Heading for the Hills? Effects of Community Flood Management on Local Adaptation to Flood Risks

Abstract

The Community Rating System (CRS) program was implemented by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1990 as an optional program to encourage communities to voluntarily engage in flood mitigation initiatives. This article uses national census tract‐level data from 1980 to 2010 to estimate whether CRS participation and flood risk affect a community's local patterns of population change. We employ an instrumental‐variables strategy to address the potential endogeneity of CRS participation, based on community‐scale demographic factors that predict when a tract's host community joins the CRS. The results find significant effects of the CRS program and flood risk on population change. Taken together, the findings point to greater propensity for community‐scale flood management in areas with more newcomers and programs such as CRS stabilizing population, though not especially in flood‐prone areas. We observe the CRS neither displacing population toward lower‐risk areas nor attracting more people to flood‐prone areas.

Post-Flood Risk Management and Resilience Building Practices: A Case Study

“…Moreover, The Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (2009) stated that the best way to reduce the disaster risks is to strengthen the communities around the world and increase their resilience so that they can combat adverse situations [17,41,42]. Similarly, the Hyogo Framework (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) perceived the necessity of producing resilient communities plus established methods to build it by (1) Preparing policies that are integrated with disaster prevention, preparedness, mitigation, and reduction of vulnerability (2) Increasing the local capacity to build hazard resilience (3) Introducing the attributes of risk reduction, emergency preparedness, response, recovery, and reconstruction into the policies for the disaster management [43,44]. Figure 10 illustrates that people live in a hazardous area despite the river erosion.…”

“…One of the male respondents in LN said: "We did not consider the 2010 flood warning, and when a flood hit our area it was havoc that destroyed us". Moreover, it was concluded that resilience is not only the capacity of the system to return to its original state but to do advancement in it by learning from past experiences and adaptation [43]. Mustafa [44] surveyed to gather information from the farmers in Pind Patekhan flood plains.…”

“…The emergency services and response plans are the variables for the institutional Dimension of community resilience, as stated by [43,45]. Table 2 below represents the findings of a comparison of satisfaction level between government and NGOs against emergency relief received by the affected community of 2010 flood in four localities of district Layyah using Yeh's Index of Satisfaction [47].…”

Flood Insurance and Claims: The Impact of the Community Rating System

“…Implementing the flood mitigation activities requires some financial commitment (Brody et al 2009), and so it is not surprising that Li and Landry (2018) find that CRS communities with larger tax revenues undertake more CRS mitigation activities. Other research has found that characteristics spanning from hydrological to socio-demographic may influence community participation in the CRS (Brody et al 2009;Landry and Li 2012;Li and Landry 2018;Noonan and Liu 2019;Sadiq and Noonan 2015).…”

The distributional impact of FEMA’s community rating system

“…In research closest to ours, Noonan and Sadiq (2018) look at the effect of CRS on poverty and income inequality, and Noonan and Liu (2019) look at the effect of CRS participation and flood risk on local patterns of population change. Using panel data at the tract level from 1970 to 2010, Noonan and Sadiq (2018) find that median incomes are lower and poverty rates are higher in CRS communities.…”