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.

This handbook is a resource for enhancing disaster resilience in urban areas. It summarizes the guiding principles, tools, and practices in key economic sectors that can facilitate incorporation of resilience concepts into decisions about infrastructure investments and urban management that are integral to reducing disaster and climate risks.

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.

No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.

In the devastation that follows a major disaster, there is a need for multiple sectors to unite and devote new resources to support the rebuilding of infrastructure, the provision of health and social services, the restoration of care delivery systems, and other critical recovery needs. In some cases, billions of dollars from public, private and charitable sources are invested to help communities recover. National rhetoric often characterizes these efforts as a "return to normal." But for many American communities, pre-disaster conditions are far from optimal. Large segments of the U.S. population suffer from preventable health problems, experience inequitable access to services, and rely on overburdened health systems. A return to pre-event conditions in such cases may be short-sighted given the high costs - both economic and social - of poor health. Instead, it is important to understand that the disaster recovery process offers a series of unique and valuable opportunities to improve on the status quo. Capitalizing on these opportunities can advance the long-term health, resilience, and sustainability of communities - thereby better preparing them for future challenges. Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters identifies and recommends recovery practices and novel programs most likely to impact overall community public health and contribute to resiliency for future incidents. This book makes the case that disaster recovery should be guided by a healthy community vision, where health considerations are integrated into all aspects of recovery planning before and after a disaster, and funding streams are leveraged in a coordinated manner and applied to health improvement priorities in order to meet human recovery needs and create healthy built and natural environments. The conceptual framework presented in Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters lays the groundwork to achieve this goal and provides operational guidance for multiple sectors involved in community planning and disaster recovery. Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters calls for actions at multiple levels to facilitate recovery strategies that optimize community health. With a shared healthy community vision, strategic planning that prioritizes health, and coordinated implementation, disaster recovery can result in a communities that are healthier, more livable places for current and future generations to grow and thrive - communities that are better prepared for future adversities.

Comprehensive Preparedness Guide (CPG) 101 provides guidelines on developing emergency operations plans (EOP). It promotes a common understanding of the fundamentals of risk-informed planning and decision making to help planners examine a hazard or threat and produce integrated, coordinated, and synchronized plans. The goal of CPG 101 is to make the planning process routine across all phases of emergency management and for all homeland security mission areas. This Guide helps planners at all levels of government in their efforts to develop and maintain viable all-hazards, all-threats EOPs. Accomplished properly, planning provides a methodical way to engage the whole community in thinking through the life cycle of a potential crisis, determining required capabilities, and establishing a framework for roles and responsibilities. It shapes how a community envisions and shares a desired outcome, selects effective ways to achieve it, and communicates expected results. Each jurisdiction's plans must reflect what that community will do to address its specific risks with the unique resources it has or can obtain.

A Companion to Environmental Geography is the first book to comprehensively and systematically map the research frontier of 'human-environment geography' in an accessible and comprehensive way. Cross-cuts several areas of a discipline which has traditionally been seen as divided; presenting work by human and physical geographers in the same volume Presents both the current 'state of the art' research and charts future possibilities for the discipline Extends the term 'environmental geography' beyond its 'traditional' meanings to include new work on nature and environment by human and physical geographers - not just hazards, resources, and conservation geographers Contains essays from an outstanding group of international contributors from among established scholars and rising stars in geography