Coastal Smart Growth Home: Getting Started: Hazard Mitigation Plan
HAZARD MITIGATION PLAN
A hazard mitigation plan is a plan that forms the foundation for a community's long-term strategy to reduce impacts from future disasters. Hazard mitigation is sustained action taken to reduce or eliminate long-term risk to people and their property from hazards.
Comprehensive Plans (sometimes called Master Plans or other names), address many aspects of a community’s goals for its physical, social and economic environment and future development. By integrating hazard mitigation plan findings and recommendations into comprehensive plans, zoning, capital expenditures and planning regulations, communities can institutionalize hazard mitigation concepts as part of their development practices.
How to Get Started
Hazard Mitigation: Integrating Best Practices Into Planning
This American Planning Association guide, produced with support from FEMA, describes best practices for integrating hazard mitigation into comprehensive plans, and implementation tools. This guide also includes cases studies from a variety of communities.
Protecting Florida Communities: Land Use Planning Strategies And Best Development Practices For Minimizing Vulnerability To Flooding And Coastal Storms
This Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, provides a step-by-step process for Florida communities to integrate hazard mitigation policies into a comprehensive plan. This resource also includes planning and best practices for reducing community vulnerability, maintaining and enhancing natural protective features, and managing development and redevelopment.
Post-Disaster Redevelopment Planning; A Guide For Florida Communities
This guide published by the Florida Department of Community Affairs (now the Department of Economic Opportunity) and the Florida Department of Emergency Management provides a roadmap for planning for post-disaster recovery including an overview of the planning process, key ingredients for success, and implementation considerations.
There is an addendum, Post Disaster Redevelopment Planning: Addressing Adaptation During Long Term Recovery, that addresses planning for the effects of sea level rise. It looks at a range of adaptation strategies, with a focus on Palm Beach, Florida
Optional Comprehensive Plan Element For Natural Hazard Reduction
This guide from the Washington State Department of Community, Trade, and Development (now the Washington State Department of Commerce) provides a process for developing a local hazard mitigation element of a comprehensive plan.
