Small Communities Can Leverage Big Resources for Disaster Resilience

For U.S. communities, preparing for and adapting to the threat of flooding, wildfire, drought, and other disasters is essential now more than ever. But it’s nearly impossible without sufficient staffing, technical expertise, funding, and other resources. That’s why communities hardest hit by repeated disasters often cite a lack of capacity—to plan, fund, and implement programs and projects needed to reduce risk—as a top barrier to building resilience to extreme weather events. And even while a growing number of state governments are creating programs that support planning and project development to better handle disasters, more work is needed across the country to build durable local capacity.

To help accomplish that, members of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ State Resilience Planning Group met virtually in February to learn from three organizations working throughout Texas, the Southeast, and the West to fill the gap. Presenters shared perspectives from their work helping communities develop resilience plans, make data-informed decisions, invest in risk reduction projects, and build long-term capacity.

Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group that partners with communities to improve community development and land management, presented research on local disaster preparedness and response capacity. Among communities with very low capacity, as measured by Headwaters Economics’ Rural Capacity Index, 46% face high flood risk, 38% have high wildfire risk, and 19% deal with both threats. An accompanying analysis of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grants found 76% of grant funding flowed to communities rated as high capacity since the program’s start. Although the analysis examined only one of various federal funding sources, its findings that smaller communities need more assistance to compete for resources are compelling.

Planning ahead in wildfire- and flood-prone communities

Courtesy of FloodWise

To help fill the capacity gap, Headwaters Economics established two planning assistance programs, FloodWise Community Assistance and the Community Planning Assistance for Wildfires (CPAW). FloodWise offers free assistance to help communities in the Western and Central United States with project development and land-use planning. The program also builds capacity through regional partnerships and trainings or workshops for local governments and their partners.

One such community is Three Forks, Montana, where updated flood-plain mapping revealed the 2,000-resident town faced higher flood risk than previously realized. FloodWise helped Three Forks officials prioritize their options to decrease flood risk and develop a funding strategy that led to a $4.15 million FEMA Flood Mitigation Assistance grant for a project to divert floodwaters, lower flood risk, and decrease the flood plain within city limits.

“Thinking about how to make those funding mechanisms possible and sustainable is one of the ways that we’re building and investing in capacity at the local level,” said Dr. Kristin K. Smith, lead researcher and policy analyst for the FloodWise Community Assistance program.

To help communities facing wildfire threats, the CPAW program offers land-use planning solutions, communications assistance, and customized research.

“We know wildfires are going to occur and to assume that we can suppress all wildfires is a costly and deadly mistake,” said Doug Green, CPAW program manager. “We need to remember that this is not a wildfire problem; it is a structural ignition problem. If houses and buildings don’t catch fire, then we don’t have a disaster.”

In 2021, the town of Estes Park, Colorado, sought CPAW assistance to update landscaping regulations to encourage the use of more fire-resistant native plants and creation of “defensible space”—an area around a building that has been cleared of combustible materials. CPAW reviewed the town’s landscape codes and provided recommendations to improve its land-use planning process.

Developing flood-risk data for towns in Texas

Dr. Andrew Juan The Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas

Acquiring reliable and current data for resilience planning is especially challenging in rural and small towns and in historically marginalized communities. The West Texas county of Hudspeth, with fewer than 3,500 residents, knows this all too well. For years, frequent flash flooding threatened critical infrastructure, and outdated flood-risk data made it hard for county leaders to address the threat.

Fortunately, Hudspeth turned to Texas A&M University’s Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas for help. With funding from the Texas Legislature, the institute launched the Digital Risk Infrastructure Program (DRIP) in 2022 to help 10 underserved Texas communities access reliable data to help reduce flooding. In Hudspeth, the DRIP team collected spatial data with a drone and combined that with community members’ photos and observations to develop flood-risk maps.

“This was a great example of leveraging technology, equipment, and methodology, and bringing that to a community that was lacking necessary resources,” said Dr. Sam Brody, director of the Institute for Disaster Resilient Texas. So far, the institute has developed 73 customized flood-risk maps for DRIP communities.

Brody emphasized that “accessible data” has different meanings in different communities, including that some towns prefer printed maps over online ones.

Building staff capacity for local and state governments

Community resilience relies on trusted, knowledgeable leaders. SBP, a national organization that helps communities reduce the time between disasters and recovery, created a Resilience and Recovery Fellows program to connect resilience professionals to small and medium-sized communities. SBP hires, trains, supports, and places those experts in communities where they help secure recovery assistance and plan for climate threats.

“The Fellows program is great for communities that have a lot going on but don’t necessarily have the budget to set aside a salary for someone to be completely focused on this,” said Hannah Trautwein, assistant director of the SBP Fellows program. The organization has placed fellows in three state and four city governments, and one nonprofit, and plans to partner with FEMA to support the Community Disaster Resilience Zones that the agency designated last year.

Partnering to build durable capacity

These programs show that help is available to states working to support local resilience. DRIP, CPAW, FloodWise, and the SBP Fellows program are directly supporting communities and helping build local capacity. State governments can learn from these successes, specifically by building relationships with local governments and communities and tailoring solutions to their needs. This expanding network of technical assistance providers is critical to help small, rural, and historically marginalized communities build capacity for disaster resilience planning and action.

Kristiane Huber works on climate resilience with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ U.S. conservation project.