. Everything listed here is an interagency effort and many of them have resulted in actual, tangible work leading to hazard mitigation projects not unlike this vertical evacuation structure on Washington's outer coast. So this was actually the first structure of its kind in North America. It was built by the Shoalwater Bay Tribe, which is located in the outer coast region of our state, using FEMA mitigation funds. And it's being used now as a model for other isolated coastal communities that are threatened by tsunamis, not just here in Washington, but all up and down the West Coast. Our mitigation program at the state is working on securing more funding for these kinds of structures, especially now that we've identified where they really need to be located. And, but for today I think I'm gonna focus more on the Coastal Hazards Resilience Network, or CHRN, as well as the Coastal Hazards Organizational Resilience Team or COHORT. Next slide, please. So as I mentioned earlier, many of Washington's coastal communities on the outer and inner coast struggle very much with capacity to prepare and implement their resilience plans and projects. So in 2019, the Washington Department of Ecology formed the Coastal Hazards Organizational Resilience Team, or COHORT, which establishes a coast-wide resilience initiative that's really meant to leverage the resources of not only the Department of Ecology, but my agency, the Emergency Management Division, as well as Washington Sea Grant and Washington State University. That translates into support for local coastal resilience efforts. So in 2021, more than 170 coastal resilience projects were identified along our outer coast alone, with many of them planned for communities with very high rates of social vulnerability to disasters according to CDC's Social Vulnerability Index. And in 2022, COHORT was given funds from the state legislature to build out its program with actual permanent staff and help make COHORT a permanent program in state government rather than just a sort of loosely affiliated, pilot kind of project. So the focus will be with that new state money, the focus will be on coordinated state technical assistance for coastal and climate resilience, particularly for communities and tribes with those resource capacity challenges. With this additional staff, COHORT will provide hands-on planning support to underserved communities and help them access funding opportunities. So for EMD, both are really essential, but we are a main conduit to the resilience funding that FEMA provides through the Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant programs. And so we are really hoping that our staff person that we are hiring will play a key role in helping coastal communities go from plan, which they're actually really pretty good at, you know, developing their plans, but going from plan to project, so hopefully hoping to develop a, an effective plan-to-project pipeline. The goal will be that within two years, the full COHORT team, including EMD's Coastal Resilience Specialists, will provide technical assistance to local communities and tribes on at least 10 projects, develop a strategic plan to guide coast-wide resilience, develop criteria, funding guidelines and administrative processes for small grants, expand the capability of the Washington Coastal Hazard Resilience Network, which I'll mention later, to provide resources and training and create a risk assessment identifying priority actions and projects. So it'll be a very busy two years for the COHORT staff, but now that we've got full support from our respective agencies and state legislature, we feel like that's, all of that is doable. Next slide, please. So the Washington Coastal Hazards Resilience Network or CHRN is a program co-managed by the Washington Sea Grant and the Department of Ecology. So its main purpose is to support coastal resilience through collaboration, education and knowledge exchange. So it was established in 2013 after it became clear that Washington really needed a peer network and some kind of forum for the wide range of coastal hazards work that's being done around the state in both public and private sectors. And so today, the CHRN includes over 70 members from local, state, federal and tribal governments, as well as people outside of government and including academia, nonprofits and consulting firms, engineering firms, all of whom come together at the annual meeting to network and build relationships. And although CHRN is pretty informal, it is becoming a real resource for practitioners in the state, including by documenting the array of resilience projects, plans, reports, studies, et cetera that occur here, which you can all check out at the CHRN website, which is wacoastalnetwork.com. And I think we'll place something in the chat for that. And next slide. I think that's it for me. - [Jessica] We now have a few minutes left to answer some questions that have been filtering in through the Q&A panel. So our first question here is for Joe. A participant asks did research into community engagement reveal, and perhaps explore, disconnects between community vision and desires on one hand and forecasted impacts of climate change or sea level rise on the other? And if so, how did your research address that? - [Joe] So that's a great question. I think that I'm going to give a bit of a non-answer and say both yes and no. I think that there are a lot of people that we had brought into our advisory committee who really cared and still, and care quite a bit about the future of Crisfield and they're really invested in this place. It's their home, it's their, you know, a lot of folks have lived there their whole lives. It's where they have their businesses and their churches and their communities. So I think that it was at times really difficult to have some conversations about what future flooding conditions might look like in Crisfield given sea level rise projections. However, I don't think that it necessarily conflicts with their visions for the future. I think that what we're, what we try to do with this work is to support what Crisfield's current vision is and to also prepare them to have conversations in the future that might allow for a bit more of a transformation into what Crisfield is. So a lot of the solutions and strategies that I talked about in this presentation, were really focusing on what types of, you know, immediate infrastructure, on-the-ground adaptation strategies can allow for Crisfield to persist given the types of flooding that they have. But I think that putting some of those strategies into action will maybe alleviate some of the pressures that they're feeling and allow them to in the future begin to think more about those Community Resilience Goals that they have about economic development and youth development, recreation, those types of things, and how they might just still be able to pursue them even though flooding is going to increase. And maybe that's gonna look like perhaps some of the businesses that are currently situated in downtown moving further away from the water. Maybe that's going to look like reimagining the waterfronts in Crisfield to, you know, incorporate more marshes and nature-based solutions that are gonna be able to absorb storm surge and things like that. So I think that it certainly was like a, there were times where it felt like there was a conflict with what people's visions were, but I think what we were trying to really do is prepare them to have the capacity to have some conversations that might lead to more transformation for Crisfield in the future. - [Jessica] Thank you, Joe. And I have a series of