A comprehensive plan is a guiding document upon which communities base zoning and other regulations. This document discusses factors communities should consider while creating a comprehensive plan.

Once hazard mitigation is included in a city's comprehensive plan, the region and its citizens are more prepared to respond to a potential natural disaster. The purpose of this thesis was to illuminate factors that encourage cities to include hazard mitigation within their comprehensive plans. The research used geographic information system (GIS) and census data to locate urban, suburban, and rural areas at risk of flooding and analyzed these regions' comprehensive plans. The research results suggest that previous major flooding events often lead to the inclusion of flood-related hazard mitigation into cities' comprehensive plans. This finding suggests that policy alone does not influence hazard mitigation; other methods should be practiced to ensure hazard mitigation is included within neighborhood/city comprehensive plans. I. INTRODUCTION * A. RESEARCH QUESTIONS * B. PROBLEM STATEMENT * C. LITERATURE REVIEW * 1. Hazard Mitigation and Planning * 2. Participatory Planning * 3. Planning and GIS * D. RESEARCH DESIGN * E. CHAPTER OUTLINE * II. BACKGROUND AND METHODOLOGY * A. DEFINITIONS * B. METHODOLOGY * 1. ArcMap * 2. Comprehensive Plans * III. COMMONALITIES AMONG STATES WITH A HIGH PERCENTAGE OF FLOODING HAZARD MITIGATION DISCUSSION IN COMPREHENSIVE PLANS * A. INTRODUCTION * B. HIGH-PERCENTAGE STATES * 1. Illinois * 2. California * 3. Wisconsin * IV. COMMONALITIES AMONG STATES WITH A LOW PERCENTAGE OF FLOODING HAZARD MITIGATION DISCUSSION IN COMPREHENSIVE PLANS * A. INTRODUCTION * B. LOW-PERCENTAGE STATES * 1. Maryland * 2. Virginia * V. CONCLUSION * A. ORDINANCES, PAST FLOODING, AND FLOODING VULNERABILITY * B. THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S ROLE Following this introduction and literature review, Chapter II discusses my research design in greater detail. Chapter III shows my analysis for determining the commonalities of states with a high percentage of comprehensive plans that account for flood-related resiliency. Similar to Chapter III, Chapter IV shows the analyzed commonalities of the chosen states that had a low percentage of comprehensive plans with flood-related hazard mitigation, but that still included hazard mitigation within their plan. The final chapter, Chapter V, consists of my findings and conclusion. My findings focus on the states in Chapter III and Chapter IV that included disaster resiliency in their comprehensive plans to reveal the reasons why these particular jurisdictions included hazard mitigation. In addition, I suggest policy considerations for community planning academic programs and the federal government, and make general suggestions for cities based on my findings.

Sustainability, resilience, and climate change are top of mind for planners and floodplain managers. For subdivision design, those ideas haven't hit home. The results? Catastrophic flood damage in communities across the country. This PAS Report is out to end the cycle of build-damage-rebuild and bring subdivision design into line with the best of floodplain planning. Readers will get the tools they need to save lives, protect property, and lay the foundation for a better future.

Flood risk management policy across the European Union is changing, partly in response to the EU Floods Directive and partly because of new scientific approaches and research findings. It involves a move towards comprehensive flood risk management, which requires bringing the following fields/domains closer together: the natural sciences, social sc

Floods take a heavy toll on society, costing lives, damaging buildings and property, disrupting livelihoods, and sometimes necessitating federal disaster relief, which has risen to record levels in recent years. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) was created in 1968 to reduce the flood risk to individuals and their reliance on federal disaster relief by making federal flood insurance available to residents and businesses if their community adopted floodplain management ordinances and minimum standards for new construction in flood prone areas. Insurance rates for structures built after a flood plain map was adopted by the community were intended to reflect the actual risk of flooding, taking into account the likelihood of inundation, the elevation of the structure, and the relationship of inundation to damage to the structure. Today, rates are subsidized for one-fifth of the NFIP's 5.5 million policies. Most of these structures are negatively elevated, that is, the elevation of the lowest floor is lower than the NFIP construction standard. Compared to structures built above the base flood elevation, negatively elevated structures are more likely to incur a loss because they are inundated more frequently, and the depths and durations of inundation are greater. Tying Flood Insurance to Flood Risk for Low-Lying Structures in the Floodplain studies the pricing of negatively elevated structures in the NFIP. This report review current NFIP methods for calculating risk-based premiums for these structures, including risk analysis, flood maps, and engineering data. The report then evaluates alternative approaches for calculating risk-based premiums and discusses engineering hydrologic and property assessment data needs to implement full risk-based premiums. The findings and conclusions of this report will help to improve the accuracy and precision of loss estimates for negatively elevated structures, which in turn will increase the credibility, fairness, and transparency of premiums for policyholders.