questions for both panelists around data tools and that question is are there any national tools that you're using in your analyses, or do you develop tools in-house? And if you develop them, what kind of data sets do you use and do you have any tips for other states or jurisdictions who might want to develop other tools or modeling efforts? - [Kevin] Yeah, so we definitely, I know for us at Washington EMD, we do, there are a couple of national tools that we use. The National Risk Index from FEMA is something that's popping up more and more as a tool that we need to at the very least be familiar with, understand how it was created, how it works, what it's capable of, what it's not capable of, all of that kind of stuff. And so we use it to a certain extent, although we do focus more on our own processes, and our own methods when it comes to analyzing risk and doing the various hazard analyses that I oversee, for example. A lot, all of it is spatial based, so we're very much lucky to live in a state like Washington where we have tons of really great spatial data that's probably available that is, you know, available for anyone to use. And so we focus mostly on using those kinds of data sets from our state agencies or from our partnering universities and colleges around the state. There are a handful of local or Pacific Northwest regional tools that are developed by one of those academia partners, the Climate Impacts Group based out of University of Washington. They do a lot of really great tool development stuff and a lot of really great original research that we definitely leverage in our work in terms of the hazard analysis that we do. So I would definitely recommend anyone checking them out. They have some really great stuff. And then for any other tips for states or jurisdictions who might wanna develop tools or do other kind of modeling efforts, I mean, the biggest thing for us is to, you know, we focus mostly on using spatial statistical modeling to understand how hazards and risks are changing over time and space. So, you know, making sure that you're familiar with the concepts behind it, making sure that you have the data that you need to do that kind of work and somebody on staff who understands, you know, the nitty gritty, behind the scenes kind of stuff has been really helpful for us. But that'd probably be my biggest tip. - [Joe] Thanks for that question. So our project really relied on such a, like a breadth of data sources. I know that for instance for the cost-benefit analysis, the modelers from the University of Maryland Environmental Finance Center who worked on this project with us used FEMA Hazus data for that. I'm not even really sure the types of data sources that our coastal modelers from George Mason University used for their flood modeling. That's a little bit outside of my wheelhouse in terms of expertise, but I will say what I think that, was important for this project is actually the use of like hyper-local data. And that really came from the qualitative interviews that were conducted at the top of this by our environmental anthropologist, Liz Van Dolah, to really understand this community and what their wants and needs are and what their goals are. And through the Community Advisory Committee workshops, we really got to integrate those local perspectives and local knowledge into the project as well. And on a very, you know, kind of grassroots level, like we had folks from George Mason University, our modelers like driving around with City staff in trucks and with members of our Community Advisory Committee to find tide gate locations and to look at the drainage infrastructure. And then from there we built, you know, a GIS map of the drainage infrastructure and where there were functioning tide gates and where there were not functioning tide gates. So yeah, I think that the, for our project, while there were times where it called to use these larger data sets and national data to help to guide the work, sometimes the stuff that was most important for this project was really came at a really, really local basis and we did a lot of data collection ourselves as a part of this work. - [Jessica] Great, thank you Kevin, thank you Joe. All right, so our last question today will be for Kevin, and there's an interest from our participant in learning a little bit more about the organizational structure of the COHORT and CHRN programs, and specifically how action-oriented are they? This participant has similar networks where they're located, but they're more educational. - [Kevin] Yeah, I would say CHRN traditionally has been, has definitely been more educational than anything else. It's really served as a, like I said, you know, in my slides it's been more of a forum for us. It's been a way for people who work in the coastal hazard space to get together and share resources and learn about what each other are doing and connect and network and, you know, develop partnerships. And I'm sure that there are conversations that started at a CHRN annual meeting that have led into, you know, some kind of partnership that resulted in a project. But I don't know that any of that's being tracked in a very real way, at least not right now. Maybe in the future it will be. Whereas COHORT is much more formal, especially now that the state has provided us actual funding to staff COHORT. Before we received that funding, it was really just our four agencies, Ecology, EMD, Sea Grant and WSU coming together and recognizing that there was this need and we, there were a couple pilot projects and a couple reports that came out of it, but all of it was just kind of on top of our normal, day-to-day duties. It wasn't anything that was like in our, you know, official position descriptions for example, you know, to attend these COHORT meetings, all that kinda stuff. It was really just, hey, there's this potential here, there's this need here, let's kind of get together. And that over a couple years developed into this request for funding from the state legislature and we were lucky to get it this last time around. So now that we're gonna have actual permanent staff dedicated to implementing some of these goals that we've established under COHORT, it's turning into something that's definitely much more action-oriented than it ever was before. We haven't had a whole lot of, you know, tangible work that's come out of COHORT just yet because up until now, it's just kind of been planning and talking and getting our ducks in a row. But hopefully within the next two years, as I mentioned, we have a lot of goals that we've told the state legislature that we can do and they've given us funding to do it. So hopefully in two years, we've accomplished all of those things and it'll definitely be something seen as action-oriented. Yeah. - [Jessica] All right, thank you Kevin. And thank you to everyone who has submitted questions in the Q&A feature. We have listed and linked here the key resources highlighted in this presentation, the state and local updated Mitigation Planning Policy guides, as well as the recently released new Local Mitigation Planning Handbook can be found on FEMA.gov's Mitigation Planning Program page. We have also included the links to some data tools and other resources shared during the presentation today. And as a reminder, we will be sharing out these slides with the attendees after this webinar. I would like to again thank our presenters for the day. Should you wish to reach out, we have provided their contact information here. And thank you all for joining. Please stay tuned for future "From Policy to Action" webinars hosted by FEMA's National Mitigation Planning Program.